TALES FROM A ROLLTOP DESK
By Christopher Morley
Illustrated By Walter Jack Duncan
Garden City, N. Y., And Toronto
Doubleday, Page & Company
1921
A LETTER OF DEDICATION
TO
FRANK NELSON DOUBLEDAY
Dear Effendi:
I take the liberty of dedicating these little stories to you, with affection and respect. They have all grown, in one mood or another, out of the various life of Grub Street, suggested by adventures with publishers, booksellers, magazine editors, newspaper men, theatrical producers, commuters, and poets major and minor. If they have any appeal at all, it must be as an honest (though perhaps sometimes too jocular) picture of the excitements that gratify the career of young men who embark upon the ocean of ink, and (let us not forget) those much-enduring Titanias who consent to share their vicissitudes. You have been the best of friends and counsellors to many such young men, and I assure you that they look back upon the time spent under your shrewd and humorous magistracy with special loyalty and regard. You will understand that in these irresponsible stories no personal identifications are to be presumed.
I think you remember—I know you do, because you have often charitably chuckled over the incident—that rather too eager young man who came to call on you one day in September, 1913, saying that he simply must have a job. And how you, in your inimitable way, said “Well, what kind of a job would you like best to have around this place?” And he cried “Yours!” And you justly punctured the creature by saying “All right, go to work and get it.” (There was more youthful palpitation than intended impertinence in the young man's outcry, so he has assured me.) And then, still tremulous with ambition, this misguided freshman pulled out of his pocket a bulky memorandum on which he had inscribed his pet scheme for the regeneration and stimulus of the publishing business, and laid it before you. How hospitably you considered his programme, and how tenderly you must have smiled, inwardly, at his odd mixture of earnestness and excitement! At any rate, you set him to work that afternoon, with the assurance that he might have your job as soon as he could qualify.
Well, he did not get it; nor will he ever, for he knows (by this time) what a rare complex of instincts and sagacities is needed in the head of a great publishing house; and his own ambition has proved to be a little different. But he can never be enough grateful for the patience and humorous tolerance with which you brooded upon his various antics, condoned his many absurdities, welcomed and encouraged his enthusiasms. In nearly four years in your “shop” he learned (so he insists) more than any college could ever teach: and how much he had to unlearn, too! And the surprising part of it was, it was all such extraordinarily good fun. The greatest moments of all, I suppose, were when this young man was invited by one of your partners (on occasions that seemed so interminably far apart!) to “walk in the garden,” that being the cheerful tradition of the Country Life Press. There, after some embarrassing chat about the peonies and the sun dial, the victim meanwhile groaning to know whether it was, this time, hail or farewell, there would come tidings of one of those five-dollar raises that were so hotly desiderated. That paternal function (so this young man and his fellow small fry observed) was rightly a little beneath the dignity of the Effendi: you, they noted, only walked in the garden with paper merchants and people like Booth Tarkington and Ellen Glasgow and good Mr. Grosset of Grosset and Dunlap!
Many young men (O Effendi), from Frank Norris down, have found your house a wonderful training-school for writers and publishers and booksellers. There are great names, of permanent honour in literature, that owe much to your wisdom and patience. But among all those who know you in your trebled capacity as employer, publisher, and friend, there is none who has more reason to be grateful, or who has done less to deserve it, than the young man I have described. And so you will forgive him if he thus publicly and selfishly pleases himself by trying to express his sense of gratitude, and signs himself
Faithfully yours
Christopher Morley.
Roslyn, Long Island January, 1921.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The original responsibility for some of these stories—or at any rate the original copyright—was allotted as follows: “The Prize Package,” Collier's Weekly (1918); “Urn Burial,” Every Week (1918); “The Climacteric,” The Smart Set (1918); “The Pert Little Hat,” The Metropolitan (1919); “The Battle of Manila Envelopes,” The Bookman (1920); “The Commutation Chop-house,” The New York Evening Post (1920); “The Curious Case of Kenelm Digby,” The Bookman (1921); “Gloria and the Garden of Sweden,” Munsey's (1921); “Punch and Judy,” The Outlook (1921).
All but one of these publications are still in existence. To their editors and owners the author expresses his indebtedness and his congratulation.
CONTENTS
[ THE CURIOUS CASE OF KENELM DIGBY ]
[ GLORIA AND THE GARDEN OF SWEDEN ]
[ THE BATTLE OF MANILA ENVELOPES ]
TALES FROM A ROLLTOP DESK
THE PRIZE PACKAGE
LESTER VALIANT came back from Oxford with the degree of B. Litt., some unpaid tailors' bills, and the conviction that the world owed him a living because he had been suffered within the sacred precincts of Balliol College for three years. A Rhodes scholarship is one of the most bounteous gifts the world holds for a young man; but in Lester's case Oxford piled upon Harvard left him with a perilous lot to unlearn. You can tell a lot about a man when you know what he is proud of; and Lester was really proud of having worn a wrist watch and a dinner jacket with blue silk lapels three or four years before they became habitual in the region of Herald Square. But let us be just: he was also proud of his first editions of Conrad and George Moore; for he was much afflicted with literature.
Lester originated in the yonder part of Indiana, but when he returned from Oxford he made up his mind to live in New York. He felt it appropriate that he should be connected in some way with the production of literature, and after hiring a bedroom on the fourth floor of an old house on Madison Avenue, where two friends of his were living, he set out to visit the publishers.
There is a third-rate club in London called the Litterateurs' Club. A few years ago it was in urgent need of funds, and a brilliant idea struck the managing committee. Every writer listed in the American “Who's Who” was circularized and received a very flattering letter saying that, owing to the distinction of his contributions to contemporary letters, the Litterateurs' Club of London would be very much pleased to welcome him as a member, upon a nominal payment of five guineas. About seven hundred guileless persons complied, and transatlantic travel became appreciably denser on account of these men of letters crossing to England to revel in their importance as members of a club of which no one in London has ever heard. And by some fluke the managing committee had got hold of the name of Lester Valiant, then at Oxford—perhaps because he had once published a story in the Cantharides Magazine. Probably they bought a mailing list from some firm in Tottenham Court Road.
Cecil Rhodes's executors paid his five guineas, and he had his cards engraved:
LESTER G. P. VALIANT
The Litterateurs' Club, London
The use of these pasteboards brought him ready entrée in the offices of New York publishers. If he had not been so eager to impress the gentlemen he interviewed with his literary connoisseurship, undoubtedly he would have landed a job much sooner. But publishers are justly suspicious of anything that savours of literature, and Lester's innocent allusions to George Moore and Chelsea did much to alarm them. At length, however, Mr. Arundel, the president of the Arundel Company, took pity on the young man and gave him a desk in his editorial department and fifteen dollars a week. Mr. Arundel had once walked through the quadrangle of Balliol, and he was not disposed to be too severe toward Lester's naïve mannerisms.
To his amazement and dismay, Lester found his occupation not even faintly flavoured with literature. He was set to work writing press notes about authors of whom he had never heard at Oxford and whose books he soon discovered to be amateurish or worse. He had been nourishing himself upon the English conception of a publisher's office: a quaint, dingy rookery somewhere in Clifford's Inn, where gentlemen in spats and monocles discuss, over cups of tea and platters of anchovy toast, realism and the latest freak of the Spasmodists.
The Arundel office was a wilderness of light walnut desks and filing cases, throbbing with typewriters, adding machines, and hoarse cries from the shipping room at the rear. Here sat Lester, gloomily writing blurbs for literary editors, and wondering how long it would be before he would earn forty dollars a week. He reckoned that was what one ought to get before incurring matrimony.
Like all young men of twenty-three, Lester thought a good deal about marriage, although he had not yet chosen his quarry. The feeling that he could marry almost anybody was delicious to him. But this heavenly eclecticism endures such a short time! For youth abhors generalities and seeks the concrete instance. Also, much reading of George Moore sets the mind brooding on these things. Lester used to stroll in Madison Square at dusk before going back to his room, and his visions were often of a dark-panelled apartment in the Gramercy Park neighbourhood where an open fire would be burning and someone sitting in silk stockings to endear him as he returned from the office.
His arrival caused something of an upheaval in the placid breasts of the two old college friends whose sitting room he shared on Madison Avenue. They were sturdy and steady creatures, more familiar with Edward Earle Purinton and Orison Swett Marden than with Swinburne and Crackanthorpe and Mallarmé. To his secret annoyance, Lester learned that both Jack Hulbert and Harry Hanover were earning more than thirty dollars a week, and he even had an uneasy suspicion that they were saving some of it. When he spoke about Beardsley or Will Rothenstein or the Grafton Galleries they were apt to turn the talk upon Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker. When he showed them his greatest treasure, a plaster life mask of himself that a sculpturing friend in Chelsea had made, they were frankly ribald. Jack was in the circulation department of a popular magazine, and Harry performed some unexplained tasks in the office of a tea importer. Lester was fond of them both, but it seemed to him a bitter travesty that these simple-minded Philistines should possess so much higher earning power than he. So he thought of taking a garret in Greenwich Village, but in the Madison Avenue house he was sharing a big sitting room at little expense. So he spread his books about, hung up his framed letter from Przybyszewski, put his hammered brass tea caddy on the reading table, and made the best of the situation.
Even on fifteen dollars a week a young man may have a very amusing time in New York. For his room and breakfast Lester paid six dollars a week; for his other meals he used to hunt out the little table-d'hôte restaurants of which there are so many in the crosstown streets between the Avenue and Broadway. To come in from the snowy street on a winter evening, sit down to a tureen of Moretti's hot minestrone, open a new packet of ten-cent cigarettes, and prop up a copy of the Oblique Review against the cruet stand, seemed to Lester the prismatic fringe of all that was je ne sais quoi and ne plus ultra. The dandruffians in the little orchestra under the stairs would hammer out some braying operatic strains, and Lester would lean back in a swirl of acrid tobacco smoke and survey his surroundings with great content.
It was while he was conjugating the verb to live in this manner, and sowing (as someone has said) a notable crop of wild table d'hôtes, that he first realized the importance of Pearl Denver. Miss Pearl was Mr. Arundel's personal stenographer, a young woman remarkable in her profession by the fact that she never exposed the details of her camisole to the public gaze; also when the boss dictated she was able to rescue his subordinate clauses from the airy vacancy in which they hung suspended, and hook them up into new sentences capable of grammatical analysis. As a stenog she was distinctly above par, but not above parsing.
Lester, of course, had a speaking acquaintance with Miss Denver, but her existence had never really penetrated the warm aura of egocentric thoughts that enhaloed him. He knew her simply as one of the contingents of the office; and the office had proved a great disappointment to him. Not one of the “firm” (he called them “directors”) wore spats; not one of them had shown the faintest interest in his suggestion that they publish a volume of Clara Tice's drawings. Lester must be pardoned for having dismissed Miss Denver, if he had thought of her at all, as not generis.
We now proceed more rapidly. Entering the hallway of Moretti's on Thirty-fifth Street, about half past one cocktail of a winter evening, he found the cramped vestibule crowded by several persons taking off their wraps. A copy of the Oblique Review, unmistakable in its garlic-green cover, fell at his feet. Thinking it his own, he picked it up and was about to pocket it when a red tarn o'shan-ter in front of him turned round. He saw the bobbed brown hair and gray eyes of Miss Denver. “Well, Mr. Valiant, what are you doing with my magazine?”
“Oh—why—I beg your pardon! I thought it was mine! I'm awfully sorry!” He was keenly embarrassed, and pulled his own copy out of his overcoat pocket as an evidence of good faith.
She laughed. “I don't wonder you made the mistake,” she said. “Probably you thought you were the only person in New York reading the Oblique!”
He felt the alarm that every shy or cautious youth experiences in the presence of beauty, and, with a mumbled apology, fled hastily to a little table in a corner. There, pretending to read some preposterous farrago of free verse, he watched Miss Denver meet another girl who was evidently waiting for her. The two chattered with such abandon, smoked so many cigarettes, and seemed so thoroughly at home that Lester envied them their savoir. Manoeuvring his spaghetti and parmesan, his gaze passed as direct as the cartoonist's dotted line to the charming contour of the stenographer's cheek and neck. His equanimity was quite overset. Never before had he gazed with seeing eye upon the demure creature sorting out Mr. Arundel's mind into paragraphs. Human nature is what it is; let Lester's first thought be confessed: “I wonder if she knows what my salary is?”
At last, after smoking many cigarettes and skimming over the Oblique Review, Lester felt it was his move. He walked down the room, looking at his wrist watch with a slight frown as he passed her table. At the door he saw by the reflection in a mirror that she had not even looked up. He hurried back to Madison Avenue, pausing to sniff the crystal frosty air. At the corner of Fifth he stood for a moment, inhaling the miraculous clearness of the night and pondering on the relative values of free verse and ordered rhythms as modes of self-expression.
In spite of a certain bumptiousness among males, Lester was painfully shy with nubile women, and it was several days before he had opportunity for further speech with Miss Denver. Moretti's is a fifty-cent table d'hôte, and his regimen was calculated on a forty-cent limit for dinner; but after this meeting with the Oblique Review's fairest abonnée he haunted the place for some evenings. Then one day, taking in some copy for a book jacket to be approved by the sales manager, he encountered Miss Denver in the sample room. During working hours she was “strictly business,” and he admired the trim white blouse, the satin-smooth neck, and the small, capable hands jotting pothooks in her notebook as she took a long telephone call. She put down the receiver, and smiled pleasantly at him.
“Don't you go to Moretti's any more?” he asked, and then regretted the brusqueness of the question.
“Sometimes,” she said. “Usually when I buy the Oblique I go to a Hartford Lunch. I can sit there as long as I want and read, with doughnuts and coffee.”
Lester had a curious feeling of oscillation somewhere to the left of his middle waistcoat button. As the little girl said on the Coney Island switchback, he felt as though he had freckles on his stomach.
“Will you come to Moretti's with me some night?” he asked.
“I'd love to,” she said. “I must hurry now. Mr. Arundel's waiting for this phone call.”
A little later in the day, after a good deal of heartburning, Lester called her up from his desk. “How about to-morrow night?” he said, and she accepted.
Coursing back to his chamber the next evening, Lester was a little worried about the ceremonial demanded by the occasion. Should he put on white linen and a dinner jacket, becoming the conquering male of the upper classes? But the recollection of the Oblique Review suggested that a touch of négligée would be more appropriate. A clean, soft collar and a bow tie of lavender silk were his concessions to unconvention. He was about to scrub out a minute soup stain on the breast of his coat, but concluded that as a badge of graceful carelessness this might remain. At a tobacconist's he bought a package of cheap Russian cigarettes, such as he imagined a Bolshevik might smoke.
There she came, tripping along the street, with something of the quick, alcaic motion of an Undersmith on high. He waved gayly. She depressed her shift key and reversed the ribbon. He double-spaced, and they entered the restaurant together.
Lester felt an intellectual tremor as they sat down at a corner table. Never had his mind seemed so relentlessly clear, so keen to leap upon the problems of life and tessellate them. It was as though all his past experience had cumulated and led up to this peak of existence. “Now for a close analysis of Female Mind,” was his secret thought as he settled in his chair. He felt almost sorry for this gay, defenceless little shred of humanity who had cast herself under his domineering gaze. A masculine awareness of size and power filled him. And yet—she seemed quite unterrified.
As they began on the antipasto he thought to himself: “I must start very gently. Women like men to veil their power.” So he said:
“That was funny, my picking up your magazine the other night, wasn't it? You know I thought it was my copy.”
“Oh, the dear old Oblique! Isn't it a scream? I read myself to sleep with it every night. We'll have to make the most of it while we can, because Mr. Arundel says it can't pay its paper bill much longer.”
This irreverence rather startled Lester, who was writing an article “On the Art of Clara Tice” which he had been hoping the Oblique would buy. In fact, he was startled quite out of the careful conversational paradigm he had planned. He found himself getting a little ahead of his barrage. “Does Mr. Arundel read it?” he asked. “Heavens, no!” cried Miss Denver, and effervesced with laughter. “He would rather face a firing squad than read that kind of stuff. But he has an interest in the concern that supplies their paper.” The matter of paper had never occurred to Lester before. Of course he knew a magazine had to have something to print on, but he had never thought of the editors of a radical review being embarrassed by such a paltry consideration.
“Is Mr. Arundel literary?” he asked.
Miss Denver found this very whimsical. “Say, are you kidding me?” she said, with tilted eyebrows. “The chief says literature is the curse of the publishing business. Every time somebody puts over some highbrow stuff on him we lose money on it. The only kind of literature that gets under his ribs is reports from the sales department.”
“That's very Philistine, isn't it?”
“Sure it is, but it puts the frogs in the pay envelopes, so what of it?”
“Well, I should expect the head of a big publishing house to be at least interested in some form of literary expression.”
“You should worry! That's what we hires for. Besides he has a literary passion, too—Walt Mason. He thinks Walt is the greatest poet in the world.”
“Walter Mason?” murmured Lester. “I don't think I know his work.”
“Hasn't Walt made Oxford yet?” asked Miss Denver. “He writes the prose poems in the evening papers, syndicate stuff, you know. Printed to look like prose, just the opposite of the free-verse gag.” She smiled reminiscently, and quoted:
When I am as dry as a fish up a tree, then I to the hydrant repair, and fill myself up, without ticket or fee, with the water that's eddying there. I drink all I want—half a gallon or more—and then I lie down on my couch; when I rise in the morning my head isn't sore and I don't wear a dark brindle grouch——”
“Is there any free-verse stuff that can cover that?” she asked.
Lester was somewhat disconcerted. His assessment of Female Mind did not seem to be proceeding methodically. He played for time.
“I thought you enjoyed the Oblique?”
“As a joke, yes: I laugh myself giddy over it. But I know darn well that kind of junk won't last. By and by the ghost'll quit putting up and the editors will get jobs as ticket choppers. I guess I'm a Philistine!”
With this deliciously impudent creature beaming at him, Lester felt himself cursedly at a disadvantage. Neither Harvard nor Balliol had informed him about this Walter Mason, and though he had seven hundred quips and anecdotes indexed in a scrapbook marked Jocoseria, none of them seemed to bubble up just now. Darn the girl, her mind wouldn't stand still long enough for him to take its temperature. It was like trying to write captions for the movies while the film was running. He blew a cloud of blue Russian vapour across the board, and smiled at her in a tolerant, veni-vidi-Bolsheviki kind of way. Behind his forehead he was fighting desperately to catch up.
As they wrestled with the spaghetti he remembered that someone had told him that publishers usually depend on the literary judgment of their wives. Perhaps that was the case with Mr. Arundel? But Miss Denver laughed aloud at the suggestion.
“Wrong again!” she said. “He's not married. Petunia Veal, the author of 'Sveltschmerz,' has been angling for him for years, and lots of other lady authors, too. He's so sentimental, he's escaped 'em all so far.”
She bubbled and chuckled and gurgled her way through the rest of Moretti's menu, amazing him more and more by the spontaneity, sophistication, and charm of her wit. He escorted her home, and then stood under a lamp-post for three minutes removing the soup stain with a handkerchief. “She's immense!” he said to himself. “Why she's—she's a poem by William Butler Yeats!” As an afterthought, he made a mental memorandum to visit the library and look up the work of Walter Mason.
A few days later Mr. Arundel sent for Lester, who hurried to the private office with visions of a raise in salary. The president was sitting at his desk turning over some papers; he motioned Lester to a chair and seemed curiously loath to begin conversation. At last he turned, saying:
“Mr. Valiant, your life at Oxford did a great deal to mitigate your literary sensibilities?” Lester hardly knew what to say, and murmured some meaningless syllables.
“I think that your abilities can be of very great service to us,” continued Mr. Arundel, “and as an evidence of that I am asking the cashier to raise your salary five dollars a week.”
Lester bowed gently; he was not capable of articulate speech.
“I want to ask you a rather delicate question,” pursued the president, who seemed as much embarrassed as his visitor. “Do you ever write poetry?”
Lester's voice was amazingly hoarse and choky, but in a spasm of puzzlement and gratification he ejaculated: “Sometimes!”
“What I really mean,” said Mr. Arundel, “is this: do you ever write verses of a sentimental nature—hum—what might be called endearments?”
The young man sat speechless in surprise and embarrassment. As a matter of fact, he had been trolling some amatory staves in secret, in honour of Miss Denver; and he imagined they had come in some way under his employer's eye.
“Please do not be alarmed,” said Mr. Arundel, seeing his discomfiture. “This is purely a matter of business. As it happens, I have a need for some poems of an intimately sentimental character, and, being totally unfitted to produce them myself, I wondered if you would sell me some? I would be glad to pay market rates for them.”
Still Lester could do no more than bow.
“I shall have to be frank,” said Mr. Arundel, “and I must beg you to keep this matter absolutely confidential. I have your word of honour in that regard?”
“Absolutely,” said Lester, quite vanquished by amazement.
The president's sense of humour seemed to have mastered his diffidence. A quaint smile lurked behind the furrows that years of royalties had carved on his face.
“I want to do some wooing in rhyme; and I want you to turn out some verses for me of a superlatively lyric sort, it being understood that I purchase all rights in these poems, including that of authorship. Would you be willing to do me half a dozen, at say ten dollars each?”
Lester, although staggered by the proposal, was still able to multiply six by ten, and his answer was affirmative and speedy.
“I do not wish to give you any specifications as to the object of your vicarious amour,” said the president. “It is a lady, of course; young and fair. How soon can you despoil the English language of half a dozen songs of passion worthy of the best Oxford traditions?”
Jack and Harry found Lester good company that evening. When they got back to the sitting room on Madison Avenue he was lying on a couch, nursing a large calabash and contemplating the ceiling with dreamy brow. As they entered, stripping off their overcoats and chucking the night extras across the room at him, he smiled the rich, tolerant smile of Alexander at the Macedon polo grounds.
“Well, Lester,” said Jack, “why the Cheshire-cat grin?”
“I've sold sixty dollars' worth of verse,” said Lester, benignly; “also I've had a raise.”
“My God!” said Harry. “Think how many starving cubists you could endow on that! There'll be a riot in Greenwich Village.”
“Pity the poor bartenders on a night like this!” cried Jack. Then they went to Browne's chop-house for dinner. After a three-finger steak and several beakers of dog's nose, Lester was readily persuaded to enounce the first number of his sonnet sequence, which had accreted or (as its author expressed it) nucleolated, while he was walking home from the office.
“Sonnet, in the Petrarchan mode, item No. 1,” he proclaimed:
Upon a trellis, bending toward the south,
I set my heart, a yearning rose, to climb;
It pullulates and blooms in sultry rhyme,
It spires and speeds aloft, in spite of drouth.
And seeking for that sweeter rose, your mouth,
That beckons from some balcony sublime,
It heeds no whit the tick-tack-tock of Time
And with its sweetness all the night endow'th.
O beauteous rose! O shrub without a thorn!
O velvet petals unsmutched of the mire!
For this my life was manifestly born,
To climb toward thy lips, and never tire!
Now ope thy shutter in the flood of mom—
Lean out, and smile, and pluck thy heart's desire.
“Seems strange,” said Harry, “that a man can buy a good meal with a thing like that!”
“What is a petrarch, anyway?” said Jack. “Gee, you'll have to brush your hair to keep it out of your eyebrows,” said Harry. “Herod was petrarch of Galilee, don't you remember? It's a kind of comptroller or efficiency expert.”
“Nonsense,” said Harry. “Herod was patriarch of Galilee, not petrarch.”
At this moment Lester was busy multiplying twenty by fifty-two, and adding sixty, and he did not attempt to put Laura's friend right in the eyes of his companions.
The next morning, at the office, Lester took occasion to stroll over to the corner where Miss Denver was tickling the keys. Her delicious, able fingers flashed like the boreal aurora; the incomparable smoothness of her neck and throat fascinated him; her clear, blue-washed gray eyes startled him with their merry archness. Wambling inwardly, he met her gaze as coolly as he might.
“Come to Moretti's to-night?” he asked.
“I'm sorry; I've got a date to-night.”
He ached in spirit. “To-morrow night?”
She hesitated a moment, tapping the desk with a rosy finger nail. Then her face brightened. “I'd love to.”
As he returned to his desk and the dull routine of writing press notes for Petunia Veal's latest novel, he uttered a phrase that he had caught from Harry Hanover. It was the first sign of his emancipation from Mallarmé and the Oxford Movement, for certainly that phrase had never been heard on the quilted lawns of Balliol: “She's a prize package, all right, all right!”
Ten days elapsed. All six sonnets had been delivered and paid for, and Mr. Arundel had bargained for a few extra rondeaux, at five dollars each.
Antipasto, minestrone, breadsticks, force-meat balls, and here we are again at the spaghetti and Hackensack Chianti. Lester had mailed his MS. on “Clara Tice and the Pleinaerists of Greenwich Village” to the Oblique Review that afternoon, and had calculated that the editors could not in any decency offer him less than fifty—or perhaps forty—dollars for it. This, added to 20 by 52 plus 60 plus the rondeaux and other probable increments, would certainly support two in a garret for some time. He also had hopes of selling some obscenarios for the movies. Pearl would probably want to go on with her work, for a while at any rate. She was so independent! But those clear eyes of hers, like a March sky with teasings of April in it, how tender and laughing they were! A few nights ago they had taken a long bus ride together, and she had forgotten her muff. She let him warm her hands instead. He went home that night feeling strong enough to bite lamp-posts in two, and had waked up Jack and Harry to put them right about Petrarch.
Pearl was teaching Lester to twirl up his spaghetti with fork and spoon, instead of draping it out of his mouth like Spanish moss. Suddenly she laughed.
“What did I tell you!” she said. “The dear old Oblique has gone blooie! Mr. Arundel called up the editor to-day and told him the Barmecide Company won't supply him with any more paper until he pays his bills. Of course that means he'll have to quit.”
Lester was touched in two vital spots: his own private hopes, and his zeal for fly-specked literature. “Shades of Frank Harris!” he cried. “If that isn't just like Arundel! Why, that man is pure and simple bourgeois! I never heard of such a thing. Has he no feeling at all for art?” Pearl laughed—the pure, musical laugh of careless girlishness, but the recording angel caught in the nimble chords a faint overtone of something else—like the tinkle of ice in a misty tumbler. “Oh, he has his own ideas about art,” she said. “He's taken to writing poetry himself. You never heard such stuff—I've been meaning to tell you. What does 'pullulate' mean?”
Lester's valiant heart, Lester's manly hands that had acted as a muff on a Riverside Drive bus, trembled and stiffened. “It 'pullulates and blooms in sultry rhyme,” she quoted gayly. “Now what do you make of that, as referring to Mr. Arundel's heart? Sultry is right, too!” Lion-hearted Harvard, oak-bosomed Balliol, and all the mature essences of manhood were needed to keep Lester calm. How had she seen these secret strains? She must have been peeping into the chief's private correspondence. He hesitated during six inches of spaghetti. “Search me!” he said. “Is it in Walter Mason?”
“No, it's his own stuff, I tell you. O beauteous rose! O shrub without a thorn!” she chanted, and her laughter popped like a champagne cork. The horrid truth burst upon him. The boss was courting the angel of the office with the very ammunition that Lester himself had furnished, and his vow of secrecy forbade him to disclose the truth. Oh, the paltry meanness of fate, the villainy of circumstance! It is impossible to describe the pangs it cost him to dissemble, cloak, disguise, and conceal the anguish he felt. But dissemble, cloak, disguise, and conceal he did, and though his heart glowed like an angry cigar stub, he reached home at last.
There he sat down at his table, and amid the healthy snores of his roommates he concocted a fine piece of literary ordnance. Late and grimly he toiled and contrived. At length he had fashioned a sonnet which would be the golden sum and substance of the previous sequence; a cry of the heart so splendidly forensic that Mr. Arundel would pounce upon it, yielding his crisp steel engraving in return. But see, the asp concealed in the basket of fruit, the adder in the woodpile! Read Lester's sonnet as an acrostic:
Over that trellis where the moon distills
My heart is climbing like a rambler rose:
You lean and listen to the whippoorwills,
Heedless of how the fragrant blossom grows!
O beauteous rose! O shrub without a thorn!
When wilt thou realize my love in sooth?
I touch the windowsill with heart forlorn,
Hoping the guerdon of thy bounteous youth.
After the grief and teen of bitter days,
Troubled by woes that cicatrize and burn,
Ever at eventide I seek thy praise,
Yearning thy maiden bliss—I yearn, I yearn!
Over the rotten fruit of buried years
Unbar the bolt—have pity on my tears!
The discerning reader will spot the glittering falchion of malice lurking in the initial letters. Read them downward, they convey: o my how I hate you! Lester had but to convey this poisoned comfit to his chief: then, playing upon the artless Pearl, persuade her to show it to him—point out the murderous duplicity of the love token; and she would recoil into his arms. Greenwich Village would sound the timbrel of joy, and even the Oblique might find a softer-hearted papyrus vendor. Vos plaudite! With such thoughts, amid the wailing matin song of boarding-house steam pipes, our hero fell into a brief slumber.
That morning Lester hastened to the office. He waited feverishly until the hour when the chief usually arrived, then visited the private office. There he found the vice-president going over the morning mail. “Is—is Mr. Arundel in?” he stammered.
“Mr. Arundel isn't here to-day,” said the vicepresident. “He will be away two weeks.”
Lester retired queasily, and hurried to the corner sacred to Miss Denver. Here he found one of the other stenographers using Pearl's machine.
“Where's Miss Denver?” he asked.
The young lady, of humorous turn, looked at her wrist watch. “Getting ready to go over the top,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Haven't you heard? She marries the boss this morning.”
ADVICE TO TO LOVELORN
I
MISS ANN AUSTIN came briskly into her little cupboard of a room at the back of the Evening Planet office. She hung up her hat and coat, opened her rolltop desk, put her small handbag carefully in a drawer, and looked at herself in a greenish mirror that hung secretly on a hook in the recess under the pigeonholes. She took the rubber hood off her typewriter, poured three paper cupfuls of drinking water on the potted geranium on the windowledge, wound up the cheap clock on top of the desk, and moved it forward ten minutes to compensate for what it had lost during the night. Now she was ready for work. As she wound up the clock, the usual thought occurred to her—when would she be able to buy herself the handsome little wrist watch she coveted? There were a lot of them in the jeweller's shop on Park Row, and she admired them every morning on her way to the office. But when one is supporting one's self and an invalid mother in an uptown apartment, and has to pay for a woman to come in during the day to lend a hand, all on fifty dollars a week, in an era of post-bellum prices, wrist watches have to wait. However, as Ann made the daily correction in her laggard clock she used to say to herself: “There's a better time coming.” She was not devoid of humour, you see.
Then the office boy would bring in the big pile of morning mail, grinning as he laid it on the pullout slide of her desk. He may be excused for grinning, because Ann was the kind of creature who would bring a smile to the surliest face. She was just a nice size, with a face that was both charming and sensible, and merry brown eyes (when it wasn't too close to the first of the month). Also, that pile of mail was rather amusing. Those letters, so many of them written on cheap pink or blue stationery and addressed in unsophisticated handwriting, were not directed to Miss Ann Austin, but to “Cynthia,” and the office boy knew pretty well the kind of messages that were in them. For Ann, under the pseudonym of “Cynthia,” conducted the Planet's department of Advice to the Lovelorn, and daily several score of puzzled or distracted beings bared their hearts to her. The pile of letters was growing bigger, too. The Planet, which was not a very flourishing paper just at that time, had started the Advice to the Lovelorn department a few months before, and had put Ann in charge of it because she had done so well writing sob stories. It was beginning to “pull” quite surprisingly as a circulation feature, especially since her smiling little picture, vignetted in a cut with a border of tiny hearts, had been put at the head of the column. Under the cut was the legend: “Cynthia, a Sympathetic Adviser in Matters of the Heart.” Ann didn't know whether to be pleased or not at the growing popularity of her feature. This was not quite the kind of thing she had hoped for when she entered the newspaper world. But—the more letters there were from the lovelorn, the sooner she might get that needed raise.
With a little sigh she got out her penknife, began slitting the envelopes, ceased to be Ann Austin and became Cynthia, the sage and gentle arbiter over her troubled parliament of love.
It was a task that required no small discretion and tact, because Cynthia, whatever her private misgivings, tried to perform it with some honest idealism. In the first place, the letters that were obviously merely humorous, or were amorous attempts to inveigle her into private correspondence, were discarded. Then the letters to be used in the next day's column had to be selected, and laid aside to be printed with her comment on the ethical or sociological problems involved. The remaining letters had all to be answered, and data noted down that would be useful in compiling the pamphlet “1001 Problems of Courtship” that the managing editor insisted on her preparing. He said it would be great circulation dope. Ann didn't care much for the managing editor, Mr. Sikes. He had a way of coming into her room, closing the door behind him, leaning over her desk, and saying: “Well, how's little Miss Cupid?” If it hadn't been for that habit of his, Ann would have spoken to him about a raise before now. But she had an uneasy feeling that it would not be pleasing to put herself in the position of asking him favours. She would have been still more disturbed if she had known that some of the boys in the city room used to talk about “Cupid and Sikey” when they saw him visit her room. They said it angrily, because Ann was a general office favourite. Even the coloured elevator man had brought his wooing problems to her one day, wanting to be reassured as to his technique.
It is all very well for you to scoff, superior reader, but letters such as Ann had to read every morning bring an honest pang to an understanding heart; particularly when that heart is in collaboration with twenty-two years of bright, brown-eyed, high-spirited girlhood. Perhaps you don't realize how many of us are young and ignorant and at work in offices, and absorbed, out of working hours, in the universal passion. A good many make shift to be cynical and worldly-wise in public, but who knows how ravishingly sentimental we are in private? Some say that Doctor Freud didn't tell the half of it. As that waggish poet Keith Preston has remarked,
Love, lay thy phobias to rest,
Inhibit thy taboo!
We twain shall share, forever blest,
A complex built for two!
A complex built for two was the ambition of most of Ann's correspondents; but mainly her letters exhibited the seamy side of Love's purple mantle. You see, when lovers are perfectly happy, they don't write to the papers about it. And when she pondered gravely over “Brokenhearted's” letter saying that she has just learned that a perfectly splendid fellow she is so infatuated with has a wife and three children in Detroit; or over “Puzzled's” inquiry as to whether she is “a bum sport” because she wouldn't let the dark young man kiss her good-night, she sometimes said to herself that Napoleon was right. Napoleon, you remember, remarked that Love causes more unhappiness than anything else in the world. And then she would turn to her typewriter, and put under “Puzzled's” inquiry:
No, “Puzzled,” do not let him kiss you unless you are betrothed. If any one is a “bum sport” it is he for wanting to do so. If he “always kisses the girls good-night when he has had a good time,” he is not your sort. A man that does not respect a girl before marriage will certainly not respect her afterward.
After she had typed these replies she always hastily took the paper out of her typewriter and tucked it away in her desk. She did not like the idea of Mr. Sikes coming in and reading it over her shoulder, as he had done once. That was the time she had used the quotation “Pains of Love are sweeter far than all other pleasures are” in answering “Desolate.” The managing editor had repeated the verse in a way that both angered and alarmed her.
This particular morning, among the other letters was one that interested her both by the straightforward simplicity of its statement and by the clear, vigorous handwriting on sensible plain notepaper. It ran thus:
Dear Cynthia:
I am a young business man, very much in love, and I need your help. I have fallen in love with a girl who does not know me. I do not even know her name but I know her by sight, and I know where she works. She looks like the only one for me, but I don't want to do anything disrespectful. Would it be a mistake for me to call at her office and try to get a chance to meet her? Do you think she would be offended? She looks very adorable. Please tell me honestly what you think.
Respectfully yours,
Sincerity.
Wearied by the maunderings of many idiotic flappers and baby vamps, this appeal attracted her. She put it into the column for the following day, writing underneath it:
You never can tell, “Sincerity”! It all depends upon you. If you are the right kind of man, she ought not to be offended. Why not take a chance? Faint heart never won fair lady.
It was trying enough, Ann used to think, to have to pore over the troubles of her lovelorn clients on paper; but the worst times were when they came to call on her at the office. Fortunately this did not happen very often, for the stricken maidens and young Lochinvars who make up the chief support of such columns as hers are safely and busily shut up among typewriters and filing cases during the daytime; their wounds do not begin to burn intolerably until about five-thirty p.m. But now and then some forlorn and baffled creature would find his or her way to “Cynthia” and ask her advice. She would listen sympathetically, apply such homely febrifuge as her inexperienced but wise heart suggested to her, and after the patient had gone she would add the case to her list of 1001 Problems. The material for the pamphlet was growing rapidly.
One morning, while the managing editor was in her room asking her how soon the booklet would be ready, the office boy brought in a card neatly engraved Mr. Arthur Caldwell. Now as a rule Cynthia did not see masculine visitors, because (after one or two trying experiences) she had found that they were inclined to transfer to her the heart that someone else had bruised. But in this case she welcomed the caller because Mr. Sikes was being annoyingly facetious. He had looked over her laboriously gathered data for the 1001 Problems, and had said: “Well, you're getting to be quite an experienced little girl in these matters, hey?” He had seemed disposed to linger on the topic with pleasure. Therefore Cynthia told the office boy to send Mr. Caldwell in, though the name meant nothing to her. Mr. Sikes went out, and the caller was introduced.
Mr. Caldwell proved to be a young man, quite as nice-looking as the collar-advertising young men without being so desperately handsome. Cynthia liked him from the first glance. There was something that seemed very genuine about his soft collar and his candid, clean-shaven face and the little brown brief-case he carried. He had on brown woollen socks, too, she noticed, in one of those quick feminine observations. He seemed very embarrassed, and his face suddenly went ruby red.
“Is this Cynthia?” he said.
“Yes,” said Ann, pushing aside a mass of lovelorn correspondence, and wondering what the trouble could be.
“My name's Caldwell,” he said. “Look here, I suppose you'll think me an awful idiot, but I wanted to ask your advice. I—I wrote you a letter the other day, and your answer in the column made me think that perhaps you wouldn't mind giving me some help. I wrote that letter signed 'Sincerity'.”
He was obviously ill at ease, and Ann tried to help him out.
“I remember the letter perfectly,” she said. “Did you take my advice?”
“Well, I'm a bit uncertain about it,” he said.
“I just wanted to explain to you a little more fully, and see what you think. You see I happened to see this girl one day, going into her office. I suppose the idea about love at first sight is all exploded, but I had a hunch as soon as I saw her that——Oh, well, that I would like to know her. I've seen her going in and out of the building, but she has never seen me, never even heard of me. I don't know any one who can introduce me to her, and I can't just walk up to her and tell her I'm crazy about her. They don't do that except in Shakespeare. I don't know much about girls and I thought maybe you could suggest some way in which I could meet her without frightening her.”
Ann pondered. She liked the young man's way of putting his problem, and it was plain from his genuine embarrassment that he was sincere.
“I'd love to help you, if I could,” she said. “It seems to me that the only way to go about it is to arrange some business with the firm she works for, and try to meet her that way. Couldn't that be done?”
“She's secretary to one of the big bugs in the Telephone Company,” he said. “I'm in the publishing business. I don't see any way in which I could fake up a business connection there. The worst of it is, there may be a dozen fellows in love with her already, for all I know. I suppose I might get a job with the Telephone Company, but by the time I had worked up far enough to have an excuse for going into the vice-president's office where she works, someone else might have married her.” He laughed, a boyish, ingratiating chuckle.
“It does seem pretty hard,” said Ann. “I don't know what to say.” She had a mental picture of the unknown fair one, going in and out of the big Telephone Company's building on Dey Street, unaware of the admiring glances of this bashful admirer. “I'll bet the men she knows aren't half as nice as he is,” she said to herself.
“I happen to know that she reads your column,” said Caldwell. “I suppose there isn't any way I could get in touch with her through that?”
“If there's any legitimate way I can help,” Ann said, “I'll be glad to. But I hardly see what I can do.”
“Well, thanks awfully,” he said. “If I get a chance to meet her, will you let me come in again and tell you about it? Perhaps you would let me mention your name as a reference, in regard to my respectability I mean?”
“Surely you can give her better references than that? You see, I don't know so very much about you, Mr. Caldwell.”
“In matters like this,” he said, “I guess you're the Big Authority. And by the way, do you ever do any book reviewing? I work for Fawcett and Company, the publishers, and we'd like immensely to have your comment on some of our love stories. Can I send you some books?”
“I can't promise to review them,” said Ann, rather pleased, because this seemed to her a way to earn a little extra money. “But I'll speak to the literary editor, and we'll see.”
“Suppose I send them to your home address,” said Caldwell. “I know what a newspaper office is, if I send them here someone else might snitch them. Give me your street number, and you'll be spared the trouble of taking them home to read.”
“That's very kind of you,” said Ann. “Miss Ann Austin, 527 West 150th Street. Well, you let me know what happens about your fair lady. I wish you all sorts of luck!”
When Arthur Caldwell got outside the office, he looked down Park Row to where the great Telephone Building rose up behind the brown silhouette of St. Paul's.
“Caldwell,” he said to himself, “you're an infernal liar! But it pays! I'll figure out some way. While there's life there's dope.”
He set out for the subway, but paused again to meditate.
“Ann Austin!” he said. “By George, she's a queen.”
II
It is not the purpose of this tale to tell in detail how Arthur Caldwell laid siege to Ann Austin. He was a cautious man, and for some time he contented himself by presenting occasional reports of his progress with the damsel of the Telephone Company. Ann, in her friendly and unselfish way, was delighted to hear, a few days later, that he had met his ideal. Then, averring that he needed further counsel, Arthur persuaded her to have lunch with him one day; and Ann, convinced that the young man was in love with someone else, saw no reason why this should not be done. Perhaps it was a little odd that at their various meetings they should have talked so much of themselves, their ambitions, the books they had been reading, and so on; and so little of the Telephone lady. But surely it was strictly a matter of business that Arthur should send Miss Austin some of Fawcett's novels, for her to review in the Planet; and equally a professional matter that he should discuss with her her opinion of them. And then came the day when Arthur called up to say that things were going so well with the Telephone lady that he wanted Cynthia to meet her; and would she join them in St. Paul's Churchyard at half-past twelve? Ann, with just a curious little unanalyzed twinge in her heart, agreed to do so.
But when she reached the bench in the graveyard, where a bright autumn sunshine filled the clearing among those tremendous buildings, Arthur was there alone.
“Where's Alice?” said Ann, innocently—for such was the name Arthur had always given the lady of the Telephone Company.
“She couldn't come,” he said. “But I want to show you her picture.”
They sat down on the bench, and he took out of his pocket a copy of the noon edition of the Planet. He turned to the feature page, and displayed the little cut of Cynthia at the head of the Lovelorn column.
“There,” he said, stoutly (though his heart was tremulous within him), “there, you adorable little thing, there she is.”
It would be pleasant to linger over this scene, but, as I have just said, this is not our denouement, but only an incident. Ann, shot through with delicious pangs of doubt and glory and anger, asked for explanations.
“And do you mean to say there never was any Alice, the beautiful Telephone blonde?” she said. “What a fraud you are!”
“Of course not,” he said. “You dear, delightful innocent, I just had to cook up some excuse for coming up to see you. And you can't be angry with me now, Ann, because in your own answer to Sincerity's letter you said the girl ought not to be offended. You told me to take a chance! Just think what self-control I had, that first time I came up to see you, not to blurt out the truth.” And then he tore off a scrap of margin from the newspaper and measured her finger for a ring.
III
There were happy evenings that winter, when Ann, after finishing her stint at the office, would hasten up their rendezvous at Piazza's little Italian table d'hote. Here, over the minestrone soup and the spaghetti and that strong Italian coffee that seems to have a greenish light round the edges of the liquid (and an equally greenish taste), they would discuss their plans and platitudes, just as lovers always have and always will. As for Ann, the light of a mystical benevolence shone in her as she conned her daily pile of broken hearts in the morning mail. More than ever she felt that she, who had seen the true flame upon the high altar, had a duty to all perplexed and random followers of the gleam who had gone astray in their search. Aware more keenly that the troubled appeals of “Tearful” and “Little Pal,” however absurd, were the pains of genuine heartache, she became more and more tender in her comments, and her correspondence grew apace. Now that she knew that her job need not go on forever she tried honestly to run the column with all her might. How stern she was with the flirt and the vamp and the jilt; how sympathetic with the wounded on Love's great battle-field. “Great stuff, great stuff!” Mr. Sikes would cry, in his coarse way, and complimented her on the increasing “kick” of her department. Knowing that he attributed the accelerated pulse of the Lovelorn column to mere cynicism on her part, she did not dare wear her ring in the office for fear of being joked about it. She used to think sadly that because she had made sympathy with lovers a matter of trade, she herself, now she was in love, could hope for no understanding. Although she hardly admitted it, she longed for the day when she could drop the whole thing.
One evening Arthur met her at Piazza's, radiant. He was going off on a long business trip for his publishing house, and they had promised him a substantial raise when he returned. They sat down to dinner together in the highest spirits. Arthur, in particular, was in a triumphant mood: the publishing world, it seemed, lay under his feet.
“Great news, hey?” he said. “We'll be able to get married in the spring, and you can kick out of that miserable job.”
“But, Arthur,” she said, “you know I have to take care of Mother. Don't you think it would be wiser if I went on with the work for a while, until your next raise comes? It would help a good deal, and we'd be able to put a little away for a rainy day.”
“What?” he said. “Do you think I'm going to have my wife doing that lovelorn stuff in the paper every day? It'd make me a laughing stock if it ever got out. No, sir! I haven't said much about it, because I knew it couldn't be helped; but believe me, honey, that isn't the right kind of job for you. I've often wondered you didn't feel that yourself.”
Ann was a little nettled that he should put it that way. Whatever her private distaste for the Lovelorn column, it had served her well in a difficult time, and had paid the doctor's bills at home. And she knew how much honest devotion she had put into the task of trying to give helpful counsel.
“At any rate,” she said, “it was through the column that we first met.”
What evil divinity sat upon Arthur's tongue that he could not see this was the moment for a word of tenderness? But a young man flushed with his first vision of business success, the feeling that now nothing can prevent him from “making good,” is likely to be obtuse to the finer shades of intercourse.
“Of course, dear, I could see you were different from the usual sob sister of the press,” he said. “I could see you didn't really fall for that stuff. It's because I love you so, I want to get you out of that cheap, degrading sensational work. Most of those letters you get are only fakes, anyway. I think Love ought to be sacred, not used as mere circulation bait for a newspaper.”
Ann was a high-spirited girl, and this blunt criticism touched her in that vivid, quivering region of the mind where no woman stops to reason. But she made an honest attempt to be patient.
“But, Arthur,” she said; “there's nothing really cheap and degraded in trying to help others who haven't had the same advantages we have. I know a lot of the letters I print are silly and absurd, but not more so than some of the books you publish.”
“Now, listen,” he said, loftily, “we won't quarrel about this. I don't want you to go on with the job, that's all. It isn't fair to you. You may take the work seriously, and put all sorts of idealism into it, but it's not the right kind of job for a refined girl. How about the men in the office? I'll bet I know what they think of it. They probably think it's a devil of a good joke, and laugh about it among themselves. Don't you think I've seen that managing editor leering at you? That sort of thing cheapens a girl among decent men. Every Lovelace in town feels he has a right to send you mash-notes, I guess.”
Ann was furious.
“Well, you're the only one I ever paid any attention to,” she said, blazing at him. “I'm sorry you think I've cheapened myself. I guess I have, by letting you interfere with my affairs.”
She slipped the ring from her finger, and thrust it at him. Arthur saw, too late, what he had done. She listened in scornful silence to his miserable attempts to console her, which were doubly handicapped by the old waiter hovering near. She was still adamant while he took her up town. The only thing she said was when she reached the door of her apartment.
“I don't want you to cheapen yourself. You needn't come any more.”
By this time Arthur also was thoroughly angry. The next morning he went away on his business trip, realizing for the first time that he who has the pass key to a human heart treads among dangerous explosives.
IV
How different the little room in the Planet office looked to Ann when she returned, with a sick heart, to her work the next morning. Everything was just the same—the geranium on its windowledge, that seemed to survive both the eddying hot air from the steampipes beneath it and the daily douche of iced drinking water; the noisily ticking inaccurate little clock; the dusty typewriter. All were the same, and there was the pile of morning letters from Love's battered henchmen. To office boy and casual reporter Ann herself seemed the usual cheerful charmer with her crisp little white collar and dark, alluring hair. Her swift, capable hands sped over the pile of letters, slitting the envelopes and sorting the outcries into some classification of her own. Outwardly nothing had altered, but everything seemed to have lost its meaning. What a desolate emptiness gaped beneath the firm routine of her daily life. She was struck by the irony of the fact that the only one in the office who seemed to notice that something was amiss was the one person whom she disliked—Mr. Sikes. He came in about something or other, and then stayed, looking at her intently.
“You look sick,” he said. “What's the matter, is the love feast getting on your nerves?”
With a queer twitching at the corners of her mouth, she forced herself to say some trifling remark. He leaned over her and put his hand on hers. She caught the strong cigarry whiff of his clothes, which sickened her.
“Too much love in the abstract,” he said, insinuatingly. “What you need is a little love in the concrete.”
If he—or any one—had spoken tenderly to her, she would have burst into tears. But the boorishness of his words was just the tonic she needed. She looked at him with flashing eyes, and was about to say: “Keep to some topic you understand.” Then she dared not say it, for now she could not run the risk of losing her job. She faced him steadily, in angry silence. He left the room, and the little green-tarnished mirror under the pigeonholes saw tears for the first time.
The irony of her position moved her cruelly when she began her task of dealing with the correspondents. Here she was, giving helpful, cheery advice, posing as all-wise in these matters, when her own love affair had come so miserably to grief. In the ill-written scrawls on scented and scalloped paper she could hear an echo of her own suffering. “Hopeless” and “Uncertain” and “Miss Eighteen” got very tender replies that day. And how she laid the lash upon “Beau Brummel” and “Disillusioned,” those self-assured young men, who had chosen that mail to contribute their views on the flirtatious and unreliable qualities of modern girls.
The bitterness of her paradoxical task became dulled as the days went on, but there were other troubles, too, to bother her. Her mother, quick and querulous to detect unhappiness, fell into one of her nervous spells, and the doctor had to be called in again. The woman-by-the-day got blood-poisoning in her arm, and could not come. The landlord gave notice of a coming raise in rent. A fat letter came from Arthur, and in a flush of passion she destroyed it unread. If it hadn't been such a fat letter, she said to herself, it wouldn't have annoyed her so to see it. But she wasn't going to wade through pages of explanation of just what he had meant. She was still cut to the quick when she remembered the cavalier and easy way in which he had scoffed at her work. And then, as time went by, she found herself moving into a new mood—no longer one of exaggerated tenderness toward her clients, but a feeling almost cynical. “They're all fools, just as I am,” she said.
One morning she found on her desk a note from the managing editor:
Dear Miss Cupid:
We've made some changes in our budget, and I've been authorized to fatten your envelope $15 a week. I'm glad to do this, because the Lovelorn stuff is going big. Just keep kidding them along and everything will be fine. Maybe some day we can syndicate it. Hope this will cheer you up, don't look so blue at your friends.
Sikes.
There had been a time when the tone and phrasing of this note might have seemed offensive, but in the numbness of despondency Ann had felt lately, it was a fine burst of rosy warmth. Thank God, she said to herself, something has broken my way at last! She wondered if she had been mistaken in Sikes, after all? Perhaps he was really a friend of hers, and she had misunderstood his odd ways.
That day at noon she went down to the cashier's department to cash a small check. There was no one in the cage, but in the adjoining compartment, behind a wall of filing cases, she could hear two girls talking. One of them said:
“I see Sikes has put through a raise for Lovelorn. Pretty soft for her, hey?”
“She'll have to give value received, I guess,” said the other. “Sikes figures if he puts that over for her, she'll fall for him. She's been stalling him for quite a while, but I suppose he's got her fixed now.”
She fled, aghast, ran down to another floor so as not to be seen, and took the elevator. Out on the street she walked mechanically along Park Row and found herself opposite St. Paul's. She wandered in and sat down on a bench. It was a chilly day, and the churchyard was nearly empty.
So this was Sikes's friendliness; and she, utterly innocent even in thought, was already the subject of vulgar office gossip. For the first time there broke in upon her, with bitter force, the knowledge that no matter how easy it may be to counsel others, few of us are wise in our own affairs.
Pitiable paradox: she, the “sympathetic adviser in matters of the heart,” had made shipwreck of her own happiness. How right Arthur had been, and how childish and mad she, to reject his just instinct. It was true: she had made use of Love for mere newspaper circulation; and now Love had died between her hands. Well, this was the end. No matter what happened, she could not go on with the job. Cold and trembling with nervousness, she returned to her desk, to finish her column for the next day.
On her typewriter lay some letters, which had come in while she was out. She opened one, and read.
Dear Cynthia:
I am in great trouble, please help me. I am in love with a fellow and know he is all right and we would be very happy together. We were engaged to be married, and everything was lovely. But he objected to the work I was doing, said it was not a good job for a girl and that I ought to give it up. I knew he was right, but the way he said it made me mad. I guess I am hot-tempered and stubborn—anyway, I told him to mind his own business, and he went away. Now I am heart-broken, because I love him and I know he loves me. Tell me what to do.
Jessie.
Ann sat looking at the cheap blue paper with the initial J gaudily embossed upon it in gilt. In the sprawling lines of unlettered handwriting she saw an exact parallel to her own unhappy rupture with Arthur. How much more clearly we can see the answer in others' tangles than in our own! Jessie, with her pathetic pretentious gilt initial, knew that she had been in the wrong, and was brave enough to want to make amends. And she—had she not been less true to Love than Jessie? Her false pride and obstinacy had brought their own punishment. Seeing the situation through Jessie's eyes, she could read her duty plain. Arthur, no doubt, was through with her forever, but she must play the game no less.
She put Jessie's letter at the head of the Lovelorn column for the next day. Under it she wrote:
Certainly, dear Jessie, if you feel you were in the wrong, you ought to take the first step toward making up. Probably he was tactless in criticizing you, but I am sure he only did it because he had your true interest at heart. So write him a nice letter and be happy together. Your friend Cynthia hopes it will all come out all right, because she has seen other cases like this where false pride caused great suffering. If he is the right man, he will love you all the more after he gets your letter.
Ann sent up her copy to the composing room, and then going to a telephone booth she called up Fawcett and Company and asked for Mr. Caldwell.
“Mr. Caldwell's not here any longer,” said the girl.
“Serves me right,” said Ann to herself. “Can you tell me where I can find him?” she asked, wondering how it was that one so miserable could still speak in such a pleasant and apparently unconcerned tone of voice.
The Fawcett operator switched her to another wire.
“I'm sorry,” said a stenographer, “Mr. Fawcett left here about two weeks ago. He's got a job out of town—in Boston, I think. I can find out for you in the morning if you'll call again.”
“Never mind,” said Ann.
She had a horror of facing Mr. Sikes in her present wretchedness, so before she went home she wrote him a note, resigning her job, and asking permission to leave as soon as possible.
The next day she had to nerve herself to face his protests, and the friendly remarks of all the staff when the news spread. It was a hideous ordeal, but she managed to get through it smiling. But by evening she was inwardly a wreck. In her present mood, she had an instinctive longing to revisit the shabby little restaurant where she and Arthur had spent so many happy hours. She knew it would give her pain; but she felt that pain was what she needed—sharp, clean, insistent pain to ease the oppression and disgust of what she had been through. Remorse, she felt, is surgical in action: it cuts away foul tissues of the mind. She could not, without preparatory discipline, face her mother's outcry at hearing she had given up her job.
V
In the crisp blue evening air the bright front of Piazza's café shone with a warm and generous lustre. From sheer force of habit, her heart lightened a little as she climbed the stairs and entered the familiar place, where festoons of red and green paper decoration criss-crossed above the warm, soup-flavoured, tobacco-fogged room. There was a clatter of thick dishes and a clamour of talk.
“One?” said the head waiter, his wiry black hair standing erect as though in surprise.
She nodded, and followed him down the narrow aisle. There was the little table, in the corner under the stair, where they had always sat. A man was there, reading a newspaper.... Her heart felt very strange, as though it had dropped a long way below its usual place. It was Arthur, and he was smiling at her as though nothing had happened. He was getting up. . . he was shaking hands with her. . . how natural it all seemed!
Like all really great crises, it was over in a flash. She found herself sitting at the little table, taking off her gloves in the most casual fashion. Arthur was whispering outrageous things. How fine it is that everybody talks so loud in Italian table d'hôtes, and the waiters crash the dishes round so recklessly!
Arthur's talk seemed to be in two different keys, partly for the benefit of old Tonio, the waiter, and partly for her alone.
“Well, here you are! I wondered how soon you'd get here.... Have you forgiven me, dearest?. . . Do you want some minestrone?. . . Why didn't you answer my letters, brownest eyes? . . . Yes, and some of the near-beer.. . . Darling, it was all my fault. I wrote to tell you so. Didn't you get my letter?”
After all, at such times there isn't much explaining done, A happy reconciliation is the magic of a moment, and no explanations are necessary. The trouble just drops away, and life begins again from the last kind thing that was said. All Ann could do was whisper:
“No, Arthur—it was I who was wrong. I—I've given up the Lovelorn.”
And then, after a sudden moisture of eye on both sides, the steaming minestrone came on in its battered leaden tureen from which the silver plating disappeared long ago, and under pretense of serving her soup Arthur stretched out his hand. She put out hers to meet it, and found the ring slipped deftly back on her finger.
“But, Arthur,” she said, presently, “I thought you were out of town.”