Tales of the City Room/At the Close of the Second Day
AT THE CLOSE OF THE
SECOND DAY
AT THE CLOSE OF THE SECOND DAY.
THE little room, high up in the rear of the old-fashioned New York house, had come to seem like home to its occupant. Its small window overlooked the garden of a German neighbor who had cultivated, in his ten by twelve expanse of ground, a riot of blooming sweet peas, scarlet geraniums, and sturdy vines that reached out over the adjoining walls in most friendly fashion. Busy bees had found the little honey mart in the heart of the big city, and their buzzing, as they worked among the flowers, added the final touch to the homely charm of the place.
Virginia Imboden looked at the familiar scene with unseeing eyes, her forehead pressed dismally against the window-pane. Before her was this artless evidence of simple prosperity. In the street, beyond the garden wall, white-frocked children played about, daintily regardful of their clothes. The warm summer breeze that had been dallying among the geraniums suddenly bore up to her the tones of a street organ. The music, softened by distance, came faintly to her ears, and her lips twitched rather sardonically as she recognized the familiar strains of the "Miserere." It seemed a fitting touch of irony that the old air should be dinned into her ears at the moment of her own surrender to despair. She recalled the last time she had heard it. One of Herforth's political victims had sent him a box for the opera, and that hospitable youth had invited rather more of his friends than the box would hold to enjoy the music with him. They had had a jolly time. Miss Imboden's dark eyes twinkled as she recalled it. After the opera they had indulged in a little supper—a very good supper, she remembered. She mentally and lingeringly called up the various items of the bill of fare. They had begun with steamed oysters, followed by mallard duck with jelly, celery, and champagne, and ending with the reckless conbination of lobster salad and ices. How good it had all tasted! Miss Imboden looked around the clean, bare little room with something very like a groan; for Miss Imboden was hungry.
The bald statement, as she repeated it to herself, was as convincing as the landlady's remarks had been half an hour before, when that stout person had toiled up the stairs for a few moments of serious converse with her young lodger. She had informed Miss Imboden that she herself was honored in the neighborhood as a woman who paid her bills promptly, and she had then solicitously inquired how she could be expected to maintain that enviable reputation unless her lodgers paid her. The questions embarrassed the young woman on the top floor, back. Miss Imboden admitted that she had not paid her room rent for five weeks. She went further, and recklessly stated that there were no present indications of her being able to pay it for five weeks to come. Whereupon the interview had concluded rather unpleasantly, with Mrs. Smith's concise request for the key and the room "as early Monday morning as you can make it convenient, if you please."
Miss Imboden was not, as a rule, easily depressed, but her heart had sunk as she found herself alone again, looking out on the little garden which had been such a comfort to her through the long, hot summer. In her thoughts she had facetiously called it hers, and she had criticised freely the amateur gardening of the simple old man who had pottered happily up and down the narrow path with his ubiquitous watering can. She would have made that garden like the one she loved out West, with its lilies of the valley and its wealth of sweet-scented, homely mignonette. Over in the corner where he had planted those gaudy geraniums she would have put—but she was going away the day after to-morrow to leave it all behind her. Going away, though she knew of no place to go. And she had eaten nothing for two days, and she was hungry.
That stubborn fact presented itself with malevolent persistence and would not down. She had never before been really hungry. Sometimes, after long tramps over the mountains or glorious days on the sea, she had thought she was. But the healthy appetite with which she had sat down to the table then had been a wholly different thing from this gnawing sensation that was so new—and so terrible. She discovered with alarm that she was growing faint. That last interview with the landlady had not been a pleasant experience for a proud woman.
"She seemed annoyed because I have n't any money," said the girl to herself, drearily. "I'm quite sure she's not so acutely inconvenienced by it as I am."
She looked around the room in the vain effort to discover something of her own that had not yet been pawned. There was nothing. The trifles adapted to that sort of business negotiation had gone one by one during a "hard luck period," of which she had heard her professional friends speak but which she had never thought to experience herself. When she had unexpectedly lost her position on "The Globe," and the "hard luck period" began, she had at first rather enjoyed the novelty. It was interesting to speculate as to how long her money would last. It had been interesting, and "developing, too," she told herself, to pawn her belongings when the money was gone, and to live on two cheap meals a day. But the charm faded as the novelty wore off, and when the two meals became one meal, and finally, as to-day and yesterday, no meal, Miss Imboden sighed for vulgar affluence. It was the dull season. There was no hope of securing a position until fall—and to-day was Saturday, the twenty-fifth of August. All her friends were out of town. The two or three newspaper associates whom she knew intimately enough to go to in such straits were away on their vacations. There was absolutely no one from whom she could or would borrow—and she was hungry.
She put on her hat and thrust the pin through her soft brown hair. She had not pawned her clothes—she could not afford to do that, she had told herself. She would make a good appearance to the last, and if the morgue was inevitable, perhaps she would be treated as a gentlewoman should be treated—a gentlewoman in "temporary financial difficulties." There was nothing suggestive of these about the slight, elegant figure in its well-fitting tailor-made gown. Her shoes and gloves were perfect, her hat a becoming little French "confection," bought in the prosperous days of early spring, and the face beneath it a charming one, notwithstanding its pallor and the peculiar expression in the big, dark eyes.
"Good-by," said Miss Imboden, bowing with much elegance to her reflection in the small mirror on the mantel. "I'm going out—and perhaps I shall not see you again. I may go to the river—but I'm sorry, for it seems to me that you and I, if you 're the body and I'm the soul addressing it, deserve a better fate than that. We 've done very well together for twenty-five years, and if we 're overthrown now it's not our fault."
She stood silent, looking into the brown eyes that looked so bravely back at her. She saw them fill suddenly, and she pressed her handkerchief against her face with a little sob.
"I wonder if it's all a horrible nightmare," she murmured aloud—"or perhaps I'm losing my mind." She pulled down her veil and left the room without a glance behind. The landlady heard her light steps going down the stairs and experienced for a moment a slight qualm of conscience. She was not a hard-hearted woman, but she had been irritated by the girl's apparent gay indifference to her position. She did not realize that it was assumed to hide a depth of depression which she would have been equally at a loss to understand.
Miss Imboden strolled down the street in the bright warm sunshine, resolutely refusing to consider a few morbid suggestions which her exhausted nerves communicated to her brain. She had decided to make a last effort to collect from the editor of an obscure little periodical a few dollars which he had promised her for an accepted manuscript. If he could be induced to advance this money before the publication of the article, it would tide her over a day or two—and who could tell what would happen then? She had no money for car-fare, so she made the hot and weary journey on foot, to be met by disappointment at the end. She had quite forgotten that it was Saturday, and that the office closed at two o'clock on that day. She looked at the barred door with dull resentment. She had built her hopes on the editor more strongly than she had realized, and the sudden disappointment almost stunned her. As she came out of the building in which "The Woman's Banner" was published, she glanced at the clock in the window of a neighboring jeweller and saw that it was after five. Happy men and women were hurrying along the street on their way to dinner,—at least, they moved briskly and seemed happy. The cable cars that rounded "Dead Man's Curve" bore a freight of fortunate human beings—going home to dinner! The organ man who ground out the ghostly strains of long-forgotten airs on a wheezy little instrument near the corner would soon go home to dinner. The world was full of people to whom dinner was a cheerful commonplace, while to her—
A passing woman, clad in a shabby black gown, had hesitated and was looking at her sympathetically. Miss Imboden realized, with a sudden flush, that she must have staggered a trifle and that she was now standing still. She pulled herself together and went on, her head proudly erect. "To the river," said the morbid voice within—and for the first time that dreary possibility began to put on the guise of the probable.
As she turned toward Broadway she heard quick steps beside her and glanced up with a smile, expecting to see the sympathetic face of the woman in black. Instead, she looked into a pair of dark gray eyes under heavy brows which almost met over a sharply aquiline nose. She saw an immaculate silk hat raised, and became at the same time aware that this very handsome, well-dressed stranger was speaking to her.
"Good-evening," said that individual, with genial coolness.
"Good-evening," replied Miss Imboden, with indecision.
The erect military figure beside her adapted his step to hers and walked on by her side like an old acquaintance.
"May I ask where you are going?" he said.
His voice had the quiet interest and assured tone of a friendship which warranted the question. Miss Imboden, who appreciated the artistic, appreciated it even in these trying circumstances. She hesitated a moment then let herself drift with the tide.
"I'm going to dinner," she announced firmly.
"May I beg that you will take pity on me and dine with me?" suggested her new companion. "I'm a stranger in the city and lonely. Your face, as I passed you, looked very much as I felt. I took the liberty of following you and speaking to you like a beggar asking alms. Won't you give me the pleasure of your company for an hour or two over our dinner?"
It was all wrong, conventionally wrong. Miss Imboden was acutely conscious of that. But the river would be all wrong, too, and surely this gnawing hunger, this faintness, this queer feeling in her head were wrong as well. Better dinner with a stranger than the river by herself. She would accept his invitation, yes, but under no false pretences.
"Thank you," she said with quiet dignity, "I will dine with you, with pleasure. I have not dined for two days."
He looked at her with a start, and the eyes of the man of the world read the truth in the face beside him. He muttered a startled ejaculation under his breath, and, quickening his step, took her to a large restaurant, not many blocks away. He established her in a cosey corner by the window, where the summer breeze blew in upon her, laden with the perfume of the mignonette that blossomed on the window-sill. She was glad to see her favorite flower here. It seemed a happy omen, a home sanction on a course erratic but blameless. She leaned back in her chair and wondered why the tables and diners seemed so far away, and why the voice of the waiter came to her from such a distance. She was aroused by the sensation of having something go stinging down her throat, some thing that put new life into her. The stranger was holding a glass to her lips and the waiter stood by with water.
"It's the heat," she heard her escort say to him. "She's a little overcome by it. She has been out in the sun too long. She 'll be better when she has eaten something. Bring the soup as soon as you can."
She sat up, mechanically straightening her hat. "I beg your pardon," she said simply. "I feel quite myself now. Thank you."
"What a thoroughbred she is!" he thought. He repeated the inward comment as he watched her eat her soup as deliberately and daintily as if she had risen from the luncheon table but a few hours before. She looked up when the waiter removed the plates, and the ready laughter bubbled to her eyes and looked out at him in a quizzical little gleam. She was quite herself again, and she suddenly determined that he should have as pleasant an hour as it was in her power to give him. He was doing a corporal work of mercy—feeding the hungry. She would do a spiritual work of mercy—comfort the lonely. His eyes were bent on the bill of fare and he was giving his order to the waiter with the seriousness which the importance of the occasion demanded. She took advantage of the opportunity to study his face. It was a handsome face—beautiful, she decided, because there was soul in it. His complexion, though dark, was very clear, and the gray eyes, beneath their long lashes, had an almost boyish frankness. They looked up at her as the waiter departed, and his white teeth flashed in a quick response to the faint smile he saw on her lips.
"You feel better, don't you?" he remarked, looking at her with gay friendliness. "I'm not going to ask you anything about it yet. Perhaps, later, you 'll tell me. For the present, we 're going to play that we 've been friends for a thousand years, through all sorts of incarnations, as it were. I really believe we have, don't you?"
She smiled back at him with as frank a friendliness as his own.
"According to the theosophists," she said, "our souls have recognized each other. They always do, through any number of incarnations, if they are really congenial and friendly. They recognize their enemies of past incarnations, too, and so, when you meet a man and take what you think is an unreasonable dislike to him, it simply means that you and he have had some trouble in another life and that the soul has recognized its enemy. You were kind to me a thousand years ago, and I remember it."
"It's a refreshing theory," said her companion, gratefully. "It lessens the strain on one's mind. When you find yourself loathing a fellow you can accept the condition as a matter of course instead of speculating about it and fearing that you are doing him an in justice. You need merely say to yourself, 'Well, he acted so badly in that seventeenth incarnation of his that no self-respecting man could have anything to do with him now.' Whereupon you dismiss him from your mind with a contented smile."
He helped her to the fish as he spoke, and they drifted into a light-hearted talk which developed a similarity of taste and point of view that surprised them both. Over the salad he told her of his experiences as a civil engineer in Central America, touching but lightly on the personal side of the narrative, and giving to the incidents a picturesqueness that charmed his guest.
Under the influence of food and friendliness Miss Imboden's spirits revived as a drooping plant straightens itself after a shower. She sipped the glass of champagne he poured out for her and resolutely kept in the background the haunting spectre of to-morrow. It was her duty to be cheerful and companionable. The gas had been lit, and burned softly under colored shades. Through the window she could see the twinkling lights of Broadway. She turned from them to meet his eyes fixed upon her with a yet pleasanter twinkle. They had been talking so freely and light-heartedly that both had temporarily forgotten the strangeness of their position. It came to them after this little lull and there was a moment of embarrassment. He recovered himself first, and, over the ices, gave her a quiet imitation of an English celebrity which delighted her by its fidelity to life. But as she looked and listened the woman's mind was busy. She must get away from him now—how, she did not know, but somehow, and almost at once. The coffee had been ordered. She drank it, declining the liqueur which came with it, and as he sipped his and chatted on, her plan of action outlined itself in her mind.
If only she had met him in any other way she would have been glad to know him better. But she was resolved not to continue an acquaintance whose warrant had lapsed. He had been charming. He had given her a most excellent dinner, and his manner had been that of a gentleman and a friend. Thanks to her, his enjoyment had been complete. It was time that the incident should end. She had had appetite and no dinner. He had dinner but no appetite. Each had supplied the other's lack. They were quits.
"What shall we do next?" he asked cheerfully, as he took the check from the waiter. "It's too warm for the theatre, is n't it? And there's nothing on that's really good. Why not take a pleasant drive through Central Park and around Claremont? It's only eight. We can be back by ten, if you wish."
The proposition fitted in with her plan, and she acquiesced.
"I will order the carriage," he said, "and have it at the ladies entrance. Perhaps you'd better wait in the little reception-room at the left." He led her there as he spoke and saw her comfortably seated.
"I will not keep you waiting more than five minutes," he promised, glancing down at her protectingly.
She watched his erect figure go through the door and down the hall. The instant he was out of sight she sprang to her feet, and the next moment the pedestrians on Eleventh Street were confronted by the spectacle of a young lady, perfectly dressed, running like a deer along that quiet thoroughfare through the gathering darkness. She did not stop until she reached Washington Square. There she dropped exhausted on a small bench and panted as she sat looking up at the cross blazing on the lofty tower of the church in front of her.
It was fate, and a happy one for Miss Imboden, that sent Ruth Herrick swinging rapidly across the Square on her way home from "The Searchlight" office. Her quick eye saw the lonely figure and read the depression in its relaxed lines. She looked sharply at the averted face, and recognized Miss Imboden, whom she knew slightly.
"Why, Miss Imboden!" she exclaimed, stopping suddenly before the drooping form. "How do you do? I'm so glad to see you."
The cheery voice and the expression of sympathy in Miss Herrick's gray eyes broke the barriers of the other woman's reserve. She sobbed almost hysterically as she caught Miss Herrick's hands in hers as confidingly as a child reaches out to its mother in the dark.
"I 've had so much trouble," she said. "I would have come to you, but I heard that you were away on your vacation."
"I got back last night," explained "The Searchlight's" leading woman. "They sent for me. I had a great deal of work piled up awaiting me, and stayed late to do it. I thought a good tramp would put me in trim again after ten hours at my desk, so I walked up from 'The Searchlight' office. Was n't it lucky? We 'll take the elevated train at Eighth Street and you shall tell me all about it on our way home."
The story was begun in the train and completed in Miss Herrick's apartment at the Hotel Edward. Miss Imboden was tucked cosily into a big chair near a window overlooking the ivy-covered Moorish court of the hotel; under her tired feet was a hassock, in her hand was a big palm-leaf fan, and before her sat Ruth Herrick, all interest and attention.
"Now I 'll tell you what you 're going to do," said that resolute young person when the tale was ended. "You 're to stay here with me until you get thoroughly settled. I think our city editor will give you a place on 'The Searchlight.' He was asking to-day for some one to do the news of the women's clubs when the season opens. I 'll introduce you to him to-morrow and tell him you 're exactly the woman for the place—which is no more than the truth. As to this experience to-night, I 'll give you twenty dollars for that. I can make a 'special' out of it."
"If you do," said Miss Imboden, with childlike wistfulness, "I hope you will try to make it appear that the man was acting according to his lights, and meant nothing but kindness. He may have seen that I looked hungry. At all events, if he learns that he possibly saved me from the North River—is that the one they use?—he can't regret having done it and won't feel as if I treated him badly."
Miss Herrick laughed.
"Leave that to me, my dear," she answered reassuringly. "I will show him up as the Good Samaritan of his own deed."