Don-A-Dreams/Part 4/Chapter 3
III
Fortified by a bowl of watery soup and a tasteless fricassee of chicken, he started out to call on Margaret, more hopeful of the success of his relations with her since he had solved his other problems of intercourse by the simple process of elimination; and as he walked, he dramatized a scene of apologies and explanations, in which he would plead that he could better help her now that he could give his whole time to her, and she—instead of criticising and accusing him—would discuss her situation in a friendly confidence that would be wholly encouraging. Her smile—that had lost none of its dimples—would lose its suggestion of superiority; instead of looking at him with the open gaze which promised nothing because it concealed nothing, she would return to the girlish shy glance that was so dear to his memory. She would recognise his greater experience of life and defer to him. She would accept his more cheerful outlook on the future and be willing to continue her search for employment without this rasping anxiety which made such a discord of their friendship.
He found himself, unexpectedly, at her door. The smiling maid let him in, amused by the frequency of his visits. He waited in the familiar parlour, awakened to apprehension by the approach of a meeting for which he suddenly found himself quite unprepared.
When Margaret appeared, silently, in the doorway, he rose, startled; for she had the pale and set face of an actress entering upon the stage again after the climax of a tragedy. She looked at him, looked away from him, and crossed in front of him to give him her back from the window.
The silence that ensued seemed to him an hour long.
He began bravely: "I wanted to explain. I had been worried— worried about Conroy—and about other things. I hadn't had time, scarcely, to think—to plan for you; and"
"You needn't trouble yourself," she put in. "I'm going home."
He took a step toward her and stopped, helplessly. There was an anguish of disappointment in his "Why?"
"Mother has written me." She did not turn around. "She hasn't even enough money to come for me. She could only send me"—he quivered at the choke in her voice—"my railroad ticket. She can get me a place in the Saint Katherine's School for Girls, teaching music." She added bitterly: "And deportment!"
"Don't go."
"What else can I do?" she cried, facing him with the accusation of her tears. "I can't stay here. You—no one"
"I will," he pleaded. "Don't go. Give me a chance. Come and see Kidder with me. Take anything—until we find out. This sort of thing can't be done in a day. Take it until we can get something better."
"Take what?"
"The 'extra' work—like Miss Morris. It'll only be five or six dollars a week, but it'll help pay expenses until—I have lots of money. Don't go. I—it'll be the end of everything." Her silence emboldened him. "I've been waiting here for you. I knew you'd come, to study, to go on the stage—the concert stage. And I've been waiting. That's why I thought this theatrical work—would be good—to be near you. . . . And now, if you give it all up and go away, there won't be anything for either of us. There's nothing for you, up there, teaching music in a girls' school." He ended faintly: "And there's nothing here for me, if you go."
She replied, with some of her old spirit: "You didn't seem to care whether I went or not!"
"I know. It hasn't been Everyone has been against me, worrying me. Conroy was drinking and quarrelling with me. I was worried about them at home. Mother's ill and they blame me for it—my father does. I didn't care, as long as I knew you were coming. I wouldn't give up"
"Well," she said, putting all that aside, "what do you think I can do?"
"You can do what Miss Morris has been doing. There's nothing to be ashamed of in this extra work. Perhaps Kidder can get you in 'The Rajah's Ruby' with me. You can go on studying your music and your singing."
"But five or six dollars wouldn't pay my board."
"That's only the beginning. I'm getting ten a week already. You can work up into some of the smaller parts. Besides, you don't have to board. We—Conroy and Pittsey and I—have been living for about five dollars a week each, and I believe I can do it for less, where I am now."
She said, out of her thoughts: "It's horrible to be poor!"
"It's not as horrible here as it would be at home."
"No." She sat down, sighing with the inward tension of anxiety. "I'd do anything rather than that. . . . It would be Miss Cary's place. She used to be music teacher at Saint Kitt's, and took us out for our walks, like a governess. . . . Who's Mr. Kidder?"
"He's the agent—the man who engages the extras. We had better go right away. There may be something waiting now."
She rose, half reluctantly, lingering at the window, "I don't know what mother will say!" She ended her hesitation with "And I don't care!" She turned to him, rigid. "I'll have to take the responsibility of my own life some day. I might as well begin now."
He saw the fear against which she was fighting. "Don't be afraid," he said pityingly. "I'll help."
"Yes." She glanced back at the window that gave a glimpse of the street, a glimpse of that city of strangers in which their struggle would be so unbefriended, their poverty so forlorn. "It—it frightens one a little, doesn't it?"
He answered, in the same voice, with a faltering smile: "It's worse when you wake up at night."
They looked at each other, standing in a silence that gave ear to the muffled tumult of the street traffic, rumbling like the menace of a surf. She sighed again. "Well," she said, "I'll put on my things."
She left him. He drew himself up slowly and stood waiting, his eyes alight, his whole face alight, with an emotion of defiant hope and tenderness. Here was the battle; and he was ready for it. It was the world against him, for the prize of all his dreams. He settled his coat collar and drew a long breath.
When he heard her coming down the stairs, he stepped out into the hall and met her confidently. "If he's not there this afternoon," he said, "we'll be sure to find him in the morning."
But he was there—smoking an after-dinner cigar, with his hat side-tilted on his head, seated before his office desk waiting for his stenographer to return from luncheon. He received them with a genial nod, without rising—until Don introduced her formally; then he took off his hat and held out his huge hand to her rather amusedly. "Sit down. Sit down," he said. "What can I do for you, eh?"
Don brought her an office chair and stood beside her protectingly while he explained what Kidder could do for them; and Kidder listened with the grave air of an elder in a child's game. "Well," he said, "let's see now. Let's see where we're at." He took up some sheets of tabulated reports from his desk, and went through them solemnly. "Never been on the stage before, eh?"
"No," Don answered for her. "We're Is it We'd like to be together in 'The Rajah's Ruby,' if we could."
"Uh-huh?" He took up a pen. "About five-foot-eight or nine? . . . Let's see, now."
His pen travelled down a column of names one by one. He paused, reflected, and made a deciding check-mark. "That'll be all right. Report to Mrs. Connors, Monday, at the Classic." He looked up at the entrance of his stenographer. "Here," he said to her. "Transfer Miss Delancey to rehearsals for 'The White Feather.' Miss Richardson here"—he pointed over his shoulder with his pen handle—"takes her place with the 'Ruby.' Same height."
"Well?" He returned to Don. "Keepin' warm these days? The 'Ruby' looks like an all season run, don't it?" His desk telephone interrupted him. "Yes. . . . Yes. . . . Eight away. . . . Oh, ten minutes. . . . Sure." He took up his hat and his cigar together. "Take Miss Richardson's signature. That'll be all right," he put aside Don's thanks. "I'll be back in an hour," he said over his shoulder to his stenographer—and left them to her.
She chewed a nonchalant cud of gum while Margaret signed her name on the line that was vacant for it. And still chewing, she had returned to her typewriting, indifferent to them, before they were aware that their business with her was finished.
"That was easy," Don said, in the elevator.
Margaret had her thoughts. She replied only: "I don't think he's a gentleman, do you?"
"Well, he's been mighty kind to me. I don't know what I should have done without him—and Walter Pittsey. They have all—everyone has been kind to me."
She looked at him with an expression which he mistook for incredulity. He tried to reply to it by telling her of his first discouraging days in New York and of the aid that had come to end them; and this recital was a revelation of character that was not lost on her, any more than Kidder's manner of receiving him had been.
She said, with an unexpected smile: "You haven't changed a bit."
"Did you want me to?"
She looked back at his interview with Kidder. "No. Not if it makes people be nice to you."
"Well, all right then," he said gaily. "I'm satisfied if you are!"
He was full of hope, voluble of encouragement, gallant with a protective deference that was as winning as flattery. He walked the noisy streets in a devoted attention to her that seemed to leave him oblivious to everything else. Even when he spoke of himself, it was only to give her his experience as an aid to her in making her plans. And all this single-hearted and unconscious devotion came appealingly to her in her mood of loneliness and fear for herself.
They wandered about until she was tired, and then he took her to the galleries of the Fifth Avenue art dealers, where she could sit on plush-upholstered seats and talk of Europe and the Louvre. He confessed that he had always liked landscapes with roads in them—roads up which you might imagine yourself walking to a house that just showed its roof over a hill—or pictures of men and women who were saying something which you could guess.
"But don't you like the colour? the poetry?"
He studied the row of landscapes before him. "Yes, I think I do. But I like them best when there's something to invite you to get inside them and explore, don't you know?"
"0h, you're a Philistine," she teased him.
"Am I? . . . Oh, well, never mind; you're not, anyway," he said; and he said it with such an innocent pride in her that she could not laugh at him.
When it was time for her to return to her boarding-house for dinner, she faced the prospect of loneliness with a reluctance which he was quick to see; and they went together to a little Sixth Avenue restaurant where they ate fried oysters and potatoes with a daring sense of freedom from conventionality and the restraint of parents.
"This is better than Coulton," he said, smiling across the small table.
"Or teaching deportment in Saint Kitt's!" She exaggerated a shudder. "Ugh! What a life!"
The oysters were greasily cooked; the restaurant smelled of a rancid kitchen; the table-cloth was as soiled as the waiter's linen; but if they were sensible of these drawbacks, the fact was not apparent. He was too happy to see anything but her; and she, obviously, enjoyed his happiness. He kept his eyes on her like a courtier, finding her face even sweeter than when it had been more girlish, and dwelling in the unabashed friendliness of her smile without wishing it more demure. He enjoyed the almost domestic pleasure of sharing food with her; and when he recalled his old vision of her pouring coffee at the breakfast table, he blushed with a feeling of guilt in that anticipation, for it seemed a treachery to her new camaraderie.
To any spectator of their dinner, she would have appeared a merely pretty young woman, of a slight and Puritanic figure—with a suggestion of provinciality in her simple ruchings and her low heels—dining poorly, in a smelly restaurant, with a thin, a shabby, an amusingly adoring young man who might be an ill-paid clerk and who was certainly a stupid conversationalist. The romance of the situation was all in their own minds, as romance has a way of being. But he felt that he had won in his first bout with the world that was trying to separate her from him, and this dinner was to remain in his history of himself as wonderful as a royal fête, as one of the gala occasions of his life, as an incident for poets, like a wedding day.