A GLIMPSE OF PROMISED LAND
"Hello, Grace!"
I was passing the society editor in her den a moment later, and she
called out a cheery greeting, although she didn't look up from her
task. She was polishing her finger-nails as busily as if she lived for
her hands--not by them.
"Hello, Jane!"
My very voice was out of alignment, however, as I spoke.
"Are you going to let all the world see that you're not a headstrong
woman?" something inside my pride asked angrily, but as if for
corroboration of my conscientious whisperings, I looked in a
shamefaced way at the lines of my palm.--The head-line _was_ weak and
isolated--while the heart-line was as crisscrossed as a centipede
track!
But a heart-line has nothing at all to do with a city editor's
desk--certainly not on a day when the crumpled balls of copy paper
lying about his waste-basket look as if a woman had thrown them! Every
one had missed its mark, and up and down the length of the room the
typewriters were clicking falsetto notes. The files of papers on the
table were in as much confusion as patterns for heathen petticoats at
a missionary meeting.
"What's up?"
I had made my way to the desk of the sporting editor, who writes
poetry and pretends he's so aerial that he never knows what day of the
week it is, but when you pin him down he can tell you exactly what you
want to know--from the color of the bride's going-away gown to the
amount the bridegroom borrowed on his life insurance policy.
"Search me!" he answered--as usual.
"But there's something going on in this office!" I insisted.
"Everybody looks as exercised as if the baby'd just swallowed a
moth-ball."
"Huh?"
He looked around--then opened his eyes wider. "Oh, I believe I did
hear 'em say--"
"What?"
"That they can't get hold of that story about the Consolidated
Traction Company."
"--And damn those foreigners who come over here with their fool
notions of dignity!" broke in the voice of the city editor--then
stopped and blushed when he saw me within ear-shot, for it's a rule of
the office that no one shall say "damn" without blushing, except the
society editor and her assistants.
"Who's the foreigner?" I asked, for the sake of warding off apologies.
That's why men object so strongly to women mixing up with them in
business life. It keeps them eternally apologizing.
"Maitland Tait," he replied.
"Maitland Tait? But that's not foreign. That's perfectly good
English."
"So's he!" the city editor snapped. "It's his confounded John
Bullishness that's causing all the trouble."
"But the traction company's no kin to us, is it?" the poet inquired
crossly, for he was reporting a double-header in verse, and our
chatter annoyed him.
"Trouble will be kin to us--if somebody doesn't break in on Great
Britain and make him cough up the story," the city editor warned over
his shoulder. "I've already sent Clemons and Bolton and Reade."
"--And it would mean a raise," the poet said, with a tender little
smile. "A raise!"
"Are you sure?" I asked, after the superior officer had disappeared.
"I'd like--a raise."
He looked at me contemptuously.
"You don't know what the Consolidated Traction Company is, I suppose?"
he asked.
My business on the paper was reporting art meetings at the Carnegie
Library and donation affairs at settlement homes because the owner and
publisher drank out of the same canteen with my grandfather--and my
fellows on the staff called me behind my back their ornamental member.
"I do!" I bristled. "It's located at a greasy place, called
Loomis--and it's something that makes the wheels go round."
He smiled.
"It certainly does in Oldburgh," he said. "It's the biggest thing we
have, next to our own cotton mills and to think that they're
threatening to take their doll-rags and move to Birmingham and leave
us desolate!"
"Where the iron would be nearer?" I asked, and he fairly beamed.
_"Sure!_ Say, if you know that much about the company's affairs, why
don't you try for this assignment yourself?"
But I shook my head.
"I've got relatives in Alabama--that's how I knew that iron grows on
trees down there," I explained.
"Well--that's what the trouble is about! Oldburgh can't tell whether
this fellow, Maitland Tait, is going to pack the 'whole blarsted
thing, don't you know, into his portmanteau' and tote it off--or buy
up more ground here and enlarge the plant so that the company's
grandchildren will call this place home."
I turned away, feeling very indifferent. Oldburgh's problem was small
compared with that letter in my hand-bag.
"And he won't tell?" I asked, crossing over to my own desk and fitting
the key in a slipshod fashion.
"He seems to think that silence is the divine right of corporations.
Nobody has been able to get a word out of him--nor even to see him."
"Then--they don't know whether he's a human being or a Cockney?"
He leaned across toward me, his elbow flattening two tiers of keys on
his machine.
"Say, the society's column's having fever and ague, too," he
whispered. "The tale records that two of our 'acknowledged leaders'
met him in Pittsburgh last winter--and they're at daggers' points now
for the privilege of killing the fatted calf for him.--The one that
does it first is IT, of course, and Jane Lassiter's scared to death!
The calf is fat and the knife is sharp--but no report of the killing
has come in."
I laughed. It always makes me laugh when I think how hard some people
work to get rid of their fatted calves, and how much harder others
have to labor to acquire a veal cutlet.
"Of course he was born in a cabin?" I turned back to the poet and
asked, after a little while devoted to my own work, in which I learned
that my mind wouldn't concentrate sufficiently for me to embroider my
story of an embryo Michaelangelo the Carnegie Art Club had just
discovered. "A cabin in the Cornish hills--don't you know?"
The sporting editor pulled himself viciously away from his
typewriter.
"Ty Cobb--Dry sob--By mob--"
"Oh, I beg your pardon!"
"Can't you see when a poem is about to die a-borning?" he asked
furiously.
"I am sorry--and perhaps I might help you a little," I suggested with
becoming meekness. "How's this?--High job--Nigh rob--"
I paused and he began writing hurriedly. Looking up again he threw me
a smile.
"Bully! Grace Christie, you're the light o' my life," he announced,
"and--and of course that blamed Englishman was born in a cabin, if
that's what you want to know."
"It's not that I care, but--they always are," I explained. "They're
born in a cabin, come across in the steerage amid terrific storms--Why
is it that everybody's story of steerage crossing is stormy?--It seems
to me it would be bad enough without that--then he sold papers for two
years beneath the cart-wheels around the Battery, and by sheer
strength of brain and brawn, has elevated himself into the proud
privilege of being able to die in a 'carstle' when it suits his
convenience."
The sporting editor looked solicitous.
"And now, if I were you, to keep from wearing myself out with talking,
I'd get on the car and ride out to Glendale Park," he advised.
But I shook my head.
"I can't."
"You really owe it to yourself," he insisted. "You are showing
symptoms of a strange excitement to-day. You look as if you were
talking to keep from doing something more annoying--if such a thing
were possible."
"I'm not going to weep--either from excitement or the effects of your
rudeness," I returned, then wheeling around and facing my desk again I
let my dual personality take up its song.
"I can and I can't;
I will and I won't;
I'll be damned if I do--
I'll be damned if I don't!"
The story goes that a queen of Sweden composed this classic many years
ago, but it's certainly the national song of every one who has two
people living in his skin that are not on speaking terms with each
other.
Then, partly to keep from annoying the poet again, partly because it's
the thing a woman always does, I took out the letter and read it over
once more.
"Coburn-Colt--Philadelphia!"
The paper was a creamy satin, the embossing severely correct, the
typing so neat and businesslike that I could scarcely believe the
letter was meant for me when I looked at the outside only.
"Wonder what 'Julien J. Dutweiler' would call a small fortune?" I
muttered. "Five thousand dollars? Ten thousand dollars!--Good heavens,
then mother could have all the crepe meteor gowns she wanted without
my ever--_ever_ having to marry Guilford Blake for her sake!"
But as I sat there thinking, grandfather took up the cudgels
bravely--even though the people most concerned were Christies and not
Moores.
"Think well, Grace! That 'best-selling' clause means not only Maine
to California, but England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and
Berwick-on-the-Tweed!" he warned. "Everybody who had ever heard of
either of these two unfortunate people will buy a copy of the book and
read it to find out what really happened!"
"But the letters are hers!" Uncle Lancelot reminded him. "If people
don't want posterity to know the truth about them they ought to
confine themselves to wireless communications."
"And--what would your Aunt Patricia say?" grandfather kept on. "What
would James Christie say? What would Lady Frances Webb say?"
Thinking is certainly a bad habit--especially when your time belongs
to somebody else and you are not being paid to think! Nevertheless, I
sat there all the afternoon, puzzling my brain, when my brain was not
supposed to wake up and rub its eyes at all inside the _Herald_
office. I was being paid to come there and write airy little nothings
for the _Herald's_ airy little readers, yet I added to my sin of
indecision by absorbing time which wasn't mine.
"Of course the possession of these letters in a way connects you with
greatness," grandfather would say once in a while, in a lenient,
musing sort of way. "But I trust that you are not going to let this
fly to your head. Anyway, as the family has always known, your Uncle
James Christie didn't leave his letters and papers to his great-niece;
he merely _left_ them! True, she was very close to him in his last
days and he had always loved and trusted her--"
"But there's a difference between trusting a woman and trusting her
_with your desk keys_!" Uncle Lancelot interrupted. "Uncle James ought
to have known a thing or two about women by that time!"
"Yet we must realize that the value of the possession was
considerable, even in those days," grandfather argued gently. "We must
not blame his great-niece for what she did. James Mackenzie Christie
had caught the whole fashionable world on the tip of his camel's-hair
brush and pinioned it to canvases which were destined to get
double-starred notices in guide-books for many a year to come, and the
correspondence of kings and queens, lords and ladies made a mighty
appeal to the young girl's mind."
"Then, that's a sure sign they'd be popular once again," said Uncle
Lancelot. "Of course there's a degree of family pride to be
considered, but that shouldn't make much difference. The Christies
have always had pride to spare--now's the time to let some of it
slide!"
Thus, after hours of time and miles of circling tentatively around the
battlements of Colmere Abbey--the beautiful old place which had been
the home of Lady Frances Webb--I was called back with a stern
suddenness to my place in the _Herald_ office.
"Can _you_ think of anything else?" the poet's voice begged humbly.
"I'm trying to match up just plain 'Ty' this time--but I'm dry."
I turned to him forgivingly. I welcomed any diversion.
"Rye, lie, die, sky,--why, what's the matter with your think tank?" I
asked him. "They swarm!"
But before he could thank me, or apologize, the voice of the city
editor was in the doorway. He himself followed his rasping tones, and
as he came in he looked backward over his shoulder at a forlorn
dejected face outside. He looked at his watch viciously, then snapped
the case as if it were responsible for his spleen.
"Get to work then on something else," he growled. "There's no use
spending car fare again to Loomis to-day that I can see! He's an
Englishman--and of course he kisses a teacup at this time of the
afternoon."