A LETTER OF INTRODUCTION
New York, revisited, had much the same effect on Betty as it had had on
John during his first morning of independence. As the liner came up the
bay, and the great buildings stood out against the clear blue of the
sky, she felt afraid and lonely. That terror which is said to attack
immigrants on their first sight of the New York sky-line came to her,
as she leaned on the rail, and with it a feeling of utter misery. By a
continual effort during the voyage she had kept her thoughts from
turning to John, but now he rose up insistently before her, and she
realized all that had gone out of her life.
She rebelled against the mad cruelty of the fate which had brought them
together again. It seemed to her now that she must always have loved
him, but it had been such a vague, gentle thing, this love, before that
last meeting--hardly more than a pleasant accompaniment to her life,
something to think about in idle moments, a help and a support when
things were running crosswise. She had been so satisfied with it, so
content to keep him a mere memory. It seemed so needless and wanton to
destroy her illusion.
Of love as a wild-beast passion, tearing and torturing quite ordinary
persons like herself, she had always been a little sceptical. The great
love poems of the world, when she read them, had always left her with
the feeling that their authors were of different clay from herself and
had no common meeting ground with her. She had seen her friends fall in
love, as they called it, and it had been very pretty and charming, but
as far removed from the frenzies of the poets as an amateur's snapshot
of Niagara from the cataract itself. Elsa Keith, for instance, was
obviously very fond and proud of Marvin, but she seemed perfectly
placid about it. She loved, but she could still spare half an hour for
the discussion of a new frock. Her soul did not appear to have been
revolutionized in any way.
Gradually Betty had come to the conclusion that love, in the full sense
of the word, was one of the things that did not happen. And now, as if
to punish her presumption, it had leaped from hiding and seized her.
There was nothing exaggerated or unintelligible in the poets now. They
ceased to be inhabitants of another world, swayed by curiously complex
emotions. They were her brothers--ordinary men with ordinary feelings
and a strange gift for expressing them. She knew now that it was
possible to hate the man you loved and to love the man you hated, to
ache for the sight of someone even while you fled from him.
It did not take her long to pass the Customs. A small grip constituted
her entire baggage. Having left this in the keeping of the amiable
proprietor of a near-by delicatessen store, she made her way to the
ferry.
Her first enquiry brought her to the cottage. Mrs. Oakley was a
celebrity on Staten Island.
At the door she paused for a moment, then knocked.
The Swede servant, she who had been there at her former visit, twelve
years ago, received her stolidly. Mrs. Oakley was dusting her clocks.
"Ask her if she can see me," said Betty. "I'm--" great step-niece
sounded too ridiculous--"I'm her niece," she said.
The handmaid went and returned, stolid as ever. "Ay tal her vat yu say
about niece, and she say she not knowing any niece," she announced.
Betty amended the description, and presently the Swede returned once
more, and motioned her to enter.
Like so many scenes of childhood, the room of the clocks was sharply
stamped on Betty's memory, and, as she came into it now, it seemed to
her that nothing had changed. There were the clocks, all round the
walls, of every shape and size, the big clocks with the human faces and
the small, perky clocks. There was the dingy, medium-sized clock that
held the trumpeter. And there, looking at her with just the old
sandy-cat expression in her pale eyes, was Mrs. Oakley.
Even the possession of an income of eighteen million dollars and a
unique collection of clocks cannot place a woman above the making of
the obvious remark.
"How you have grown!" said Mrs. Oakley.
The words seemed to melt the chill that had gathered around Betty's
heart. She had been prepared to enter into long explanations, and the
knowledge that these would not be required was very comforting.
"Do you remember me?" she exclaimed.
"You are the little girl who clapped her hands at the trumpeter, but
you are not little now."
"I'm not so very big," said Betty, smiling. She felt curiously at home,
and pity for the loneliness of this strange old woman caused her to
forget her own troubles.
"You look pretty when you smile," said Mrs. Oakley thoughtfully. She
continued to look closely at her. "You are in trouble," she said.
Betty met her eyes frankly.
"Yes," she said.
The old woman bent her head over a Sevres china clock, and stroked it
tenderly with her feather duster.
"Why did you run away?" she asked without looking up.
Betty had a feeling that the ground was being cut from beneath her
feet. She had expected to have to explain who she was and why she had
come, and behold, both were unnecessary. It was uncanny. And then the
obvious explanation occurred to her.
"Did my stepfather cable?" she asked.
Mrs. Oakley laid down the feather duster and, opening a drawer,
produced some sheets of paper--to the initiated eye plainly one of Mr.
Scobell's lengthy messages.
"A wickedly extravagant cable," she said, frowning at it. "He could
have expressed himself perfectly well at a quarter of the expense."
Betty began to read. The dimple on her chin appeared for a moment as
she did so. The tone of the message was so obsequious. There was no
trace of the old peremptory note in it. The words "dearest aunt"
occurred no fewer than six times in the course of the essay, its author
being apparently reckless of the fact that it was costing him half a
dollar a time. Mrs. Oakley had been quite right in her criticism. The
gist of the cable was, "_Betty has run away to America dearest aunt
ridiculous is sure to visit you please dearest aunt do not encourage
her_." The rest was pure padding.
Mrs. Oakley watched her with a glowering eye. "If Bennie Scobell," she
soliloquized, "imagines that he can dictate to me--" She ceased,
leaving an impressive hiatus. Unhappy Mr. Scobell, convicted of
dictation even after three dollars' worth of "dearest aunt!"
Betty handed back the cable. Her chin, emblem of war, was tilted and
advanced.
"I'll tell you why I ran away, Aunt," she said.
Mrs. Oakley listened to her story in silence. Betty did not relate it
at great length, for with every word she spoke, the thought of John
stabbed her afresh. She omitted much that has been told in this
chronicle. But she disclosed the essential fact, that Napoleonic Mr.
Scobell had tried to force her into a marriage with a man she did
not--she hesitated at the word--did not respect, she concluded.
Mrs. Oakley regarded her inscrutably for a while before replying.
"Respect!" she said at last. "I have never met a man in my life whom I
could respect. Harpies! Every one of them! Every one of them! Every one
of them!"
She was muttering to herself. It is possible that her thoughts were
back with those persevering young aristocrats of her second widowhood.
Certainly, if she had sometimes displayed a touch of the pirate in her
dealings with man, man, it must be said in fairness, had not always
shown his best side to her.
"Respect!" she muttered again. "Did you like him, this Prince of
yours?"
Betty's eyes filled. She made no reply.
"Well, never mind," said Mrs. Oakley. "Don't cry, child! I'm not going
to press you. You must have hated him or else loved him very much, or
you would never have run away.... Dictate to me!" she broke off,
half-aloud, her mind evidently once more on Mr. Scobell's unfortunate
cable.
Betty could bear it no longer.
"I loved him!" she cried. "I loved him!"
She was shaking with dry sobs. She felt the old woman's eyes upon her,
but she could not stop.
A sudden whirr cut through the silence. One of the large clocks near
the door was beginning to strike the hour. Instantly the rest began to
do the same, till the room was full of the noise. And above the din
there sounded sharp and clear the note of the little trumpet.
The noise died away with metallic echoings.
"Honey!"
It was a changed voice that spoke. Betty looked up, and saw that the
eyes that met hers were very soft. She moved quickly to the old woman's
side.
"Honey, I'm going to tell you something about myself that nobody dreams
of. Betty, when I was your age, _I_ ran away from a man because I
loved him. It was just a little village tragedy, my dear. I think he
was fond of me, but father was poor and her folks were the great people
of the place, and he married her. And I ran away, like you, and went to
New York."
Betty pressed her hand. It was trembling.
"I'm so sorry," she whispered.
"I went to New York because I wanted to kill my heart. And I killed it.
There's only one way. Work! Work! Work!" She was sitting bolt upright,
and the soft look had gone out of her eyes. They were hard and fiery
under the drawn brows. "Work! Ah, I worked! I never rested. For two
years. Two whole years. It fought back at me. It tore me to bits. But I
wouldn't stop. I worked on, I killed it."
She stopped, quivering. Betty was cold with a nameless dismay. She felt
as if she were standing in the dark on the brink of an abyss.
The old woman began to speak again.
"Child, it's the same with you. Your heart's tearing you. Don't let it!
It will get worse and worse if you are afraid of it. Fight it! Kill it!
Work!"
She stopped again, clenching and unclenching her fingers, as if she
were strangling some living thing. There was silence for a long moment.
"What can you do?" she asked suddenly.
Her voice was calm and unemotional again. The abruptness of the
transition from passion to the practical took Betty aback. She could
not speak.
"There must be something," continued Mrs. Oakley. "When I was your age
I had taught myself bookkeeping, shorthand, and typewriting. What can
you do? Can you use a typewriter?"
Blessed word!
"Yes," said Betty promptly.
"Well?"
"Not very well?"
"H'm. Well, I expect you will do it well enough for Mr. Renshaw--on my
recommendation. I'll give you a letter to him. He is the editor of a
small weekly paper. I don't know how much he will offer you, but take
it and _work!_ You'll find him pleasant. I have met him at charity
organization meetings on the East Side. He's useful at the
entertainments--does conjuring tricks--stupid, but they seem to amuse
people. You'll find him pleasant. There."
She had been writing the letter of introduction during the course of
these remarks. At the last word she blotted it, and placed it in an
envelope.
"That's the address," she said. "J. Brabazon Renshaw, Office of
_Peaceful Moments_. Take it to him now. Good-by."
It was as if she were ashamed of her late display of emotion. She spoke
abruptly, and her pale eyes were expressionless. Betty thanked her and
turned to go.
"Tell me how you get on," said Mrs. Oakley.
"Yes," said Betty.
"And _work_. Keep on working!"
There was a momentary return of her former manner as she spoke the
words, and Betty wavered. She longed to say something comforting,
something that would show that she understood.
Mrs. Oakley had taken up the feather duster again.
"Steena will show you out," she said curtly. And Betty was aware of the
stolid Swede in the doorway. The interview was plainly at an end.
"Good-by, Aunt," she said, "and thank you ever so much--for
everything."