The only things she saw at first were as dreary and tragic as herself.
It began the moment she left Thornhill, with her last vision of Ellen’s
agonizing, tear-stained face hiding at her window on the circular
drive. Then came the ride alone, through hot rows of dusty, dull brick
houses; the terror-inspiring sight of lives straitened and stagnant
through poverty; the abysmal reek of the neighbourhood, near a glue
factory, where she left her car in the garage, with instructions to
return it on the morrow, and engaged an express man to take her trunk;
the long file of weary, hopeful people with little green bills in their
hands at the bank--worshippers in the modern temple; the immigrants at
Union Station, sprawling on the circular benches about the pillars,
hemmed in by their squalid baggage and children; the herding of
exhausted, stupid families from the country trains to the street-cars
and from the street-cars to the trains; the smoke-patined inferno of
the city sweating in the heat after the clean beauty of her home....
She had been unable to get away in time to buy a berth in the fast
train. In order to leave that day, which was imperative, she was forced
to take the “two-day” train, and tried to console herself with the
thought that its second-rateness would more effectually cover her
flight. But the endless trip in coaches that contained unprepossessing
persons from the lower social chaos added to the weight that lay on her
spirit.
The first night on the train she slept early and long, fatigued by
a day full of tasks, but the second she lay staring at the polished
red back of the berth above, her shade drawn up, her smarting eyes
conscious of the jabbing flashes of light as they passed through
sleeping towns, or straining out over dark, shuddering mysteries of
country; planning, wondering, trying to anticipate what life would
be like one year, two years, five years from to-night. Where should
she be; whom should she know? Should she be alive? Yes, she promised
herself, she would be that. The one thing she could not admit was that
life might end before she had fought it out.
Once she asked herself what Mathilda was doing, for by this time her
flight was an old story, the worst of the scene between Ellen and
Mathilda was over. But they would be dreadfully unhappy nevertheless,
and the pity she could spare to them softened her own sense of wrong.
She flashed on the electric light in the berth and looked at her watch.
In six hours, had it not been for Victor Hugo, for a little scrawled
note written a fifth of a century ago, she would have been meeting
Hal Blaydon at the Blythedale platform. And who could say--if she had
married Hal and learned the truth afterward--would it have made any
difference after all?
It was morning when they got beyond Pittsburgh and, sleepless and
discouraged, the grey day greeted her dismally. All she was able to
see beyond the window were little grimy houses belonging to coal
miners--they painted them a deep red or black in those parts, she
supposed because all life was accursed. For long distances nothing
caught her eye but these colours of Hell borrowed for earthly use. On a
high slope, dingy with slag and coal screenings and dust, there was a
black, sorry-looking house, where two children were swinging across the
cheap frame porch far above the train. They were singing, and it struck
her as the oddest thing she had ever witnessed. There were many houses
like it on that coal bank. Where there wasn’t coal there was yellow
mud. Where there were not either there were piles of rusty iron. She
might come to this herself, to ugliness and hunger. She shuddered and
darkened the berth, hiding her face from the vision as though it would
sear her beauty and put an end to her youth. Hardly a moment later, it
seemed, the porter awakened her from a deep sleep. They were in the
Pennsylvania station.
Moira’s mood changed the moment she stood in the rotunda. The powerful
magic of the city stirred her. Had it been raining as only it can rain
in New York, had the streets been ice-bound or blistering in mid-summer
heat, she would have felt that great surge unabated.
But to-day the city was in one of its magnificent sunny moods, laughing
at its own comic and gracile charms, whimsical with unreliable winds,
one of those startling, extravagant days when a walk in any street has
the effect of champagne. On a sudden impulse she ordered the cab to
the Ritz. She would enjoy one day, one supreme spell of indifference
and the sense of power, one hour at court when the regal town must
treat her with its finest smiles and courtesies. She wrote boldly on
the register “Mary Smith,” and the simple dignity of the name made it
distinguished in that long list of high-sounding titles.
She breakfasted in state in her bedroom, looking over Park Avenue
toward the great railroad terminus, the innumerable roofs, which
stretched like irregular stepping stones to the river, the gracious
bridge uptown. She drove in a barouche to the Metropolitan Museum
and then down the Avenue, scenting its fine airs, and lingering on
its elegant details in the slow-moving vehicle; the gay pile of the
Plaza, like a monument erected to an Empress’ holiday; the pearly
home of the Vander-somethings, with its birdlike little statue of the
architect in a Rembrandt cap, perched among the décor of its roof; the
quaintly painted florist’s building in the forties; broad, gleaming
windows wherein the comfort of grizzled millionaires was framed for
the public’s delectation; the sleek cathedrals, English and Roman,
agreeably sunning themselves--almost tête-à-tête, with an air of
after-dinner ease; the occasional brown, old-fashioned banks, which one
took at first glance to be dwellings; the Library, squat with sedentary
scholarship and stained by too much knowledge of good and evil; the
mosque-like corner of the Waldorf; and far down where the Avenue
narrowed, pleasant-memoried houses of the older time, and a freshly
be-painted little French hotel, bright and impudent as a hat box from
the Rue de La Paix.
This last looked so suitable to her state of high spirits that she
called to the driver to stop there. Strangely enough she had never been
in the Brevoort. She slipped down into the basement café and was soon
looking at the multiplied images of people in the mirrors that panelled
the walls; among them stocky, dapper bachelors, arty, bearded men, a
tall tan young fellow in a Norfolk, seemingly much fascinated with his
companion, a much older woman with a weathered elegant face. She liked
these. This, she supposed, had something to do with Greenwich Village,
though except through picture and story, she knew nothing of it. But
as she poured her tea for herself, she felt suddenly it was not the
place to be alone. How easy it would be to go upstairs now, to send
a telegram to Hal. The unholy notion made her finish her luncheon and
leave.
She went back by bus and walked about through half a dozen shops, then
to a round of galleries, and finally, tired out, to the hotel. The
thrill was over as she watched the day die on the house-tops of the
East Side, and she almost wished she did not have to spend the night
there. She wanted to be at work, after all, the sooner the better;
nothing else could save her from boredom and despair. To-morrow she
would launch herself on the unknown stream.
She bought a ticket to a Russian variety show, which was just then
having a vogue on Broadway, and found forgetfulness between its exotic
charm and the night-view from the theatre roof, of the yellow-dappled
park, its motors skimming and swerving upon curved ribbons of road.
As she turned for a last look at it, standing apart from the crowd
filing out, her solitary figure attracted the glances of a score of
prosperous-looking men. But she did not see them. She thought:
“This is so vast, what can it matter who one is? The Moira of yesterday
is just as small compared to it, as this one here. Why should I care?”
She laughed at this bit of philosophy. It was not particularly
comforting, but it helped her to believe that she had given
up the past.... In her dreams the visions of the day mingled
kaleidoscopically.
Moira knew nothing about New York in a practical way. Her path had
always been the narrow round tripped by the fashionable visitor.
Therefore, as she sat at breakfast with the “classified” columns of
the _Times_ before her she had no idea where she wanted to live. It
happened that the first addresses that she jotted down in her notebook
were far downtown and to these she went looking for the cheapest single
room she could find.
The sights that met her eye filled her with half-humorous, half-tragic
emotions. The landladies who greeted her were in the main revolting;
she was taken into rooms that smelled, rooms that had cheap iron beds
with battered brass knobs, that had carpets with holes in them and
frayed lace curtains, grey with dirt, and hideous oak furnishings and
coloured calendars on the walls. Three-fourths of them were not cleaned
oftener than once a month, she was certain, and she determined to have
cleanliness though every other comfort failed.
She found it at last. On the west side of the Village she was attracted
by a neat card bearing the words “furnished rooms” on the door of a
brick house that looked many degrees better kept than its neighbours.
A shy grey-haired woman admitted her. There were several rooms, all
spotless, and she selected one reasonably priced, with white painted
woodwork and plain furniture that she thought she might manage to
live with. When she asked for the telephone to send for her luggage
from the hotel, she was shown into the daughter’s room. In one corner
of this pure haven was a small, square stand covered with chintz and
draped with flowered cretonne. Upon it stood a discarded perfume bottle
filled with holy water, a prayer-book and catechism, and a tall white
statuette of the Virgin and child, with the monogram M. A. on the
rococo base. On the wall above the stand was a black crucifix with
the Christ in gilt. Behind the Christ was thrust a little palm cross.
Still higher than the crucifix hung a photo-engraving of the Madonna
and child from some Italian master, in a gilded frame. The homely
simplicity of the scene brought tears to the girl’s eyes....
But she felt a little less benevolent the next day when she asked Mrs.
McCabe why there were no mirrors in the bathroom. That lady gazed at
her with the sad severity of the timid and replied:
“I don’t know. There just ain’t, and there won’t be.”
In this atmosphere of staggering piety began the career of “Mary
Smith.”