The use of these pasteboards brought him ready entrée in the offices
of New York publishers. If he had not been so eager to impress the
gentlemen he interviewed with his literary connoisseurship, undoubtedly
he would have landed a job much sooner. But publishers are justly
suspicious of anything that savours of literature, and Lester's innocent
allusions to George Moore and Chelsea did much to alarm them. At length,
however, Mr. Arundel, the president of the Arundel Company, took pity
on the young man and gave him a desk in his editorial department
and fifteen dollars a week. Mr. Arundel had once walked through the
quadrangle of Balliol, and he was not disposed to be too severe toward
Lester's naïve mannerisms.
To his amazement and dismay, Lester found his occupation not even
faintly flavoured with literature. He was set to work writing press
notes about authors of whom he had never heard at Oxford and whose books
he soon discovered to be amateurish or worse. He had been nourishing
himself upon the English conception of a publisher's office: a quaint,
dingy rookery somewhere in Clifford's Inn, where gentlemen in spats
and monocles discuss, over cups of tea and platters of anchovy toast,
realism and the latest freak of the Spasmodists.
The Arundel office was a wilderness of light walnut desks and filing
cases, throbbing with typewriters, adding machines, and hoarse cries
from the shipping room at the rear. Here sat Lester, gloomily writing
blurbs for literary editors, and wondering how long it would be before
he would earn forty dollars a week. He reckoned that was what one ought
to get before incurring matrimony.
*****
Like all young men of twenty-three, Lester thought a good deal about
marriage, although he had not yet chosen his quarry. The feeling that
he could marry almost anybody was delicious to him. But this heavenly
eclecticism endures such a short time! For youth abhors generalities and
seeks the concrete instance. Also, much reading of George Moore sets the
mind brooding on these things. Lester used to stroll in Madison Square
at dusk before going back to his room, and his visions were often of a
dark-panelled apartment in the Gramercy Park neighbourhood where an open
fire would be burning and someone sitting in silk stockings to endear
him as he returned from the office.
His arrival caused something of an upheaval in the placid breasts of the
two old college friends whose sitting room he shared on Madison Avenue.
They were sturdy and steady creatures, more familiar with Edward Earle
Purinton and Orison Swett Marden than with Swinburne and Crackanthorpe
and Mallarmé. To his secret annoyance, Lester learned that both Jack
Hulbert and Harry Hanover were earning more than thirty dollars a week,
and he even had an uneasy suspicion that they were saving some of
it. When he spoke about Beardsley or Will Rothenstein or the Grafton
Galleries they were apt to turn the talk upon Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker.
When he showed them his greatest treasure, a plaster life mask of
himself that a sculpturing friend in Chelsea had made, they were frankly
ribald. Jack was in the circulation department of a popular magazine,
and Harry performed some unexplained tasks in the office of a tea
importer. Lester was fond of them both, but it seemed to him a bitter
travesty that these simple-minded Philistines should possess so much
higher earning power than he. So he thought of taking a garret in
Greenwich Village, but in the Madison Avenue house he was sharing a big
sitting room at little expense. So he spread his books about, hung up
his framed letter from Przybyszewski, put his hammered brass tea caddy
on the reading table, and made the best of the situation.
Even on fifteen dollars a week a young man may have a very amusing time
in New York. For his room and breakfast Lester paid six dollars a
week; for his other meals he used to hunt out the little table-d'hôte
restaurants of which there are so many in the crosstown streets between
the Avenue and Broadway. To come in from the snowy street on a winter
evening, sit down to a tureen of Moretti's hot minestrone, open a
new packet of ten-cent cigarettes, and prop up a copy of the _Oblique
Review_ against the cruet stand, seemed to Lester the prismatic fringe
of all that was _je ne sais quoi_ and _ne plus ultra_. The dandruffians
in the little orchestra under the stairs would hammer out some braying
operatic strains, and Lester would lean back in a swirl of acrid tobacco
smoke and survey his surroundings with great content.
It was while he was conjugating the verb _to live_ in this manner, and
sowing (as someone has said) a notable crop of wild table d'hôtes, that
he first realized the importance of Pearl Denver. Miss Pearl was
Mr. Arundel's personal stenographer, a young woman remarkable in
her profession by the fact that she never exposed the details of her
camisole to the public gaze; also when the boss dictated she was able to
rescue his subordinate clauses from the airy vacancy in which they hung
suspended, and hook them up into new sentences capable of grammatical
analysis. As a stenog she was distinctly above par, but not above
parsing.
Lester, of course, had a speaking acquaintance with Miss Denver, but
her existence had never really penetrated the warm aura of egocentric
thoughts that enhaloed him. He knew her simply as one of the contingents
of the office; and the office had proved a great disappointment to him.
Not one of the “firm” (he called them “directors”) wore spats; not one
of them had shown the faintest interest in his suggestion that they
publish a volume of Clara Tice's drawings. Lester must be pardoned for
having dismissed Miss Denver, if he had thought of her at all, as not
_generis._
*****
We now proceed more rapidly. Entering the hallway of Moretti's on
Thirty-fifth Street, about half past one cocktail of a winter evening,
he found the cramped vestibule crowded by several persons taking
off their wraps. A copy of the _Oblique Review_, unmistakable in its
garlic-green cover, fell at his feet. Thinking it his own, he picked it
up and was about to pocket it when a red tarn o'shan-ter in front of him
turned round. He saw the bobbed brown hair and gray eyes of Miss Denver.
“Well, Mr. Valiant, what are you doing with my magazine?”
“Oh--why--I beg your pardon! I thought it was mine! I'm awfully sorry!”
He was keenly embarrassed, and pulled his own copy out of his overcoat
pocket as an evidence of good faith.
She laughed. “I don't wonder you made the mistake,” she said. “Probably
you thought you were the only person in New York reading the Oblique!”
He felt the alarm that every shy or cautious youth experiences in the
presence of beauty, and, with a mumbled apology, fled hastily to a
little table in a corner. There, pretending to read some preposterous
farrago of free verse, he watched Miss Denver meet another girl who was
evidently waiting for her. The two chattered with such abandon, smoked
so many cigarettes, and seemed so thoroughly at home that Lester envied
them their savoir. Manoeuvring his spaghetti and parmesan, his gaze
passed as direct as the cartoonist's dotted line to the charming contour
of the stenographer's cheek and neck. His equanimity was quite overset.
Never before had he gazed with seeing eye upon the demure creature
sorting out Mr. Arundel's mind into paragraphs. Human nature is what it
is; let Lester's first thought be confessed: “I wonder if she knows what
my salary is?”
At last, after smoking many cigarettes and skimming over the _Oblique
Review_, Lester felt it was his move. He walked down the room, looking
at his wrist watch with a slight frown as he passed her table. At the
door he saw by the reflection in a mirror that she had not even looked
up. He hurried back to Madison Avenue, pausing to sniff the crystal
frosty air. At the corner of Fifth he stood for a moment, inhaling the
miraculous clearness of the night and pondering on the relative values
of free verse and ordered rhythms as modes of self-expression.
In spite of a certain bumptiousness among males, Lester was painfully
shy with nubile women, and it was several days before he had opportunity
for further speech with Miss Denver. Moretti's is a fifty-cent table
d'hôte, and his regimen was calculated on a forty-cent limit for dinner;
but after this meeting with the _Oblique Review's_ fairest _abonnée_ he
haunted the place for some evenings. Then one day, taking in some copy
for a book jacket to be approved by the sales manager, he encountered
Miss Denver in the sample room. During working hours she was “strictly
business,” and he admired the trim white blouse, the satin-smooth neck,
and the small, capable hands jotting pothooks in her notebook as she
took a long telephone call. She put down the receiver, and smiled
pleasantly at him.
“Don't you go to Moretti's any more?” he asked, and then regretted the
brusqueness of the question.
“Sometimes,” she said. “Usually when I buy the _Oblique_ I go to
a Hartford Lunch. I can sit there as long as I want and read, with
doughnuts and coffee.”
Lester had a curious feeling of oscillation somewhere to the left of
his middle waistcoat button. As the little girl said on the Coney Island
switchback, he felt as though he had freckles on his stomach.
“Will you come to Moretti's with me some night?” he asked.
“I'd love to,” she said. “I must hurry now. Mr. Arundel's waiting for
this phone call.”
A little later in the day, after a good deal of heartburning, Lester
called her up from his desk. “How about to-morrow night?” he said, and
she accepted.
*****
Coursing back to his chamber the next evening, Lester was a little
worried about the ceremonial demanded by the occasion. Should he put
on white linen and a dinner jacket, becoming the conquering male of the
upper classes? But the recollection of the _Oblique Review_ suggested
that a touch of négligée would be more appropriate. A clean, soft collar
and a bow tie of lavender silk were his concessions to unconvention. He
was about to scrub out a minute soup stain on the breast of his coat,
but concluded that as a badge of graceful carelessness this might
remain. At a tobacconist's he bought a package of cheap Russian
cigarettes, such as he imagined a Bolshevik might smoke.
There she came, tripping along the street, with something of the quick,
alcaic motion of an Undersmith on high. He waved gayly. She depressed
her shift key and reversed the ribbon. He double-spaced, and they
entered the restaurant together.
Lester felt an intellectual tremor as they sat down at a corner table.
Never had his mind seemed so relentlessly clear, so keen to leap upon
the problems of life and tessellate them. It was as though all his past
experience had cumulated and led up to this peak of existence. “Now for
a close analysis of Female Mind,” was his secret thought as he settled
in his chair. He felt almost sorry for this gay, defenceless little
shred of humanity who had cast herself under his domineering gaze. A
masculine awareness of size and power filled him. And yet--she seemed
quite unterrified.
As they began on the antipasto he thought to himself: “I must start very
gently. Women like men to veil their power.” So he said:
“That was funny, my picking up your magazine the other night, wasn't it?
You know I thought it was my copy.”
“Oh, the dear old _Oblique!_ Isn't it a scream? I read myself to sleep
with it every night. We'll have to make the most of it while we can,
because Mr. Arundel says it can't pay its paper bill much longer.”
This irreverence rather startled Lester, who was writing an article “On
the Art of Clara Tice” which he had been hoping the Oblique would
buy. In fact, he was startled quite out of the careful conversational
paradigm he had planned. He found himself getting a little ahead of his
barrage. “Does Mr. Arundel read it?” he asked. “Heavens, no!” cried Miss
Denver, and effervesced with laughter. “He would rather face a firing
squad than read that kind of stuff. But he has an interest in the
concern that supplies their paper.” The matter of paper had never
occurred to Lester before. Of course he knew a magazine had to have
something to print on, but he had never thought of the editors of a
radical review being embarrassed by such a paltry consideration.
“Is Mr. Arundel literary?” he asked.
Miss Denver found this very whimsical. “Say, are you kidding me?” she
said, with tilted eyebrows. “The chief says literature is the curse of
the publishing business. Every time somebody puts over some highbrow
stuff on him we lose money on it. The only kind of literature that gets
under his ribs is reports from the sales department.”
“That's very Philistine, isn't it?”
“Sure it is, but it puts the frogs in the pay envelopes, so what of it?”
“Well, I should expect the head of a big publishing house to be at least
interested in some form of literary expression.”
“You should worry! That's what we hires for. Besides he _has_ a literary
passion, too--Walt Mason. He thinks Walt is the greatest poet in the
world.”
“Walter Mason?” murmured Lester. “I don't think I know his work.”
“Hasn't Walt made Oxford yet?” asked Miss Denver. “He writes the prose
poems in the evening papers, syndicate stuff, you know. Printed to
look like prose, just the opposite of the free-verse gag.” She smiled
reminiscently, and quoted:
_When I am as dry as a fish up a tree, then I to the hydrant repair,
and fill myself up, without ticket or fee, with the water that's eddying
there. I drink all I want--half a gallon or more--and then I lie down on
my couch; when I rise in the morning my head isn't sore and I don't wear
a dark brindle grouch----“_
“Is there any free-verse stuff that can cover that?” she asked.
Lester was somewhat disconcerted. His assessment of Female Mind did not
seem to be proceeding methodically. He played for time.
“I thought you enjoyed the _Oblique_?”
“As a joke, yes: I laugh myself giddy over it. But I know darn well that
kind of junk won't last. By and by the ghost'll quit putting up and the
editors will get jobs as ticket choppers. I guess I'm a Philistine!”
With this deliciously impudent creature beaming at him, Lester felt
himself cursedly at a disadvantage. Neither Harvard nor Balliol had
informed him about this Walter Mason, and though he had seven hundred
quips and anecdotes indexed in a scrapbook marked _Jocoseria_, none
of them seemed to bubble up just now. Darn the girl, her mind wouldn't
stand still long enough for him to take its temperature. It was like
trying to write captions for the movies while the film was running. He
blew a cloud of blue Russian vapour across the board, and smiled at her
in a tolerant, _veni-vidi-Bolsheviki_ kind of way. Behind his forehead
he was fighting desperately to catch up.
As they wrestled with the spaghetti he remembered that someone had told
him that publishers usually depend on the literary judgment of their
wives. Perhaps that was the case with Mr. Arundel? But Miss Denver
laughed aloud at the suggestion.
“Wrong again!” she said. “He's not married. Petunia Veal, the author of
'Sveltschmerz,' has been angling for him for years, and lots of other
lady authors, too. He's so sentimental, he's escaped 'em all so far.”
She bubbled and chuckled and gurgled her way through the rest
of Moretti's menu, amazing him more and more by the spontaneity,
sophistication, and charm of her wit. He escorted her home, and then
stood under a lamp-post for three minutes removing the soup stain with
a handkerchief. “She's immense!” he said to himself. “Why she's--she's
a poem by William Butler Yeats!” As an afterthought, he made a mental
memorandum to visit the library and look up the work of Walter Mason.
A few days later Mr. Arundel sent for Lester, who hurried to the private
office with visions of a raise in salary. The president was sitting at
his desk turning over some papers; he motioned Lester to a chair and
seemed curiously loath to begin conversation. At last he turned, saying:
“Mr. Valiant, your life at Oxford did a great deal to mitigate your
literary sensibilities?” Lester hardly knew what to say, and murmured
some meaningless syllables.
“I think that your abilities can be of very great service to us,”
continued Mr. Arundel, “and as an evidence of that I am asking the
cashier to raise your salary five dollars a week.”
Lester bowed gently; he was not capable of articulate speech.
“I want to ask you a rather delicate question,” pursued the president,
who seemed as much embarrassed as his visitor. “Do you ever write
poetry?”
Lester's voice was amazingly hoarse and choky, but in a spasm of
puzzlement and gratification he ejaculated: “Sometimes!”
“What I really mean,” said Mr. Arundel, “is this: do you ever write
verses of a sentimental nature--hum--what might be called endearments?”
The young man sat speechless in surprise and embarrassment. As a matter
of fact, he had been trolling some amatory staves in secret, in honour
of Miss Denver; and he imagined they had come in some way under his
employer's eye.
“Please do not be alarmed,” said Mr. Arundel, seeing his discomfiture.
“This is purely a matter of business. As it happens, I have a need for
some poems of an intimately sentimental character, and, being totally
unfitted to produce them myself, I wondered if you would sell me some? I
would be glad to pay market rates for them.”
Still Lester could do no more than bow.
“I shall have to be frank,” said Mr. Arundel, “and I must beg you to
keep this matter absolutely confidential. I have your word of honour in
that regard?”
“Absolutely,” said Lester, quite vanquished by amazement.
The president's sense of humour seemed to have mastered his diffidence.
A quaint smile lurked behind the furrows that years of royalties had
carved on his face.
“I want to do some wooing in rhyme; and I want you to turn out some
verses for me of a superlatively lyric sort, it being understood that I
purchase all rights in these poems, including that of authorship. Would
you be willing to do me half a dozen, at say ten dollars each?”
Lester, although staggered by the proposal, was still able to multiply
six by ten, and his answer was affirmative and speedy.
“I do not wish to give you any specifications as to the object of your
vicarious amour,” said the president. “It is a lady, of course; young
and fair. How soon can you despoil the English language of half a dozen
songs of passion worthy of the best Oxford traditions?”
Jack and Harry found Lester good company that evening. When they got
back to the sitting room on Madison Avenue he was lying on a couch,
nursing a large calabash and contemplating the ceiling with dreamy brow.
As they entered, stripping off their overcoats and chucking the night
extras across the room at him, he smiled the rich, tolerant smile of
Alexander at the Macedon polo grounds.
“Well, Lester,” said Jack, “why the Cheshire-cat grin?”
“I've sold sixty dollars' worth of verse,” said Lester, benignly; “also
I've had a raise.”
“My God!” said Harry. “Think how many starving cubists you could endow
on that! There'll be a riot in Greenwich Village.”
“Pity the poor bartenders on a night like this!” cried Jack. Then they
went to Browne's chop-house for dinner. After a three-finger steak and
several beakers of dog's nose, Lester was readily persuaded to enounce
the first number of his sonnet sequence, which had accreted or (as its
author expressed it) nucleolated, while he was walking home from the
office.
“Sonnet, in the Petrarchan mode, item No. 1,” he proclaimed:
Upon a trellis, bending toward the south,