How different the little room in the Planet office looked to Ann
when she returned, with a sick heart, to her work the next morning.
Everything was just the same--the geranium on its windowledge, that
seemed to survive both the eddying hot air from the steampipes beneath
it and the daily douche of iced drinking water; the noisily ticking
inaccurate little clock; the dusty typewriter. All were the same, and
there was the pile of morning letters from Love's battered henchmen.
To office boy and casual reporter Ann herself seemed the usual cheerful
charmer with her crisp little white collar and dark, alluring hair.
Her swift, capable hands sped over the pile of letters, slitting the
envelopes and sorting the outcries into some classification of her own.
Outwardly nothing had altered, but everything seemed to have lost its
meaning. What a desolate emptiness gaped beneath the firm routine of her
daily life. She was struck by the irony of the fact that the only one
in the office who seemed to notice that something was amiss was the
one person whom she disliked--Mr. Sikes. He came in about something or
other, and then stayed, looking at her intently.
“You look sick,” he said. “What's the matter, is the love feast getting
on your nerves?”
With a queer twitching at the corners of her mouth, she forced herself
to say some trifling remark. He leaned over her and put his hand on
hers. She caught the strong cigarry whiff of his clothes, which sickened
her.
“Too much love in the abstract,” he said, insinuatingly. “What you need
is a little love in the concrete.”
If he--or any one--had spoken tenderly to her, she would have burst into
tears. But the boorishness of his words was just the tonic she needed.
She looked at him with flashing eyes, and was about to say: “Keep to
some topic you understand.” Then she dared not say it, for now she could
not run the risk of losing her job. She faced him steadily, in angry
silence. He left the room, and the little green-tarnished mirror under
the pigeonholes saw tears for the first time.
The irony of her position moved her cruelly when she began her task of
dealing with the correspondents. Here she was, giving helpful, cheery
advice, posing as all-wise in these matters, when her own love affair
had come so miserably to grief. In the ill-written scrawls on scented
and scalloped paper she could hear an echo of her own suffering.
“Hopeless” and “Uncertain” and “Miss Eighteen” got very tender
replies that day. And how she laid the lash upon “Beau Brummel” and
“Disillusioned,” those self-assured young men, who had chosen that mail
to contribute their views on the flirtatious and unreliable qualities of
modern girls.
The bitterness of her paradoxical task became dulled as the days went
on, but there were other troubles, too, to bother her. Her mother,
quick and querulous to detect unhappiness, fell into one of her nervous
spells, and the doctor had to be called in again. The woman-by-the-day
got blood-poisoning in her arm, and could not come. The landlord gave
notice of a coming raise in rent. A fat letter came from Arthur, and in
a flush of passion she destroyed it unread. If it hadn't been such a fat
letter, she said to herself, it wouldn't have annoyed her so to see it.
But she wasn't going to wade through pages of explanation of just what
he had meant. She was still cut to the quick when she remembered the
cavalier and easy way in which he had scoffed at her work. And then, as
time went by, she found herself moving into a new mood--no longer one of
exaggerated tenderness toward her clients, but a feeling almost cynical.
“They're all fools, just as I am,” she said.
One morning she found on her desk a note from the managing editor:
_Dear Miss Cupid:_
_We've made some changes in our budget, and I've been authorized to
fatten your envelope $15 a week. I'm glad to do this, because the
Lovelorn stuff is going big. Just keep kidding them along and everything
will be fine. Maybe some day we can syndicate it. Hope this will cheer
you up, don't look so blue at your friends._
_Sikes._
There had been a time when the tone and phrasing of this note might
have seemed offensive, but in the numbness of despondency Ann had felt
lately, it was a fine burst of rosy warmth. Thank God, she said to
herself, something has broken my way at last! She wondered if she had
been mistaken in Sikes, after all? Perhaps he was really a friend of
hers, and she had misunderstood his odd ways.
That day at noon she went down to the cashier's department to cash
a small check. There was no one in the cage, but in the adjoining
compartment, behind a wall of filing cases, she could hear two girls
talking. One of them said:
“I see Sikes has put through a raise for Lovelorn. Pretty soft for her,
hey?”
“She'll have to give value received, I guess,” said the other. “Sikes
figures if he puts that over for her, she'll fall for him. She's been
stalling him for quite a while, but I suppose he's got her fixed now.”
She fled, aghast, ran down to another floor so as not to be seen, and
took the elevator. Out on the street she walked mechanically along Park
Row and found herself opposite St. Paul's. She wandered in and sat down
on a bench. It was a chilly day, and the churchyard was nearly empty.
So this was Sikes's friendliness; and she, utterly innocent even in
thought, was already the subject of vulgar office gossip. For the first
time there broke in upon her, with bitter force, the knowledge that no
matter how easy it may be to counsel others, few of us are wise in our
own affairs.
Pitiable paradox: she, the “sympathetic adviser in matters of the
heart,” had made shipwreck of her own happiness. How right Arthur had
been, and how childish and mad she, to reject his just instinct. It was
true: she had made use of Love for mere newspaper circulation; and now
Love had died between her hands. Well, this was the end. No matter what
happened, she could not go on with the job. Cold and trembling with
nervousness, she returned to her desk, to finish her column for the next
day.
On her typewriter lay some letters, which had come in while she was out.
She opened one, and read.
_Dear Cynthia:_
_I am in great trouble, please help me. I am in love with a fellow
and know he is all right and we would be very happy together. We were
engaged to be married, and everything was lovely. But he objected to the
work I was doing, said it was not a good job for a girl and that I ought
to give it up. I knew he was right, but the way he said it made me mad.
I guess I am hot-tempered and stubborn--anyway, I told him to mind his
own business, and he went away. Now I am heart-broken, because I love
him and I know he loves me. Tell me what to do._
_Jessie._
Ann sat looking at the cheap blue paper with the initial J gaudily
embossed upon it in gilt. In the sprawling lines of unlettered
handwriting she saw an exact parallel to her own unhappy rupture with
Arthur. How much more clearly we can see the answer in others' tangles
than in our own! Jessie, with her pathetic pretentious gilt initial,
knew that she had been in the wrong, and was brave enough to want to
make amends. And she--had she not been less true to Love than Jessie?
Her false pride and obstinacy had brought their own punishment. Seeing
the situation through Jessie's eyes, she could read her duty plain.
Arthur, no doubt, was through with her forever, but she must play the
game no less.
She put Jessie's letter at the head of the Lovelorn column for the next
day. Under it she wrote:
_Certainly, dear Jessie, if you feel you were in the wrong, you ought
to take the first step toward making up. Probably he was tactless in
criticizing you, but I am sure he only did it because he had your true
interest at heart. So write him a nice letter and be happy together.
Your friend Cynthia hopes it will all come out all right, because she
has seen other cases like this where false pride caused great suffering.
If he is the right man, he will love you all the more after he gets your
letter._
Ann sent up her copy to the composing room, and then going to a
telephone booth she called up Fawcett and Company and asked for Mr.
Caldwell.
“Mr. Caldwell's not here any longer,” said the girl.
“Serves me right,” said Ann to herself. “Can you tell me where I can
find him?” she asked, wondering how it was that one so miserable could
still speak in such a pleasant and apparently unconcerned tone of voice.
The Fawcett operator switched her to another wire.
“I'm sorry,” said a stenographer, “Mr. Fawcett left here about two weeks
ago. He's got a job out of town--in Boston, I think. I can find out for
you in the morning if you'll call again.”
“Never mind,” said Ann.
She had a horror of facing Mr. Sikes in her present wretchedness, so
before she went home she wrote him a note, resigning her job, and asking
permission to leave as soon as possible.
The next day she had to nerve herself to face his protests, and the
friendly remarks of all the staff when the news spread. It was a hideous
ordeal, but she managed to get through it smiling. But by evening
she was inwardly a wreck. In her present mood, she had an instinctive
longing to revisit the shabby little restaurant where she and
Arthur had spent so many happy hours. She knew it would give her pain;
but she felt that pain was what she needed--sharp, clean, insistent
pain to ease the oppression and disgust of what she had been through.
Remorse, she felt, is surgical in action: it cuts away foul tissues
of the mind. She could not, without preparatory discipline, face her
mother's outcry at hearing she had given up her job.
V
In the crisp blue evening air the bright front of Piazza's café shone
with a warm and generous lustre. From sheer force of habit, her heart
lightened a little as she climbed the stairs and entered the familiar
place, where festoons of red and green paper decoration criss-crossed
above the warm, soup-flavoured, tobacco-fogged room. There was a clatter
of thick dishes and a clamour of talk.
“One?” said the head waiter, his wiry black hair standing erect as
though in surprise.
She nodded, and followed him down the narrow aisle. There was the little
table, in the corner under the stair, where they had always sat. A
man was there, reading a newspaper.... Her heart felt very strange, as
though it had dropped a long way below its usual place. It was
Arthur, and he was smiling at her as though nothing had happened. He was
getting up. . . he was shaking hands with her. . . how natural it all
seemed!
Like all really great crises, it was over in a flash. She found herself
sitting at the little table, taking off her gloves in the most casual
fashion. Arthur was whispering outrageous things. How fine it is that
everybody talks so loud in Italian table d'hôtes, and the waiters crash
the dishes round so recklessly!
Arthur's talk seemed to be in two different keys, partly for the benefit
of old Tonio, the waiter, and partly for her alone.
“Well, here you are! I wondered how soon you'd get here.... _Have
you forgiven me, dearest?_. . . Do you want some minestrone?. . . _Why
didn't you answer my letters, brownest eyes?_ . . . Yes, and some of the
near-beer.. . . _Darling, it was all my fault. I wrote to tell you so.
Didn't you get my letter?_”
After all, at such times there isn't much explaining done, A happy
reconciliation is the magic of a moment, and no explanations are
necessary. The trouble just drops away, and life begins again from the
last kind thing that was said. All Ann could do was whisper:
“No, Arthur--it was I who was wrong. I--I've given up the Lovelorn.”
And then, after a sudden moisture of eye on both sides, the steaming
minestrone came on in its battered leaden tureen from which the silver
plating disappeared long ago, and under pretense of serving her soup
Arthur stretched out his hand. She put out hers to meet it, and found
the ring slipped deftly back on her finger.
“But, Arthur,” she said, presently, “I thought you were out of town.”
“I was,” he said. “I've got a new job, with King and Company in Boston.
A good job, too, we can be married right away, and you don't need to
worry.”
“Well, how did you happen to come here tonight? You didn't know I was
going to be here. I didn't know it myself until an hour or so ago.”
“Perhaps I willed you to come, who knows?” he said, gaily. “Have you
been advising lovers all this while, and didn't know that they always
haunt the scenes of former felicity? I've been in town several days, and
came here every night.”
He produced a copy of the _Evening Planet_ which he had been reading
when she came in.
“I had a special reason for thinking you might come here to-night,” he
said. “This afternoon I read your column, and I saw Jessie's letter
and your answer. What you said made me think that perhaps you might be
willing to forgive me.” Ann, once more safely enthroned on the shining
glory of her happiness, felt that she could afford to tease him just a
little.
“Ah,” she said, “so you admit that some of those letters people write me
_are_ genuine, and that the answers do some good?”
He smiled at her and laid his hand over the ring, which outglittered
even the most newly nickeled of Piazza's cutlery.
“Yes, honey,” he said. “I admit it. And I knew that Jessie's letter was
genuine, because I wrote it myself.”