He interrupted again. I had never been interrupted when I was in the
convent. There the girls hung on my words with suspended breath.
"'S all right, then," Mr. Hurd said. "Here's your story. Go and see
half a dozen of our biggest millionaires in Wall Street--Drake,
Carter, Hayden--you know the list. Tell 'em you're a stranger in town,
come to study music or painting. Got a little money to see you
through--'nough for a year. Ask 'em what to do with it--how to invest
it--and write what happens. Good story, eh?" He turned to Morris for
approval, and all his dimples showed, making him look like a
six-months-old baby. He immediately regretted this moment of weakness
and frowned at me.
"'S all," he said; and I went away.
I will now pause for a moment to describe an interesting phenomenon
that ran through my whole journalistic career. I always went into an
editor's room to take an assignment with perfect confidence, and I
usually came out of it in black despair. The confidence was caused by
the memory that I had got my past stories; the despair was caused by
the conviction that I could not possibly get the present one. Each
assignment Mr. Hurd had given me during the week seemed not only
harder than the last, but less worthy the dignity of a general's
daughter. Besides, a new and terrible thing was happening to me. I was
becoming afraid--not of work, but of men. I never had been afraid of
anything before. From the time we were laid in our cradles my father
taught my brother Jack and me not to be afraid. The worst of my fear
now was that I didn't know exactly why I felt it, and there was no one
I could go to and ask about it. All the men I met seemed to be divided
into two classes. In the first class were those who were not kind at
all--men like Mr. Hurd, who treated me as if I were a machine, and
ignored me altogether or looked over my head or past the side of my
face when they spoke to me. They seemed rude at first, and I did not
like them; but I liked them better and better as time went on. In the
second class were the men who were too kind--who sprawled over my desk
and wasted my time and grinned at me and said things I didn't
understand and wanted to take me to Coney Island. Most of them were
merely silly, but two or three of them were horrible. When they came
near me they made me feel queer and sick. After they had left I wanted
to throw open all the doors and windows and air the room. There was
one I used to dream of when I was overworked, which was usually. He
was always a snake in the dream--a fat, disgusting, lazy snake, slowly
squirming over the ground near me, with his bulging green eyes on my
face. There were times when I was afraid to go to sleep for fear of
dreaming of that snake; and when during the day he came into the room
and over to my desk I would hardly have been surprised to see him
crawl instead of walk. Indeed, his walk was a kind of crawl.
Mr. Gibson, Hurd's star reporter, whose desk was next to mine, spoke
to me about him one day, and his grin was not as wide as usual.
"Is Yawkins annoying you?" he asked. "I've seen you actually shudder
when he came to your desk. If the cad had any sense he'd see it, too.
Has he said anything? Done anything?"
I said he hadn't, exactly, but that I felt a strange feeling of horror
every time he came near me; and Gibson raised his eyebrows and said he
guessed he knew why, and that he would attend to it. He must have
attended to it, for Yawkins stopped coming to my desk, and after a few
months he was discharged for letting himself be "thrown down" on a big
story, and I never saw him again. But at the time Mr. Hurd gave me
his Wall Street assignment I was beginning to be horribly afraid to
approach strangers, which is no way for a reporter to feel; and when I
had to meet strange men I always found myself wondering whether they
would be the Hurd type or the Yawkins type. I hardly dared to hope
they would be like Mr. Gibson, who was like the men at home--kind and
casual and friendly; but of course some of them were.
Once Mrs. Hoppen, a woman reporter on the _Searchlight_, came and
spoke to me about them. She was forty and slender and black-eyed, and
her work was as clever as any man's, but it seemed to have made her
very hard. She seemed to believe in no one. She made me feel as if she
had dived so deep in life that she had come out into a place where
there wasn't anything. She came to me one day when Yawkins was coiled
over my desk. He crawled away as soon as he saw her, for he hated her.
After he went she stood looking down at me and hesitating. It was not
like her to hesitate about anything.
"Look here," she said at last; "I earn a good income by attending to
my own business, and I usually let other people's business alone.
Besides, I'm not cut out for a Star of Bethlehem. But I just want to
tell you not to worry about that kind of thing." She looked after
Yawkins, who had crawled through the door.
I tried to say that I wasn't worrying, but I couldn't, for it wasn't
true. And someway, though I didn't know why, I couldn't talk to her
about it. She didn't wait for me, however, but went right on.
"You're very young," she said, "and a long way from home. You haven't
been in New York long enough to make influential friends or create a
background for yourself; so you seem fair game, and the wolves are on
the trail. But you can be sure of one thing--they'll never get you; so
don't worry."
I thanked her, and she patted my shoulder and went away. I wasn't sure
just what she meant, but I knew she had tried to be kind.
The day I started down to Wall Street to see the multimillionaires I
was very thoughtful. I didn't know then, as I did later, how guarded
they were in their offices, and how hard it was for a stranger to get
near them. What I simply hated was having them look at me and grin at
me, and seeing them under false pretenses and having to tell them
lies. I knew Sister Irmingarde would not have approved of it--but
there were so many things in newspaper work that Sister Irmingarde
wouldn't approve of. I was beginning to wonder if there was anything
at all she would approve; and later, of course, I found there was. But
I discovered many, many other things long before that.
I went to Mr. Drake's office first. He was the one Mr. Hurd had
mentioned first, and while I was at school I had heard about him and
read that he was very old and very kind and very pious. I thought
perhaps he would be kind enough to see a strange girl for a few
minutes and give her some advice, even if his time was worth a
thousand dollars a minute, as they said it was. So I went straight to
his office and asked for him, and gave my card to a buttoned boy who
seemed strangely loath to take it. He was perfectly sure Mr. Drake
hadn't time to see me, and he wanted the whole story of my life before
he gave the card to any one; but I was not yet afraid of office boys,
and he finally took the card and went away with dragging steps.
Then my card began to circulate like a love story among the girls at
St. Catharine's. Men in little cages and at mahogany desks read it,
and stared at me and passed it on to other men. Finally it disappeared
in an inner room, and a young man came out holding it in his hand and
spoke to me in a very cold and direct manner. The card had my real
name on it, but no address or newspaper, and it didn't mean anything
at all to the direct young man. He wanted to know who I was and what I
wanted of Mr. Drake, and I told him what Mr. Hurd had told me to say.
The young man hesitated. Then he smiled, and at last he said he would
see what he could do and walked away. In five or six minutes he came
back again, still smiling, but in a pleasanter and more friendly
manner, and said Mr. Drake would see me if I could wait half an hour.
I thanked him and settled back in my seat to wait. It was a very
comfortable seat--a deep, leather-covered chair with big wide arms,
and there was enough going on around me to keep me interested. All
sorts of men came and went while I sat there; young men and old men,
and happy men and wretched men, and prosperous men and poor men; but
there was one thing in which they were all alike. Every man was in a
hurry, and every man had in his eyes the set, eager look my brother
Jack's eyes hold when he is running a college race and sees the goal
ahead of him. A few of them glanced at me, but none seemed interested
or surprised to see me there. Probably they thought, if they thought
of it at all, that I was a stenographer trying to get a situation.
The half-hour passed, and then another half-hour, and at last the
direct young man came out again. He did not apologize for keeping me
waiting twice as long as he had said it would be.
"Mr. Drake will see you now," he said.
I followed him through several offices full of clerks and typewriters,
and then into an office where a little old man sat alone. It was a
very large office, with old rugs on the floor, and heavy curtains and
beautiful furniture, and the little old man seemed almost lost in it.
He was a very thin old man, and he sat at a great mahogany desk facing
the door. The light in his office came from windows behind and beside
him, but it fell on my face, as I sat opposite him, and left his in
shadow. I could see, though, that his hair was very white, and that
his face was like an oval billiard-ball, the thin skin of it drawn
tightly over bones that showed. He might have been fifty years old or
a hundred--I didn't know which--but he was dressed very carefully in
gray clothes almost as light in color as his face and hair, and he
wore a gray tie with a star-sapphire pin in it. That pale-blue stone,
and the pale blue of his eyes, which had the same sort of odd, moving
light in them the sapphire had, were the only colors about him. He sat
back, very much at his ease, his small figure deep in his great
swivel-chair, the finger-tips of both hands close together, and stared
at me with his pale-blue eyes that showed their queer sparks under his
white eyebrows.
"Well, young woman," he said, "what can I do for you?"
And then I knew how old he was, for in the cracked tones of his voice
the clock of time seemed to be striking eighty. It made me feel
comfortable and almost happy to know that he was so old. I wasn't
afraid of him any more. I poured out my little story, which I had
rehearsed with his clerk, and he listened without a word, never taking
his narrow blue eyes from my face. When I stopped he asked me what
instrument I was studying, and I told him the piano, which was true
enough, for I was still keeping up the music I had worked on so hard
with Sister Cecilia ever since I was eight years old. He asked me what
music I liked best, and when I told him my favorite composers were
Beethoven and Debussy he smiled and murmured that it was a strange
combination. It was, too, and well I knew it. Sister Cecilia said
once that it made her understand why I wanted to be both a nun and a
newspaper woman.
In a few minutes I was talking to Mr. Drake as easily as I could talk
to George Morgan or to my father. He asked who my teachers had been,
and I told him all about the convent and my years of study there, and
how much better Janet Trelawney played than I did, and how severe
Sister Cecilia was with us both, and how much I liked church music. I
was so glad to be telling him the truth that I told him a great deal
more than I needed to. I told him almost everything there was to tell,
except that I was a newspaper reporter. I remembered not to tell him
that.
He seemed to like to hear about school and the girls. Several times he
laughed, but very kindly, and _with_ me, you know, not _at_ me. Once
he said it had been a long time since any young girl had told him
about her school pranks, but he did not sigh over it or look
sentimental, as a man would in a book. He merely mentioned it. We
talked and talked. Twice the direct young secretary opened the door
and put his head in; but each time he took it out again because nobody
seemed to want it to stay there. At last I remembered that Mr. Drake
was a busy man, and that his time was worth a thousand dollars a
minute, and that I had taken about forty thousand dollars' worth of it
already, so I gasped and apologized and got up. I said I had forgotten
all about time; and he said he had, too, and that I must sit down
again because we hadn't even touched upon our business talk.
So I sat down again, and he looked at me more closely than ever, as if
he had noticed how hot and red my face had suddenly got and couldn't
understand why it looked that way. Of course he couldn't, either; for
I had just remembered that, though I had been a reporter for a whole
week, I had forgotten my assignment! It seemed as if I would never
learn to be a real newspaper woman. My heart went way down, and I
suppose the corners of my mouth did, too; they usually went down at
the same time. He asked very kindly what was the matter, and the tone
of his voice was beautiful--old and friendly and understanding. I said
it was because I was so silly and stupid and young and unbusiness-like.
He started to say something and stopped, then sat up and began to talk
in a very business-like way. He asked where my money was, and I told
him the name of the bank. He looked at his watch and frowned. I didn't
know why; but I thought perhaps it was because he wanted me to take it
out of there right away and it was too late. It was almost four
o'clock. Then he put the tips of his fingers together again, and
talked to me the way the cashier at the bank had talked when I put my
money in.
He said that the savings-bank was a good place for a girl's
money--under ordinary conditions it was the best place. The interest
would be small, but sure. Certain investments would, of course, bring
higher interest, but no woman should try to invest her money unless
she had business training or a very wise, experienced adviser back of
her. Then he stopped for a minute, and it seemed hard for him to go
on. I did not speak, for I saw that he was thinking something over,
and of course I knew better than to interrupt him. At last he said
that ordinarily, of course, he never paid any attention to small
accounts, but that he liked me very much and wanted to help me and
that, if I wished, he would invest my money for me in a way that would
bring in a great deal more interest than the savings-bank would pay.
And he asked if I understood what he meant.
I said I did--that he was offering to take entirely too much trouble
for a stranger, and that he was just as kind as he could be, but that
I couldn't think of letting him do it, and I was sure papa wouldn't
want me to. He seemed annoyed all of a sudden, and his manner changed.
He asked why I had come if I felt that way, and I began to see how
silly it looked to him, for of course he didn't know I was a reporter
getting a story on investments for women. I didn't know what to say or
what to do about the money, either, for Mr. Hurd hadn't told me how to
meet any offer of that kind.
While I was thinking and hesitating Mr. Drake sat still and looked at
me queerly; the blue sparks in his eyes actually seemed to shoot out
at me. They frightened me a little; and, without stopping to think
any more, I said I was very grateful to him and that I would bring the
money to his office the next day. Then I stood up and he stood up,
too; and I gave him my hand and told him he was the kindest man I had
met in New York--and the next minute I was gasping and struggling and
pushing him away with all my strength, and he stumbled and went
backward into his big chair, knocking over an inkstand full of ink,
which crawled to the edge of his desk in little black streams and fell
on his gray clothes.
For a minute he sat staring straight ahead of him and let them fall.
Then he brushed his hand across his head and picked up the inkstand
and soaked up the ink with a blotter, and finally turned and looked at
me. I stared back at him as if I were in a nightmare. I was opposite
him and against the wall, with my back to it, and for a moment I
couldn't move. But now I began to creep toward the door, with my eyes
on him. I felt some way that I dared not take them off. As I moved he
got up; he was much nearer the door than I was, and, though I sprang
for it, he reached it first and stood there quietly, holding the knob
in his hand. Neither of us had uttered a sound; but now he spoke, and
his voice was very low and steady.
"Wait a minute," he said. "I want to tell you something you need to
know. Then you may go." And he added, grimly, "Straighten your hat!"
I put up my hands and straightened it. Still I did not take my eyes
off his. His eyes seemed like those of Yawkins and the great snake in
my dreams, but as I looked into them they fell.
"For God's sake, child," he said, irritably, "don't look at me as if I
were an anaconda! Don't you know it was all a trick?" He came up
closer to me and gave me his next words eye to eye and very slowly, as
if to force me to listen and believe.
"I did that, Miss Iverson," he said, "to show you what happens to
beautiful girls in New York when they go into men's offices asking for
advice about money. Some one had to do it. I thought the lesson might
come better from me than from a younger man."
His words came to me from some place far away. A bit of my bit of
Greek came, too--something about Homeric laughter. Then next instant I
went to pieces and crumpled up in the big chair, and when he tried to
help me I wouldn't let him come near me. But little by little, when I
could speak, I told him what I thought of him and men like him, and of
what I had gone through since I came to New York, and of how he had
made me feel degraded and unclean for ever. At first he listened
without a word; then he began to ask a few questions.
"So you don't believe me," he said once. "That's too bad. I ought to
have thought of that."
He even wrung from me at last the thing that was worst of all--the
thing I had not dared to tell Mrs. Hoppen--the thing I had sworn to
myself no one should ever know--the deep-down, paralyzing fear that
there must be something wrong in me that brought these things upon me,
that perhaps I, too, was to blame. That seemed to stir him in a queer
fashion. He put out his hand as if to push the idea away.
"No," he said, emphatically. "No, _no_! Never think that." He went on
more quietly. "That's not it. It's only that you're a lamb among the
wolves."
He seemed to forget me, then to remember me again. "But remember this,
child," he went on. "Some men are bad clear through; some are only
half bad. Some aren't wolves at all; they'll help to keep you from the
others. Don't you get to thinking that every mother's son runs in the
pack; and don't forget that it's mighty hard for any of us to believe
that you're as unsophisticated as you seem. You'll learn how to handle
wolves. That's a woman's primer lesson in life. And in the mean time
here's something to comfort you: Though you don't know it, you have a
talisman. You've got something in your eyes that will never let them
come too close. Now good-by."
It was six o'clock when I got back to the _Searchlight_ office. I had
gone down to the Battery to let the clean sea-air sweep over me. I had
dropped into a little chapel, too, and when I came out the world had
righted itself again and I could look my fellow human beings in the
eyes. Even Mr. Drake had said my experience was not my fault and that
I had a talisman. I knew now what the talisman was.
Mr. Hurd, still bunched over his desk, was drinking a bottle of
ginger-ale and eating a sandwich when I entered. Morris, at his desk,
was editing copy. The outer pen, where the rest of us sat, was
deserted by every one except Gibson, who was so busy that he did not
look up.
"Got your story?" asked Hurd, looking straight at me for the third
time since I had taken my place on his staff. He spoke with his mouth
full. "Hello," he added. "What's the matter with your eyes?"
I sat down by his desk and told him. The sandwich dropped from his
fingers. His young-old, dimpled face turned white with anger. He
waited without a word until I had finished.
"By God, I'll make him sweat for that!" he hissed. "I'll show him up!
The old hypocrite! The whited sepulcher! I'll make this town ring with
that story. I'll make it too hot to hold him!"
Morris got up, crossed to us, and stood beside him, looking down at
him. The bunches on his jaw-bones were very large.
"What's the use of talking like that, Hurd?" he asked, quietly. "You
know perfectly well you won't print that story. You don't dare. And
you know that you're as much to blame as Drake is for what's happened.
When you sent Miss Iverson out on that assignment you knew just what
was coming to her."
Hurd's face went purple. "I didn't," he protested, furiously. "I swear
I didn't. I thought she'd be able to get to them because she's so
pretty. But that's as far as my mind worked on it." He turned to me.
"You believe me, don't you?" he asked, gently. "Please say you do."