and his eyes were so bright and deep. She stared into them and,
somehow, lost herself--the eyes turned to bright points in space, and
Time seemed to stop, with a sort of whir like a clock that runs down...
"There, there!" his voice came roughly. "None of that, my girl, none
of that! You _are_ in a nice state! Now, you march off on a vacation,
and take it on a boat of some sort--do you hear? And, listen to me--if
I find a nice woman to go with you----"
"Oh!" she interrupted mockingly, "the famous Miss Jessop! Now I _know_
you think I'm pretty bad! You forget, doctor, that I've interviewed
Miss Jessop--or tried to."
"That's better," he retorted grimly. "You hadn't much of a success,
had you, missy? And would you like to know what the famous Miss Jessop
said about you?"
"Me?"
"Yes, you. There are two sides to every interview, you know. She
said, 'If you don't see Miss Molly Dickett in your office before a
year, doctor, I miss my guess. She's a neurasthenic for you, all
right.' So what do you think of that, eh?"
"I think she was impertinent," said Molly, weakly, "and you can tell
her so."
"Bosh. Now go and lie down," he commanded shortly, and the interview
closed.
A vacation seemed a simple remedy, and she started out, bent on one,
with the kindest orders to make it long, accompanied by large credit;
but the promised renewal of vitality did not come, and the taste seemed
gone from everything. The quaint and tiny little fishing hamlet she
had fixed upon as a good place for gathering "material" by the way,
proved all and more than she had been led to hope for, and when the
greatest north-easter that had blown for fifty years bruised and tore
the rugged little coast, she "wrote it up" as a matter of course--as a
bird-dog points or a carrier pigeon wheels for home. And then Molly
Dickett received what was literally her first setback in ten years: the
City Editor sent her copy back to her!
"You're too tired, my dear girl," he wrote. "Why not wait a bit? Or
pad this out and point it up a little in the middle and send it to one
of the magazines. Peterson covered it for us, anyway, at
Kennebunkport. The cubs send you an officeful of affection, and we are
all yours truly."
But the "cubs" never hung over her desk again, for Molly never returned
to it.
"You see," as she explained to them gently, "I lost my nerve--that's
all. If I hadn't sent the stuff, it would have been all right, later,
I suppose. But I did send it, and I thought it was O.K., and if it was
as rotten as you said, why, how could I ever tell, again? Anyway, I'm
tired."
They protested, but the City Editor shook his head.
"Let her alone," he said shortly. "It's straight enough. I've seen it
happen before. She's gone too far without a check: I don't believe
women can stand it. Let her alone."
And when the most talented of the cubs went next to interview Mrs.
Julia Carter Sykes as to her recently dramatized novel, he was referred
to her secretary--and it was Molly.
"For heaven's sake!" he said angrily. "Are you insane? Wasn't it true
that Slater offered----"
"Oh, yes," said Molly negligently, "but I'm tired of offices."
"I suppose you get time for writing your own stuff--on the side?" he
suggested awkwardly, but Molly shook her head.
"Writing seems bad for the back of the neck," she said, with a grey
flash out of the tail of her eye for the cub.
"We're getting ready for the sanitarium this morning--sun-baths and
Swedish Movement Cure and grape diet. Of course you won't mention it,"
she said. "She can't possibly see you--I do all the interviews
now--but if you come around to-morrow, after I get the house closed,
I'll give you a good one."
A solemn butler entered.
"If you will be so kind as to cast your eye over the table for the
ladies' luncheon, Miss Dickett?" he said weightily.
"There's two orchids short and no time for getting more. And the salt
got into the mousse, I'm told by the cook--she wished to know if you
could suggest anything. And one of the ladies has been detained and
cannot come--by telephone message. Will you take her place, Miss
Dickett?"
"Yes," said Molly. "Tell Mrs. Carter not to worry about the orchids,
Halsey; I'll arrange something. I must go and dress, now--come
to-morrow," she added hastily.
"By George!" the cub gasped, and left, to electrify the office later.
"It's a darned shame," he ended, and the other cubs nodded sagely over
their pipes.
"With her talent, too!" they said...
You will have understood, of course, why Eleanor dropped Molly after
the unfortunate Greek dancer, but you may be surprised to learn of
Kathryn's attitude when she learned of the secretaryship. It wasn't
dignified, she said, and she was greatly disappointed in Molly.
Kathryn was Dean of Women, now, in a co-educational college in the
middle west, and was spoken of as Dean Dickett in the college journal.
Of all her children Mrs. Dickett was proudest of Kathryn, because Molly
frightened her and Eleanor patronized her. Eleanor was getting up in
the world a little too fast for her mother, nowadays, and knew people
Mrs. Dickett would never have dreamed of meeting in the old
days--people that she had grown used to the idea of never meeting, even
now that Mr. Dickett was in the Firm. Eleanor's little girl went to
school with all the little girls on the Hill and was asked to attend
their parties. Her name was Penelope, after George's mother, who had
never expected it--the name being so old-fashioned--and was
correspondingly delighted and had given her much jewelry already.
Eleanor, in so far as she mentioned Molly at all, had expressed her
opinion that to live with Mrs. Julia Carter Sykes was the most
respectable thing Molly had yet done, and added that there were
exceptional opportunities in more ways than one for the woman who held
that position--would perhaps even have called on her there, but Molly
never asked her to. Kathryn, to her parents' surprise, developed a
stodgy but unblinking antagonism to her sister, for what she called
Molly's lowering of her sense of what was due to herself, and said
coldly that she had no doubt her sister's life was easier now, but that
it was un-American.
Un-American it may have been, but easier it assuredly was not. Unlike
the factory-girls and clerks for whose benefit Mrs. Julia Carter Sykes
gave readings from her unpublished works, Molly's hours were not
limited, and her responsibility grew as her executive ability became
increasingly manifest. The thousands of women to whom the celebrity's
manifold occupations, publicities, hospitalities and charities were an
endless wonder and discussion might have marvelled less had they been
able to follow Molly's crowded days and nights and peep through the
littered desk and scribbled calendar of her study.
To amusement and interest, succeeded fatigue and interest, and to
these, fatigue alone. Each hurried, various day became a space of time
to be got through, merely, and Mrs. Julia Carter Sykes's heavy sigh as
she curled into her wicker-inset Circassian-walnut bed was no more
heartfelt than her secretary's. If Molly had ever envied Mrs. Julia,
she had long ceased to, and indeed, on that final afternoon when she
laid her dark, braided head on her arms and cried on her desk, she felt
as sorry for the authoress as for herself.
Mr. Julia Carter Sykes (as many of his friends called him) sat opposite
her, biting his nails. He was well dressed, fond of auction-bridge,
and travelled abroad in the interests of some vaguely comprehended firm.
"This will just about kill the madam," he said despondently.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Sykes, but I really must--I must," Molly gulped.
"It isn't money, is it?" he asked. "Because though I'm not a popular
authoress or anything like that, I could----"
"Oh, goodness, no!" said Molly. "It's not money at all. Only I must
get away."
"We've never got on so well with any of the others," he went on
jerkily, "and she's certainly awfully fond of you--the madam is. She's
taken you everywhere, I know, and all the dinners, and the car whenever
you----"
"Mrs. Sykes has been very kind," Molly broke in dully, "but--oh, it's
no use, Mr. Sykes. It's got to be done, and putting it off only makes
her worse. So I'm going to-morrow. She'll feel better about it later."
"I hope so, I'm sure," Mr. Sykes responded doubtfully. "She was pretty
bad when I left her. That brain of hers, you know--it's a great
strain, they tell me. Hard on us all, in a way."
Molly always smiled and sighed when she remembered him and the hunched
shoulders that leaned drearily over the tonneau.
"Where'll I tell him?" he asked, and she drew tighter the tight line
between her brows, sighed, tried to speak, and found her mind quite
utterly a blank.
"Where'll I tell him?" Mr. Sykes repeated, looking curiously at her.
To save her life Molly could not have remembered where she had arranged
to go! A real horror caught her: was this the beginning of all the
dreadful symptoms that few of Julia Carter Sykes's admirers suspected
in their idol? She must say something, and there flashed suddenly into
her mind, otherwise blank of any image or phrase, an odd occurrence of
the afternoon before, an occurrence she had been too tired to try,
even, to explain.
"Drive to the docks!" she cried sharply, and the chauffeur touched his
visor, and her life poised for twenty minutes on its watershed,
although she did not know it.
In the motor it came back to her, that twilight not eighteen hours
back, when in clearing out her desk ("the last desk I shall ever clear,
I swear!") she had happened on the little transparent glass ball, a
paper-weight, she supposed, and fingered it idly, void of thought or
feeling, after the last emotional storm with her celebrity.
As she looked into it, staring, her tired mind seemed to sink and sink
and submerge in the little clear white sphere till it drowned utterly,
and only a rigid body, its eyes turned into its lap, sat in the still,
dim room.
Presently, after what might have been hours or seconds, she seemed to
gather into herself again, but could not wrench her eyes from the
crystal ball, which looked opalescent now, and filmy, so that she
shaded her eyes mechanically with the black scarf of her dinner-dress,
to shut out the reflections of the room. But they were not
reflections, for there was bright blue in the ball, blue and white, and
nothing of that sort was in the room.
She peered into the ball, and saw in it, clear and sharp and bright as
the little coloured prints that are pasted to the bottom of such
things, a tossing sapphire sea with little white-caps on it, a boat
with a funnel, and little boats lashed to the side, a white rail, a
tilted deck, and herself, Molly Dickett, in a striped blue and white
frock and bare head, leaning over the rail on her elbows beside a
broad-shouldered man with a cap such as officers on a boat wear. The
waves actually danced and glittered in the sun. _But the room was
nearly dark_, something whispered in her brain, and just then she had
dropped the shielding scarf, and gasped back to a sense of reality and
the ball was suddenly empty.
There had been no picture in the bottom of it, after all.
But on the bow of the little boat lashed to the side she had seen,
written in tiny, tiny letters just as the Lord's Prayer is written in
carved ivory toys of incredible smallness, the letters E-L-L-A, and
these letters had fixed themselves in her mind, they had seemed so
absurdly real and she had felt so absurdly sure of them.
"Which steamer, Miss Dickett?" the chauffeur inquired respectfully; all
the employees of the Julia Carter Sykes establishment respected Molly,
as well they might. A sudden, happy irresponsibility flooded Molly's
tired mind, and she smiled into the man's face--the old,
not-to-be-resisted Molly Dickett smile.
"The name of the boat is _Ella_, Pierce," she said cheerfully, "and
it's a small boat, not a liner. Look it up."
And as he disappeared she laughed aloud.
She was still laughing softly when he returned, looking worried.
"I think you must have told me wrong, Miss Dickett, didn't you?" he
began hurriedly, lifting out her small, flat trunk. "It's the _Stella_
you mean, isn't it? There seems to be a misunderstanding; they said
the stateroom was countermanded at the last minute, but the party's
name was Richards. It's all right now, but we nearly lost it--they're
holding her for you. There don't seem to be any more passengers--are
you sure there's no mistake?"
"Perfectly sure," said Molly, sober enough now. "I'm very much
indebted to you, Pierce."
She gave him a tip that caught his breath, walked up the gang-plank of
the _Stella_, nodded easily to a severe official, and followed a pale,
neat stewardess to her state-room.
"Where is this boat going?" she asked of the pale stewardess, who
gasped and replied,
"South America, ma'am. Didn't you know?"
"I may have forgotten," said Molly, and then sleep overcame her and the
days and nights were one for a long time.
The _Stella_ carried hides and fruit and lumber, and, occasionally, two
or three passengers, for whose convenience the company had fitted up a
stateroom or two, since the demand for these proved steady. People, as
Molly learned from the stewardess (whose sole charge she was) for whom
a sea-voyage had been recommended for various reasons. There had never
been more than five at a time and two was the average; one, very common.
The long, blue days slipped by, she ate and slept and lay in the
deck-chair that had been sent by the party named Richards, and spoke to
the stewardess alone, who was used to tired and silent charges, and
served her meals on a tray.
She was a quiet, refined woman with a hand often at her heart. Molly
found her gasping in the companionway once, fed her quickly from the
little flask she pointed at in her pocket, and helped her to her berth,
as clean and comfortable as Molly's own. This produced confidences,
and she learned that Mrs. Cope (every one called her that, she said,
and treated her most respectfully) had made her first voyage as
children's nurse to an English family bound for Rio, who had turned her
off on arriving at that port. The stewardess on that trip proved
inclined to drink and sauciness, and at Mrs. Cope's suggestion they had
given her the post in her stead and she had kept it for five years. An
easy berth, she said, good pay, good board, little to do and pleasant
people. She ate alone, was practically her own mistress, and the
sea-air had saved her life, she knew.
This Molly could well believe, for she had come to count the days of
her ignorance of salt water for days of loss and emptiness. The
mornings of wind, the nights of stars and foam, the hot blue moons,
sang in her blood and tinted her cheeks: she felt herself born again,
the crowded past an ugly nightmare. She says that she had never, till
then, been alone with herself for ten years and that she had never had
time to find out what she really liked best in the world. We must
suppose that she did at last find out, but it cannot be denied that the
discovery was unusual.
Mrs. Cope died at Buenos Ayres, suddenly, as she was serving Molly's
supper, and Molly, piloted by the first mate, for she knew no Spanish,
buried her there and put up a neat headstone over her grave: the
possible lack of one had been the poor woman's one terror, and she had
sent every cent of her wages to some worthless, mysterious husband
whose whereabouts nobody knew. This took all Molly's money but so much
as was needed for her return trip, for it has to be confessed of her
that she never saved a penny in her extravagant life.
And now we see her speaking, for the first time beyond perfunctory
salutations, with the captain, a taciturn recluse of a man, furious
just now at some unexpected litigation connected with his cargo and
horribly inconvenienced by the loss of his stewardess. Two ladies
waiting, literally, on the wharf, have been promised accommodation in
the _Stella_ by the owners, and there is not a decent, respectable
woman to be found on the whole coast of South America, to look after
them.
"Suppose you give me the job?" says Molly, quietly.
He looks her up, down and across, with an eye like a gimlet; she takes
the scrutiny cheerfully, as her duty and his due, offers him her clear,
grey eyes (her only reference for character) and her capable, trim,
broad-shouldered figure as security for fitness.
"I suppose you know your own business best," he says brusquely.
"You're engaged. What name do you wish to go by?"
"My own," says she, "Molly Dickett."
So now, you see! The secret is out, and you may observe her again
piloted by the first mate, scouting through the shops of Buenos Ayres
for a blue-and-white striped cotton frock, broad enough through the
shoulders. Aprons she purchased and caps (larger caps than Mrs.
Cope's, who compromised on white lawn bow-knots) and high-laced,
rubber-soled, white canvas boots, only to be procured in English shops
for sporting-goods. Their price caused the first mate to whistle.
"What's the idea of all this?" he demanded suddenly. "Of course, you
know, you must be up to some game. Your kind doesn't ship as
stewardess."
"What game were _you_ up to?" Molly replied quickly. "Your kind
doesn't ship as first mate, does it?"
"What kind?" he said gruffly.
"The 'Dicky' kind," she answered.
He blurted out some amazed incoherence, and,
"Oh, I've seen Harvard men, before," she assured him pleasantly.
Molly took the best of care of her two ladies and accepted their
gratuities with a grave courtesy. They confided to the captain, at New
York, that she seemed unusually refined for her position, and he
replied that for all he knew, she might be.
"We'll never see _her_ again," the first mate grumbled sourly, when she
stepped off the gangplank, and the captain shrugged his shoulders
non-committally.
They did, nevertheless, but her mother never did. After that one
dreadful interview in the Dickett library (it had used to be the
sitting-room in her college days) when Eleanor had cried, and Kathryn's
letter had been read aloud, and Mr. Dickett had vainly displayed his
bank-book, and her mother had literally trembled with rage, there was
nothing for it but oblivion--oblivion, and silence.
"A stewardess! My daughter a stewardess! I believe we could put you
in an asylum--you're not decent!"
Mrs. Dickett's cheeks were greyish and mottled.
"Come, come, mother! Come, come!" said Mr. Dickett. "There's some
mistake, I'm sure. If you'd only come and live with us, Molly--we're
all alone, now, you know, and Lord knows there's plenty for all. It
doesn't seem quite the thing, I must say, though. It--it hurts your
mother's pride, you see."
"I'm sorry," said Molly, sadly. It is incredible, but she had never
anticipated it! She was really very simple and direct, and life seemed
so clear and good to her, now.
"To compare yourself with that Englishman is ridiculous, and you know
it," sobbed Eleanor. "What if he _was_ a cow-boy? He didn't wear a
cap and apron--and it was for his health--and George is too angry to
come over, even!"
"It's for my health, too," Molly urged, trying to keep her temper. "I
never was the same after I went on that vacation to Maine--I told you
before. Life isn't worth living, unless you're well."
"But you could have the south chamber for your own sitting-room, as
George suggested, and do your writing at your own time," Mr. Dickett
began.
"I've told you I'm not a writer," she interrupted shortly.
"George would rather have paid out of his own pocket----"
"We'll leave George out of this, I think," said Molly, her foot tapping
dangerously.
"Then you may leave me out, too!" cried George's wife. "I have my
children to think of. If you are determined to go and be a
chambermaid, this ends it. Come, mother!"
Mrs. Dickett avoided her husband's grasp and went to the door with
Eleanor. It is hard to see how these things can be, but the cave-woman
and her whelpish brood are far behind us now, and Molly's mother was
cut to the dividing of the bone and the marrow. The two women went out
of the room and Molly stood alone with her father.
"I'm sorry, father," she said quietly. "I can't see that I should
change my way of life when it is perfectly honourable and proper, just
to gratify their silly pride. You must realise that I have to be
independent--I'm thirty years old and I haven't had a cent that I
didn't earn for more than ten years. I have never been so well and
so--so contented since I left college, really."
"Really?" Mr. Dickett echoed in dim amazement.
"Really. And mother never liked me--never. Oh, it's no use, father,
she never has. I can't waste any more of my life. I've found what
suits me--if I ever change, I'll let you know. I'll write you, anyway,
now and then. Good-bye, father. Shake hands."
And so it was over, and she jumped into the waiting "hack" ("it was
some comfort," Eleanor said, "that she wore that handsome broadcloth
and the feather-boa") and left them.
Perhaps you had rather leave her, yourself? Remember, she had dined
the brother of a baronet (and dined him well, too)! And George Farwell
had never earned her salary on _The Day_. Still, if you will stick by
her a little longer, you may feel a little more tolerant of her, and
that is much, in this critical civilisation of ours.
She leaned over the rail in her striped blue-and-white, and the first
mate leaned beside her. The sapphire sea raced along and the milky
froth flew off from their bow. The sun beat down on her dark head, and
there was a song in her heart--oh, there's no doubt of it, the girl was
disgracefully happy!
"A fine trip, won't it be?" she said contentedly, and drew a deep
breath, and washed her lungs clean of all the murk and cobwebs left
behind.
"Yes," said the first mate. "My last, by the way."
"Your last?" she repeated vaguely. "Your last?"
He nodded and swallowed in his throat. "Shall I tell you why?"
"Yes, tell me why," she said, and stared at the ship's boat, lashed to
the side.
"I've told you about myself," he blurted out roughly, "and my family,
and all that. It can't be helped--now. We look at things differently.
A man either wants to be an attache fooling around Baden, or he
doesn't. I don't, that's all. And I go bad in offices. And I won't
take money from them--or anybody. This suits me well enough. Probably
I'm not ambitious."
"Then if it suits you," Molly began, but he put his hand over hers.
"It doesn't suit me to love any woman as much as I've loved you since
Buenos Ayres," he said, "and feel that to get her I must give up this
and settle down into a smelly office. It doesn't suit me to find that
life is just hell without her, but to know that if I know anything
about myself I couldn't live any other way but this, and that no decent
man could ask a woman to lead the rolling-stone life that I lead--she
wouldn't, anyhow."
Molly's eyes were fastened on the bow of the ship's boat; her heart
pounded against the rail; she had never felt so frightened in her life.
And suddenly she became aware that she was staring at the letters
E-L-L-A, and they looked very tiny, like the letters of the Lord's
Prayer written in carved ivory toys, and something she had not thought
of since she first left New York flashed into her mind, and she
trembled slightly. Then all the vexed and broken, many-coloured
fragments of her life clicked and settled into place, quietly and
inevitably, as they do in a child's kaleidoscope, and the final pattern
stood out, finished. She smiled slightly and thinks that perhaps she
prayed. Then,
"Why don't you give the woman a chance?" said Molly Dickett.
* * * * *
Mr. Dickett pushed little Penelope gently off his knee and stroked a
whitening whisker.
"Molly's baby was a boy, mother--I know you'd want to hear," he said.
Mrs. Dickett was silent.
"Her husband's bought a third interest in the boat," he went on firmly,
"and she says he'll probably be captain some day."
"Indeed," said Mrs. Dickett.
"They've stopped carrying passengers and the rooms are fitted up for
them, quite private, she writes, and the boy weighed nine pounds. I'm
thinking of going down to see them, when they get in to this country
again, mother. Would you care to see her husband's picture? He's a
fine looking chap--six feet, she writes."
"I don't care about it," said Mrs. Dickett, through thin lips. "It is
a relief, however, to learn that she is no longer a chambermaid."