|NEW YORK, as much as Paris or Peking, is the city of bizarre contrasts.
One such is modestly illustrated in the life of Hy Lowe.
Hy hurried on this as on every working morning eastward across Broadway
and through Astor Place to the large five-story structure, a block in
length, near the heart of the Bowery, that had been known for seventy
years as Scripture House. Tract societies clustered within the
brownstone walls, publishers of hymn books and testaments, lecture
bureaus, church extension groups, temperance and anti-cigarette
societies, firms of lady typists, and with these, flocks of
shorter-lived concerns whose literature was pious and whose aims were
profoundly commercial. Long years before, when men wore beavers and
stocks and women wore hoopskirts, the building had symbolized the
organized evangelical forces that were to galvanize and remake a corrupt
world.
But the world had somehow evaded this particular galvanizing process.
It had plunged wildly on the little heretical matter of applied science;
which in its turn had invaded the building in the form of electric light
and power and creakily insecure elevators. The Trusts had come, and
Labor Unions and Economic Determinism--even the I. W, W. and the mad
Nietzschean propaganda of the Greenwich Village New Russianists. Not to
mention War. Life had twisted itself into puzzling shapes. New York
had followed farther and farther up-town its elevated roads, subways,
steel-built sky-scrapers and amazing palaces of liquors and lobsters,
leaving the old building not even the scant privilege of dominating the
slums and factories that had crept gradually to and around it. And now
as a last negligent insult, a very new generation--a confused generation
of Jews, Italians, Irish, Poles, Slavs, serving as bookkeepers,
stenographers, messengers, door girls, elevator boys--idled and flirted
and enacted their little worldly comedies and tragedies within the very
walls of Scripture House--practised a furtive dance step or two in the
dim stock rooms, dreamed of broiled lobsters (even of liquors) while
patient men with white string neckties and routine minds sat in inner
offices and continued the traditional effort to remake that forgotten
old world.
But if the vision had failed, many a successful enterprise, then and
now, thrived under the cover of Scripture House. One had thrived there
for thirty years--the independent missionary weekly known to you as _My
Brother's Keeper_. This publication was the “meal ticket” to which Hy,
at rare intervals, referred. On the ground glass of his office door were
the words, lettered in black, “Assistant Editor.” To this altitude had
eight years of reporting and editing elevated Hy Lowe. The compensating
honorarium was forty-five dollars a week. Not a great amount for one
whose nature demanded correct clothing, Broadway dinners, pretty girls
and an occasional taxicab; still a bachelor who lives inexpensively as
to rooms, breakfasts and lunches and is not too hard on his clothes can
go reasonably far on forty-five dollars, even in New York.
On this as on other mornings Hy, after a smile and a wink for the
noticeably pretty little telephone girl in the outer office, slid along
the inner corridor dose to the wood and glass partition. Though the
Walrus' open doorway dominated the corridor, there was always a chance
of slipping in unnoted.
He opened and closed his own door very softly; whipped off and hung up
his street coat; donned the old black alpaca that was curiously bronzed
from the pockets down by thousands of wipings of purple ink: and within
twenty seconds was seated at his desk going through the morning's mail.
A buzzer sounded--on the partition just above his head. Hy started;
turned and stared at the innocent little electrical machine. His color
mounted. He compressed his lips. He picked up the editorial shears and
deliberately slipped one blade under the insulated wires that led away
from the buzzer.
Again the sound! Hy's fingers relaxed. He snorted, tossed the shears
on the desk, strode to the door, paused to compose his features; then
wearing the blankly innocent expression that meant forty-five dollars a
week, walked quietly into the big room at the end of the corridor where,
behind a flat mahogany desk seven feet square, sat the Reverend Hubbell
Harkness Wilde, D. D.
On the wall behind him lettered in gold leaf on black enamel, hung
the apothegm (not from the eloquent pen of Doctor Wilde)--“It is more
blessed to give than to receive.” Beneath, in a long mahogany bookcase,
were hundreds of volumes, every one inserted in gratitude and admiration
to the editor of _My Brothers Keeper_. The great desk was heaped with
books, manuscripts, folders of correspondence. Beside it, pencil warily
poised, sat Miss Hardwick, who for more than twenty years had followed
Doctor Wilde about these offices--during most of every working day
taking down his most trivial utterances, every word, to be transcribed
later on the typewriter by her three six-dollar-a-week girls. It was
from the resulting mass of verbiage that Miss Hardwick and the doctor
dug out and arranged the weekly sermon-editorials that you read when you
were a Sunday-school pupil and that your non-citified aunts and uncles
are reading in book form to this day. They were a force, these sermons.
Make no mistake about that! They had a sensational vigor that you
rarely heard from the formal pulpit. The back-cover announcements of
feature-sermons to come were stirring in themselves. If your mind be
“practical,” scorning all mystical theorizings, let me pass on to
you the inside information that through sermons and advertisements of
sermons and sensational full-page appeals in display type this man whom
Hy light-mindedly dismissed with the title of “the Walrus” had collected
more than two million dollars in twenty years for those mission stations
of his in Africa or Madagascar (or whenever they were). That is slightly
upward of a hundred thousand a year in actual money, as a net average!
We have had a momentary glimpse of Doctor Wilde. That was at the
Crossroads Theater, where his runaway daughter was playing a boy in
Jacob Zanin's playlet, _Any Street_. But the Walrus was then out of his
proper setting--was merely a grim hint of a forgotten Puritanism in that
little Bohemian world of experimental compliance with the Freudian Wish.
We see him in his proper setting here. The old-fashioned woodcut of him
that was always in the upper left corner of sermon or announcement
was made in 1886---that square, young, strong face, prominent nose,
penetrating eyes. Even then it flattered him. The man now sitting at the
enormous desk was twenty-nine years older. The big hooked nose was
still there. The pale-green eyes were still a striking feature; but
they looked tired now. There was the strip of whisker on each cheek,
close-clipped, tinged now with gray. He was heavier in neck and
shoulders. There were deep lines about the wide, thin, orator's mouth.
Despite the nose and eyes there was something yielding about that mouth;
something of the old politician who has learned to temper strength
with craft, who has learned, too, that human nature moves and functions
within rather narrow limits and is assailed by subtle weaknesses. It was
an enigmatic face. Beneath it were low turnover collar, the usual white
string tie and a well-worn black frock coat.
Doctor Wilde was nervous this morning. His eyes found it difficult to
meet those of his mild-faced assistant in the old alpaca office coat.
“Miss Hardwick--you may go, please!” Thus Doctor Wilde; and he threw out
his hands in a nervous gesture.
For an instant, sensing some new tension in the office atmosphere, Hy
caught himself thinking of Sue Wilde. She had a trick of throwing out
her hands like that. Only she did it with extraordinary grace. In certain
ways they were alike, this eccentric gifted man and his eccentric
equally gifted daughter. Not in all particulars; for Sue had charm.
“Must get it from her mother's side,” mused Hy. He knew that the mother
was dead, that the house from which Sue had fled to Greenwich Village
and Art and Freedom was now presided over by a second wife who dressed
surprisingly well, and whose two children--little girls--were on
occasions brought into the office.
His reverie ended abruptly. Miss Hardwick had gathered up her note-books
and pencils; was rising now; and as she passed out, released in Hy's
direction one look that almost frightened him. It was a barbed shaft of
bitter malevolence, oddly confused with trembling, incredible triumph.
“Sit down, please!” It was Doctor Wilde's voice. Hy sat down in the
chair that was always kept for him across the huge desk from the doctor.
That gentleman had himself risen, creaked over to the door, was closing
it securely.
What had that queer look meant? From Miss Hardwick of all people! To
Hy she had been hardly more than an office fixture. But in that
brief instant she had revealed depths of hatred, malignant
jealousy--something!
The doctor sank heavily into his own chair. Hy, mystified, watched him
and waited. The man reached for a paper-weight--a brass model of his
first mission house from Africa or Madagascar or somewhere--and placed
it before him on top of the unopened morning's mail, moved it this way,
then a little that way and looked at it critically. Hy, more and more
startled, a thought hypnotized, leaned forward on the desk and gazed at
that little brass house. Finally the doctor spoke:
“I have an unpleasant duty--but it is not a matter that I can lightly
pass over--”
Hy paled a little, knit his brows, stared with increasing intensity at
that mission house of brass.
“For a long time, Mr. Lowe, I have felt that your conduct was not--”
“Oh,” thought Hy, in a daze, “my conduct was not--”
“--was not--well, in keeping with your position.”
“With my position.” Hy's numb mind repeated.
“This is not a matter of a particular act or a particular occasion,
Mr. Lowe. For a long time it has been known to me that you sought
undesirable companions, that you have been repeatedly seen in--in
Broadway resorts.”
Hy's mind was stirring awake now, darting this way and that like a
frightened mouse. Some one had been talking to the doctor--and very
recently. The man was a coward in office matters; he had been goaded to
this. The “for a long time,” so heavily repeated, was of course a verbal
blind. Could it have been--not Miss Hardwick. Then Hy was surprised to
hear his own voice:
“But this is a charge, Doctor Wilde! A charge should be definite.” The
words came mechanically. Hy must have read them somewhere. “I surely
have a right to know what has bcen said about me.”
“I don't know that it is necessary to be specific,” said the doctor,
apparently now that the issue was joined, finding his task easier.
“I must insist!” cried Hy, on his feet now. He was thinking--“What has
she told him? What does she know? What does she know!”
“Sit down!” said Doctor Wilde.
Hy sat down. His chief moved the mission house a trifle to square it
with the edge of the desk.
“To mention only one occasion,” went on the doctor's voice--“though many
are known to me, I am well informed regarding the sort of life you are
known to be leading. You see, Mr. Lowe, you must understand that the
office atmosphere of _My Brother's Keeper_ is above reproach. Ability
alone will not carry a man here. There are standards finer and truer
than--”
A rhetorical note was creeping into the man's voice. He turned
instinctively to sec if Miss Hardwick was catching the precious words
as they fell from his lips; then with his eyes on her empty chair he
floundered.
The telephone rang. Hy, with alacrity grown out of long practise in
fending for his chief, reached for it.
“Oh, Mr. Lowe--” It was the voice of the pretty little telephone girl:
“It's a lady! She simply won't be put off! Could you--”
“Tell him,” said Hy with cold solemnity, “that I am in an important
Conference.”
“I did tell her that, Mr. Lowe.”
“Very well--ask him to leave his number. I can not be disturbed now.”
He hung up the receiver. “Doctor Wilde,” he said in the same Solemn
tone. “I realize of course that you are asking for my resignation. But
first I must know the charge against me. There has been an attack on my
character. I have the right to demand full knowledge of it.”
“To mention only one occasion,” said the doctor, as if unaware of the
interruption, still fussing with the mission house, “you were seen, as
recently as last evening, leaving a questionable restaurant in company
with a still more questionable young woman.”
So that was all he knew! Hy breathed a very little more easily. Then
the telephone rang again, and Hy's overstrained nerves jumped like mad.
“Very well,” said he to the pretty telephone girl, “put him on my wire.”
And to his chief: “You will have to excuse me, Doctor. This appears to
be important.” He rose with extreme dignity and left the room.
Once within his own office he stood clinging to the door-knob, breathing
hard. It was all over! He was fired. He must begin life again--like
General Grant. His own telephone bell was ringing frantically. At first
he hardly heard it. Finally he pulled himself together and moved toward
the desk. It would be Betty, of course. She ought to have more sense!
Why hadn't she stayed up-state with that new husband of hers, anyway!
Wasn't life disastrous enough without a very much entangled, contrite
Betty on his own still more entangled hands.
But the voice was not that of Betty. Nor was it the voice of Silvia.
It was a soft little voice, melodious, hesitating. It was familiar, yet
unfamiliar.
“Oh,” it said, “is that you? I've had such a hard time getting you.”
“I'm sorry!” breathed Hy. Who was she?
“Are you awfully busy?”
Hy hesitated. Deep amid the heaped and smoking runs of his life a little
warm thing was stirring. It was the very instinct for adventure. He
looked grimly about the room, to be his office no longer. He didn't care
particularly what happened now. His own voice even took on something of
the strange girl's softness.
“Not so awfully,” said he. Then groping for words added: “Where are you
now?”
“Up at the Grand Central.”
“Goodness! You're not going away--now?”
“Yes--going home. I feel awfully bad about it.”
A silence intervened. Then this from Hy:
“You--you're not alone up there?”
“All alone.”
What a charmingly plaintive little voice it was, anyway! The healthy
color was returning to Hy's cheeks.
“Well,” said he--“well, say--”
“Yes?” she murmured.
“How long--when does your train go?”
“Oh, could you? I didn't dare ask--you seemed so busy!”
“I could be there in--well, under fifteen minutes.”
“Oh, good. I've got--let me see--nearly half an hour.”
“Be by the clock in the main waiting-room Good-by!”
Hy slammed down the receiver; tore off the alpaca coat and stuffed it
into the waste basket; got into his street coat; observed the editorial
shears on the desk; seized them, cut the buzzer wires, noted with
satisfaction the nick he made in one blade; threw the shears to the
floor and rushed from the office.