As Claire stepped out into the cold sunlight of early November, she
smiled bitterly at the exaggeration of last night's mood. After the
first hectic flush of dawn there is nothing so sane and sweet and
commonplace as morning. The spectacle of Mrs. Finnegan, who lodged in
the flat below, slopping warm suds over the thin marble steps, added a
final note of homeliness, which divorced Claire completely from heroics.
"Well, Miss Robson, so you really got home, last night," broke from the
industrious neighbor as she straightened up and tucked her lifted skirts
in more securely. "I thought you never would come!... A package came
from New York for you. The man nearly banged your door down. I had
Finnegan put it on your back stoop.... It's from that cousin of yours, I
guess. I was so excited about it I kept wishing you'd get home early so
that I could get a peep at all the pretty things. But I'll run up just
as soon as I get through with the breakfast dishes."
Claire smiled wanly. "It was very good of you to take all that trouble,
I'm sure, Mrs. Finnegan!"
"Oh, bother my trouble!" Mrs. Finnegan responded. "I just knew how crazy
I'd be about a box. I guess we women are all alike, Miss Robson.
Anyway, your mother and I are!"
Mrs. Finnegan bent over her task again with a quick exasperated
movement, and Claire passed on. Her neighbor's abrupt rebuke gave Claire
a renewed sense of exclusion. She had meant to be warmly appreciative,
but she knew now that she had been only coldly polite. But, as a matter
of fact, the prospect of delving through a box of Gertrude Sinclair's
discarded finery moved her this morning to a dull fury. She felt
suddenly tired of cast-offs, of compromise, of all the other shabby
adjustments of genteel poverty. And by the time she reached the office
of the Falcon Insurance Company her soul was seething with a curious and
unreasonable revolt. The feminine office force seemed seething also, but
with an impersonal, quivering excitement. Nellie Whitehead had been
dismissed!
This Nellie Whitehead, the stenographer-in-chief, was big, vigorous,
blond--vulgar, energetic, vivid; and Miss Munch, her assistant, a thin,
hollow-chested spinster, who loafed upon her job so that she might save
her sight for the manufacture of incredible yards of tatting, never
missed an opportunity to lift her eyes significantly behind her
superior's back.
"And what do you suppose?" Miss Munch was querying as Claire stepped
into the dressing-room. "She told Mr. Flint to go to hell!... Yes,
positively, she used those very words. And I must say he was a gentleman
throughout it all. He told her gently but firmly that her example in the
office wasn't what it should be and that in justice to the other
girls...."
Claire turned impatiently away. The fiction of Mr. Flint's belated
interest in the morals of his feminine office force was unconvincing
enough to be irritating. For a man who never missed an opportunity to
force his attentions, he was showing an amazingly ethical viewpoint. On
second thought, Claire remembered that Miss Munch was never the
recipient of Mr. Flint's attentions, which to the casual eye might have
seemed innocent enough--on rainy days gallantly bending his ample girth
in a rather too prolonged attempt to slip on the girls' rubbers,
insisting on the quite unnecessary task of incasing them in their
jackets and smoothing the sleeves of their shirt-waists in the process,
flicking imaginary threads where the feminine curves were most opulent.
Not that Mr. Flint was a wolf in sheep's clothing; he played the part of
sheep, but he needed no disguise for his performance; he merely lived up
to a sort of flock-mind consciousness where women were concerned.
The group clustered about Miss Munch broke up at the approach of Mr.
Flint, who gave a significant glance in the direction of Claire Robson,
intent upon her morning work. But the excitement persisted in spite of
the scattered auditors, and the fact was mysteriously communicated that
Miss Munch's interest in the event was chargeable to her hopes. It
seemed impossible to Miss Munch that any one but herself could succeed
to the vacant post of stenographer-in-chief.
At precisely eleven o'clock the buzzer on Claire Robson's desk hummed
three times. This announced that she was wanted by Mr. Flint. She
gathered her note-book and pencils and answered the call.
Mr. Flint was busy at the telephone when Claire entered the private
office. She seated herself at the flat oak table in the center of the
room.
Mr. Flint's office bore all the conventional signs of
business--commissions of authority from insurance companies, state
licenses in oak frames, an oil-painting of Thomas Sawyer Flint, the
founder of the firm, over a fireplace that maintained its useless
dignity in spite of the steam-radiator near the window. On his desk was
the inevitable picture of his wife framed in silver, a hand-illumined
platitude of Stevenson, an elaborate set of desk paraphernalia in beaten
brass that bore little evidence of service. In two green-glazed bowls of
Japanese origin, roses from Mr. Flint's garden at Yolanda scattered
faint pink petals on the Smyrna rug. These flowers were the only
concession to esthetics that Mr. Flint indulged. In spite of a masculine
distaste for carrying flowers, hardly a day went by when he did not
appear at the office with a huge harvest of blossoms from his country
home.
Claire was bending over, intent on picking up the crumpled rose-petals,
when Mr. Flint finally spoke. She straightened herself slowly. Her
unhurried movements had a certain grace that did not escape the man
opposite her. She tossed the bruised leaves into a waste-basket and
reached for her pencil. Her heart was pounding, but she faced Mr. Flint
with a clear, direct gaze.
"Miss Robson, of course you've heard all about the rumpus," Mr. Flint
was saying. "I had to fire Miss Whitehead.... I think you can fill the
bill."
Claire rose without replying. Mr. Flint left his seat and crossed over
to her.
"I hope," he said, flicking a thread from her shoulder, "that you're
game.... Some girls, of course, don't care a damn about getting on ...
especially if there's a Johnny somewhere in sight with enough cash in
his pocket for a marriage license."
"I am very much taken by surprise," Claire faltered. "You see, the
change means a great deal to me."
Mr. Flint moved closer. His manner was intimate and distasteful.
"Sometimes I think we business men ought to get more of a slant on our
employees.... You know what I mean, not exactly bothering about how many
lumps of sugar they take in their coffee, or their taste in after-dinner
cheese ... but, well, just how often they have to resole their boots and
turn the ribbons on their spring bonnets.... Now, in Miss Whitehead's
case.... But of course you're not interested in Miss Whitehead."
"Why, I wouldn't say that," stammered Claire. Then, as she reached for
her shorthand book she said, more confidently: "To be quite frank, Mr.
Flint, I liked Miss Whitehead tremendously. She was so alive ... and
vivid."
Flint beamed. "Do you know why I picked you instead of that Munch
dame?... It's because you had all the frills of a woman and none of the
nastiness. For instance, you wouldn't be bothered in the least if I took
a notion to overload the office with another pretty girl.... I've
watched you for some time. It has taken me six months to make up my mind
to fire Miss Whitehead and boost you into her job."
He stood with an air of condescending arrogance, his thumbs bearing down
heavily on his trousers pockets, his broad fingers beating a
self-satisfied tattoo upon his thighs. Claire shrank nearer the table.
"You mean, Mr. Flint, that you dismissed Miss Whitehead merely to give
me her position?"
Flint smiled. "Well, now you're coming down to brass-headed tacks. I'm
not keen on spelling out the whys and wherefores of anything I do....
But one thing is certain enough--if Miss Munch had been the only
available candidate I _could_ have stood Miss Whitehead.... There ain't
much question about that."
"Oh, Mr. Flint! I'm sorry!"
He gave a wide guffaw. "That only makes you all the more of a corker!"
he answered, rubbing his hands together in narrow-eyed satisfaction.
She escaped into the outer office, flushed, but with her head thrown
back in an attitude of instinctive defense, and the next instant she
literally ran into the arm of a man.
"Why, Miss Robson, but this _is_ pleasant! I'm just dropping in to see
Mr. Flint."
She drew back. Mr. Stillman stood smiling before her.
Greetings and questions flowed with all the genial ease of one who is
never quite taken unawares. Claire, outwardly calm, felt overcome with
inner confusion. She passed rapidly to her desk and sat down.
Miss Munch was upon her almost instantly.
"Do _you_ know Ned Stillman?" Miss Munch asked, veiling her real
purpose.
"Yes," replied Claire, with uncomfortable brevity.
"I have a cousin who was housekeeper for his wife's father.... You know
about his wife, of course."
Claire lifted her clear eyes in a startled glance that was almost as
instantly converted into a look of challenge.
"Yes," she lied.
Miss Munch hesitated, then plunged at once into the issue uppermost in
her mind. "It's too bad you've had to be bothered with Flint's
dictation, Miss Robson. It just happens I'm writing up a long
home-office report, otherwise I'm sure he wouldn't have annoyed you."
Claire Robson fixed Miss Munch with a coldly polite stare. "You've made
a mistake, Miss Munch. Mr. Flint has given me no dictation." The speech
in itself was nothing, but Claire's tone gave it unmistakable point.
Miss Munch grew white and then flushed. She turned away without a word,
but Claire Robson knew that in a twinkling of an eye she had gained not
only an enemy, but an uncommon one.
* * * * *
That night Claire took an unusually long way round on her walk home. Her
path from the Falcon Insurance Company's office on California Street to
the Clay Street flat was never a direct one, first, because there were
hills to be avoided, and, second, because Claire found the streets at
twilight too full of charm for a rapid homeward flight. The year was on
the wane and the November days were coming to an early blackness. Claire
reveled in the light-flooded dusk of these late autumn evenings. To her,
the city became a vast theater, darkened suddenly for the purpose of
throwing the performers into sharper relief. Most clerks made their way
up Montgomery Street toward Market, but Claire climbed past the German
Bank to Kearny Street. She liked this old thoroughfare, struggling
vainly to pull itself up to its former glory. The Kearny Street crowd
was a varying quantity, frankly shabby or flashily prosperous, as far
south as Sutter Street, suddenly dignified and reserved for the two
blocks beyond. To-night Claire missed the direct appeal of the streets
lined with bright shops. They formed the proper background for her
broodings, but they scarcely entered into her mood. She could not have
said just what flight her mood was taking, or upon just which branch her
thought would alight. She was confused and puzzled and vaguely uneasy.
She had a sense that somehow, somewhere, a door had been opened and that
a strong, devastating wind was clearing the air and bringing dead things
to ground in a disorderly shower. She was stirred by twilights of
uneasiness. It was almost as if the monotonous truce of noonday had been
darkened by a huge, composite, masculine shadow, made up in some
mysterious way of the ridiculous Serbian and his blood-red dawn, and
this man Stillman, who had a wife, and Flint, with hands so ready to
flick threads from her sloping shoulders. Yesterday her outlook had been
peaceful and unhappy; to-day she felt stimulation of an impending
struggle. She was afraid, and yet she would not have turned back for one
swift moment. And suddenly the words of Mrs. Finnegan recurred, "I guess
we women are all alike." Were they?
At which point she came upon a pastry-shop window and she went in and
bought a half-dozen French pastries. The thought of her mother's
pleasure at this unusual treat brought her in due time smiling to her
threshold.
Mrs. Robson was not in her accustomed place at the head of the stairs;
about half-way up the long flight her voice sounded triumphantly:
"Oh, Claire, do hurry and see what Gertrude has sent! Everything is
perfectly lovely."
Claire quickened her pace and gained the cramped living-room. Thrown
about in a sort of joyous disorder, Gertrude Sinclair's finery quite lit
up the shabbiness. Hats, plumes, scraps of vivid silks, gilded slippers,
a spangled fan--their unrelated vividness struck Claire as fantastic as
a futurist painting. Her mother seemed suddenly young again. Claire
wondered whether, after the toll of sixty-odd years, she could be moved
to momentary youth by the mere sight of the prettiness that was
quickening her mother's pulse.
Mrs. Robson held up a filmy evening gown of black net embroidered with a
rich design of dull gold. "Isn't this heavenly?" she demanded. "And it
will just fit you, Claire. I think Gertrude has spread herself this
time."
"Yes, on finery, mother. But didn't she send anything sensible? What
possessed her to load us up with a lot of things we can never possibly
get a chance to wear?"
Claire had not meant to be disagreeable, but there was rancor in her
voice. Mrs. Robson cast aside the dress with the carelessness of a
spoiled favorite; she always adapted her manner to the tone of her
background.
"Claire Robson!" she cried, good-naturedly. "You're a regular old woman!
I'm sure _I_ haven't much to be cheerful about, but I just won't let
anything down me!... If I wanted to, I could give up right now. Where
would we have been, I'd like to know, if I hadn't held my head up?
Goodness knows, _my_ folks didn't help me. If they had had their way,
I'd been out manicuring people's nails and washing heads for a living.
And _you_ in an orphan-asylum! That's what my people did for me! As it
is, they shoved you out to work. What chance have you of meeting nice
people? No, Claire, I don't care how they have treated me, but they
might have given you a chance. I'll never forgive them for that!... I
thought last night when I was talking to Mrs. Condor and watching you
and Mr. Stillman how nice it would have been if.... Oh, that reminds me!
Who do you think has been here to-day?... Mrs. Towne! She came to
apologize about asking us to move our seats the other night. _She_ knows
the Stillmans well. The old people were pillars of the Second Church in
the 'sixties. I fancy he is dancing about that Mrs. Condor's heels a
bit. Of course, as Mrs. Towne said, _she_ wouldn't be likely to make
herself a permanent feature of Second Church entertainments. But now in
war-times _anything_ is possible. Mrs. Towne was telling me all about
Stillman and his wife. I _should_ have remembered, but somehow I forgot.
Get your things off and I'll tell you all about it."
Claire handed her mother the package of pastries. "I heard about it
to-day," she said, coldly.
"But Mrs. Towne knows the whole thing from A to Z," insisted Mrs.
Robson, genially.
"I'm not interested in the details," Claire returned, doggedly.
Mrs. Robson's face wore a puzzled, almost a harried, expression. Claire
moved away. Her mother gave a shrug and renewed her efforts to drag
further finery from the mysterious depths of the treasure-box. Her
daughter cast a last incurious glance back. The glow on Mrs. Robson's
face, which Claire had mistaken for youth, seemed now a thing hectic and
unpleasant, and gave an uncanny sense of a skeleton sitting among gauds
and baubles.
A feeling of isolation swept Claire, such as she had never experienced.
The person who should have been closest suddenly had become a
stranger.... She went into her room and closed the door.