The twilight was hotter still an hour later as he stood at the corner
waiting for his car. The trolley-ride to his house was twenty-five
minutes, and he bought a pink-jacketed newspaper to appetize his
listless mind. Life had seemed less happy, less glamourous of late.
Perhaps he had learned more of the world's ways--perhaps its glamour was
evaporating little by little with the hurried years.
Nothing like this afternoon, for instance, had ever happened to him
before. He could not dismiss the old man from his mind. He pictured him
plodding home in the weary heat--on foot, probably, to save
carfare--opening the door of a hot little flat, and confessing to his
daughter that the son of his friend had not been able to help him out.
All evening they would plan helplessly until they said good night to
each other--father and daughter, isolated by chance in this world--and
went to lie awake with a pathetic loneliness in their two beds.
Mather's street-car came along, and he found a seat near the front, next
to an old lady who looked at him grudgingly as she moved over. At the
next block a crowd of girls from the department-store district flowed up
the aisle, and Mather unfolded his paper. Of late he had not indulged
his habit of giving up his seat. Jaqueline was right--the average young
girl was able to stand as well as he was. Giving up his seat was silly,
a mere gesture. Nowadays not one woman in a dozen even bothered to thank
him.
It was stifling hot in the car, and he wiped the heavy damp from his
forehead. The aisle was thickly packed now, and a woman standing beside
his seat was thrown momentarily against his shoulder as the car turned a
corner. Mather took a long breath of the hot foul air, which
persistently refused to circulate, and tried to centre his mind on a
cartoon at the top of the sporting page.
"Move for'ard ina car, please!" The conductor's voice pierced the opaque
column of humanity with raucous irritation. "Plen'y of room for'ard!"
The crowd made a feeble attempt to shove forward, but the unfortunate
fact that there was no space into which to move precluded any marked
success. The car turned another corner, and again the woman next to
Mather swayed against his shoulder. Ordinarily he would have given up
his seat if only to avoid this reminder that she was there. It made him
feel unpleasantly cold-blooded. And the car was horrible--horrible. They
ought to put more of them on the line these sweltering days.
For the fifth time he looked at the pictures in the comic strip. There
was a beggar in the second picture, and the wavering image of Mr. Lacy
persistently inserted itself in the beggar's place. God! Suppose the old
man really did starve to death--suppose he threw himself into the river.
"Once," thought Mather, "he helped my father. Perhaps, if he hadn't, my
own life would have been different than it has been. But Lacy could
afford it then--and I can't."
To force out the picture of Mr. Lacy, Mather tried to think of
Jaqueline. He said to himself over and over that he would have been
sacrificing Jaqueline to a played-out man who had had his chance and
failed. Jaqueline needed her chance now as never before.
Mather looked at his watch. He had been on the car ten minutes. Fifteen
minutes still to ride, and the heat increasing with breathless
intensity. The woman swayed against him once more, and looking out the
window he saw that they were turning the last down-town corner.
It occurred to him that perhaps he ought, after all, to give the woman
his seat--her last sway toward him had been a particularly tired sway.
If he were sure she was an older woman--but the texture of her dress as
it brushed his hand gave somehow the impression that she was a young
girl. He did not dare look up to see. He was afraid of the appeal that
might look out of her eyes if they were old eyes or the sharp contempt
if they were young.
For the next five minutes his mind worked in a vague suffocated way on
what now seemed to him the enormous problem of whether or not to give
her the seat. He felt dimly that doing so would partially atone for his
refusal to Mr. Lacy that afternoon. It would be rather terrible to have
done those two cold-blooded things in succession--and on such a day.
He tried the cartoon again, but in vain. He must concentrate on
Jaqueline. He was dead tired now, and if he stood up he would be more
tired. Jaqueline would be waiting for him, needing him. She would be
depressed and she would want him to hold her quietly in his arms for an
hour after dinner. When he was tired this was rather a strain. And
afterward when they went to bed she would ask him from time to time to
get her her medicine or a glass of ice-water. He hated to show any
weariness in doing these things. She might notice and, needing
something, refrain from asking for it.
The girl in the aisle swayed against him once more--this time it was
more like a sag. She was tired, too. Well, it was weary to work. The
ends of many proverbs that had to do with toil and the long day floated
fragmentarily through his mind. Everybody in the world was tired--this
woman, for instance, whose body was sagging so wearily, so strangely
against his. But his home came first and his girl that he loved was
waiting for him there. He must keep his strength for her, and he said to
himself over and over that he would not give up his seat.
Then he heard a long sigh, followed by a sudden exclamation, and he
realized that the girl was no longer leaning against him. The
exclamation multiplied into a clatter of voices--then came a pause--then
a renewed clatter that travelled down the car in calls and little
staccato cries to the conductor. The bell clanged violently, and the hot
car jolted to a sudden stop.
"Girl fainted up here!"
"Too hot for her!"
"Just keeled right over!"
"Get back there! Gangway, you!"
The crowd eddied apart. The passengers in front squeezed back and those
on the rear platform temporarily disembarked. Curiosity and pity bubbled
out of suddenly conversing groups. People tried to help, got in the way.
Then the bell rang and voices rose stridently again.
"Get her out all right?"
"Say, did you see that?"
"This damn' company ought to----"
"Did you see the man that carried her out? He was pale as a ghost, too."
"Yes, but did you hear----?"
"What?"
"That fella. That pale fella that carried her out. He was sittin' beside
her--he says she's his wife!"
The house was quiet. A breeze pressed back the dark vine leaves of the
veranda, letting in thin yellow rods of moonlight on the wicker chairs.
Jaqueline rested placidly on the long settee with her head in his arms.
After a while she stirred lazily; her hand reaching up patted his cheek.
"I think I'll go to bed now. I'm so tired. Will you help me up?"
He lifted her and then laid her back among the pillows.
"I'll be with you in a minute," he said gently. "Can you wait for just a
minute?"
He passed into the lighted living-room, and she heard him thumbing the
pages of a telephone directory; then she listened as he called a number.
"Hello, is Mr. Lacy there? Why--yes, it _is_ pretty important--if he
hasn't gone to sleep."
A pause. Jaqueline could hear restless sparrows splattering through the
leaves of the magnolia over the way. Then her husband at the telephone:
"Is this Mr. Lacy? Oh, this is Mather. Why--why, in regard to that
matter we talked about this afternoon, I think I'll be able to fix that
up after all." He raised his voice a little as though some one at the
other end found it difficult to hear. "James Mather's son, I said--
About that little matter this afternoon----"
"THE SENSIBLE THING"
At the Great American Lunch Hour young George O'Kelly straightened his
desk deliberately and with an assumed air of interest. No one in the
office must know that he was in a hurry, for success is a matter of
atmosphere, and it is not well to advertise the fact that your mind is
separated from your work by a distance of seven hundred miles.
But once out of the building he set his teeth and began to run, glancing
now and then at the gay noon of early spring which filled Times Square
and loitered less than twenty feet over the heads of the crowd. The
crowd all looked slightly upward and took deep March breaths, and the
sun dazzled their eyes so that scarcely any one saw any one else but
only their own reflection on the sky.
George O'Kelly, whose mind was over seven hundred miles away, thought
that all outdoors was horrible. He rushed into the subway, and for
ninety-five blocks bent a frenzied glance on a car-card which showed
vividly how he had only one chance in five of keeping his teeth for ten
years. At 137th Street he broke off his study of commercial art, left
the subway, and began to run again, a tireless, anxious run that brought
him this time to his home--one room in a high, horrible apartment-house
in the middle of nowhere.
There it was on the bureau, the letter--in sacred ink, on blessed
paper--all over the city, people, if they listened, could hear the
beating of George O'Kelly's heart. He read the commas, the blots, and the
thumb-smudge on the margin--then he threw himself hopelessly upon his
bed.
He was in a mess, one of those terrific messes which are ordinary
incidents in the life of the poor, which follow poverty like birds of
prey. The poor go under or go up or go wrong or even go on, somehow, in
a way the poor have--but George O'Kelly was so new to poverty that had
any one denied the uniqueness of his case he would have been astounded.
Less than two years ago he had been graduated with honors from The
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and had taken a position with a
firm of construction engineers in southern Tennessee. All his life he
had thought in terms of tunnels and skyscrapers and great squat dams and
tall, three-towered bridges, that were like dancers holding hands in a
row, with heads as tall as cities and skirts of cable strand. It had
seemed romantic to George O'Kelly to change the sweep of rivers and the
shape of mountains so that life could flourish in the old bad lands of
the world where it had never taken root before. He loved steel, and
there was always steel near him in his dreams, liquid steel, steel in
bars, and blocks and beams and formless plastic masses, waiting for him,
as paint and canvas to his hand. Steel inexhaustible, to be made lovely
and austere in his imaginative fire ...
At present he was an insurance clerk at forty dollars a week with his
dream slipping fast behind him. The dark little girl who had made this
mess, this terrible and intolerable mess, was waiting to be sent for in
a town in Tennessee.
In fifteen minutes the woman from whom he sublet his room knocked and
asked him with maddening kindness if, since he was home, he would have
some lunch. He shook his head, but the interruption aroused him, and
getting up from the bed he wrote a telegram.
"Letter depressed me have you lost your nerve you are foolish and just
upset to think of breaking off why not marry me immediately sure we can
make it all right----"
He hesitated for a wild minute, and then added in a hand that could
scarcely be recognized as his own: "In any case I will arrive to-morrow
at six o'clock."
When he finished he ran out of the apartment and down to the telegraph
office near the subway stop. He possessed in this world not quite one
hundred dollars, but the letter showed that she was "nervous" and this
left him no choice. He knew what "nervous" meant--that she was
emotionally depressed, that the prospect of marrying into a life of
poverty and struggle was putting too much strain upon her love.
George O'Kelly reached the insurance company at his usual run, the run
that had become almost second nature to him, that seemed best to express
the tension under which he lived. He went straight to the manager's
office.
"I want to see you, Mr. Chambers," he announced breathlessly.
"Well?" Two eyes, eyes like winter windows, glared at him with ruthless
impersonality.
"I want to get four days' vacation."
"Why, you had a vacation just two weeks ago!" said Mr. Chambers in
surprise.
"That's true," admitted the distraught young man, "but now I've got to
have another."
"Where'd you go last time? To your home?"
"No, I went to--a place in Tennessee."
"Well, where do you want to go this time?"
"Well, this time I want to go to--a place in Tennessee."
"You're consistent, anyhow," said the manager dryly. "But I didn't
realize you were employed here as a travelling salesman."
"I'm not," cried George desperately, "but I've got to go."
"All right," agreed Mr. Chambers, "but you don't have to come back. So
don't!"
"I won't." And to his own astonishment as well as Mr. Chambers' George's
face grew pink with pleasure. He felt happy, exultant--for the first
time in six months he was absolutely free. Tears of gratitude stood in
his eyes, and he seized Mr. Chambers warmly by the hand.
"I want to thank you," he said with a rush of emotion, "I don't want to
come back. I think I'd have gone crazy if you'd said that I could come
back. Only I couldn't quit myself, you see, and I want to thank you
for--for quitting for me."
He waved his hand magnanimously, shouted aloud, "You owe me three days'
salary but you can keep it!" and rushed from the office. Mr. Chambers
rang for his stenographer to ask if O'Kelly had seemed queer lately. He
had fired many men in the course of his career, and they had taken it in
many different ways, but none of them had thanked him--ever before.