THE CITY SWALLOWS DAISY.
The summer dawn came with a warm melting of the dark and a running out
over the sky-floor of spilled light from under the edge of the world.
Daisy, her nerves thrilling like the nerves of one drunken with wine,
leaned untired on the varnished window-sill; looking, with all her young
vitality gathered into shine of eyes and beat of heart, for her first
view of the city.
The shadow of the express, as the early sun came up, coursed like a
hound along the barrow-pits of the right-of-way, and quivered, as it
were, in noiseless impact against the stolid cedar fence-posts that
stood still and were whipped by in the guise of staring bumpkins as the
smart, swift train hummed on its way.
Daisy saw these effects at the edge of her travel-picture out of the
corner of her eye merely. Her attention was concentrated
forward--forward, to watch for the first white trimming of roof-tops on
the dewy green fabric of the prairie-rim. Hateful to her were the square
fields by the track, where phlegmatic men and teams moved up and down
the black fallow; hateful the whitewashed houses, the homely
poplar-clumps, the stacks of straw. Appurtenances, all, of the life
with which she had been surfeited (she thought): reminding her of cows
to be milked, of barnyard drudgery, of gawky, red-visaged, wholly
unpiquant boys, of men content to smoke and drawl away their rare hours
of ease.
Hateful! The term is too mild to express the immense energy of the
girl's distaste for the life she had, with youth's dash, pushed behind
her in one reckless thrust.
She was done with it. For good or for ill, she was done with it all, or
thought so, in these kinetic and dancing moments, as new leagues of her
unexplored earth uprolled along the endless ribbon of this two-railed
track of dreams. New leagues, yes--but, so far, no new scenery. The
stations she had passed, and continued to pass, were nothing but an
endless chain of Toddburns; the intervening reaches of farm land, no
more than linked replicas without number or variation, of the Nixon
farm. In spite of the "flyer" and its obvious achievement over distance,
Daisy Nixon at moments had the odd sensation that the track was
revolving beneath the car-wheels, treadmill-style, and the train merely
standing maddeningly still amid the old locale.
But there--there! A quick hypodermic needle of joy pricked her throat,
and Daisy caught her breath as the strong keen drug of excitement
tingled out to all her nerve-ends. A white kite-tail of houses seemed to
drop down and flicker, half in the air, at the point where the uprolling
earth revolved against the broad-open casement of the morning sky.
Appearing for a moment as a fantasy, it soon settled into a lengthening
white saw-blade of joined buildings, low in the distance, dividing the
solid green world from the dreamy firmament of a June dawn. Straight
toward it rushed the cleaving bullet of the train.
Her head out beneath the raised window-sash, her companion forgotten as
though he had never existed, Daisy wrapped herself in the joy of the
hour. The white house-line, advancing along the angle of its
perspective, broadened and took form and character, split into rays of
streets, discovered great chimneys with smoke-plumes, unveiled square
buildings in a caparison of glittering windows, began to live and move
and give forth human signs. The first workers were already in the
streets, for a goose-herd of city whistles was croaking out seven, vying
therein with the warning blast of the "flyer's" engine as, barely
slackening speed, it rushed along the cobweb of tracks, arrogant and
favored possessor, for the time being, of the right of way to the great
urban station in the heart of all.
"Well, kid," said the voice of Beatty, "how d'ye like it?"
"Fine, Freddie," Daisy replied, blithely. The comment was plain and
simple enough; but her eyes and cheeks told the rest, without need of
words.
Beatty stuck on his hat, tilting it a little.
"It ain't so bad, either," he conceded, grinning to himself, as he
picked up his smart leather suitcase and Daisy's battered telescope
grip, "not so bad, at that, kiddo."
With a hollow, drumlike roar, the train drew to a halt beneath a dome of
glass and iron; and Daisy and her companion, inching along behind the
file of passengers, at length emerged upon a cement walk, walled in on
either side by the bulk of varnished railway coaches. Passing along
this, descending a stair with an iron balustrade, and proceeding through
a great, busy, and echoing rotunda with a ceiling almost as far away as
a sky, Daisy and her companion emerged upon a stretch of granolithic
pavement.
Beyond the curb, a bevy of bus-drivers from city hotels crowed like a
flock of roosters--the surmounting voice in this bedlam being that of a
sandy-mustached old-timer, whose vehicle was labelled "Imperial Hotel."
By his hind-wheel he stood, moving nothing but the hinges of his jaws;
and to see his mouth open to its red limit was to be filled with
consternation.
"Imm-Peary-ail Hoat'l!" he sang, his eyes looking nonchalantly up and
away, with something of the expression he used to wear when scouting the
sky for signs of rain, in the old farming days before he became poet
laureate of the city's pioneer hotel.
"Why--look who's here, will you!" The exclamation was Beatty's, as he
stopped alongside the scratched old bus. "This is him, Mrs. Beatty--old
Jim-Jam Hogle. Can you take a passenger, J. J.?"
Mr. Hogle, without ceasing his vocal offices for so much as the fraction
of a moment, let his eyes flicker down over Beatty with no sign of
recognition, returned his gaze again to its former direction above the
depot roof, and jerked his thumb casually toward the interior of his
craft. Beatty handed the girl in, climbed in after her, and set down the
suitcase and grip. No others entered; and presently Mr. Hogle, turning
from his post by the wheel-rim and glancing inscrutably in at Daisy as
he passed the glass panel behind where his two passengers sat, unsnapped
and threw in his iron hitching-weight, climbed to his high seat, and
rattled away.
Daisy Nixon had never before seen such crowds nor such coachmanship.
With the horses trotting at a good speed, the old teamster wound in and
out by motor-trucks, autos, street-cars, horse-drays, and thronging
pedestrians, as smoothly, swiftly and carelessly as though he had the
whole street to himself. The traffic grew less dense as they passed out
of the vicinity of the depot, crossed a corner where the car-tracks met
at right angles, and, after bowling for a block or two down the city's
main thoroughfare, turned down a side street and drew up at the door of
a hoary frame hotel, its white-painted two-tier piazza weathered to a
dingy gray.
Beatty and Daisy descended; and the old bus-driver, after first hitching
the team to the weight, followed with the grips.
"You wait in the hall here, while I go an' dicker with the clerk, dear,"
said Beatty, ostentatiously, "I'll be right back."
Daisy, looking about her curiously, encountered suddenly the eye of Mr.
Hogle, standing up the hall, out of sight of the hotel office. The eye
had been trying for some moments to catch hers; and, now that it had
succeeded, Mr. Hogle raised a huge forefinger, stained indelibly with
harness-oil, and beckoned. Daisy went over briskly.
"_Missis_ Beatty, hey?" said Mr. Hogle, toning his great voice to a low
interrogative rumble.
Daisy nodded a careless affirmative. It was none of his business. She
felt able to take care of this point herself, when the time should
arrive.
"Like hell you are," said the unmincing Mr. Hogle, "ner wun't be. Break
away from him as soon's as you can--that's if it ain't too late already.
I know _him_."
Daisy dimpled; raising her chin challengingly, after a manner she had.
But she did not answer.
"I guess you're all right yet," said Mr. Hogle, after a shrewd fatherly
glance, "an' I see you're one of them confident kind. Them's the ones
that gets ketched easiest. Now you'll mind what I told you--won't you,
Missie?"
Daisy, regarding her adviser with dancing eyes, bobbed her chin up and
down in mock docility; and Mr. Hogle, shaking his head pessimistically,
went out to put away his team.
"What was that old geezer saying?" said Beatty, coming out of the office
as the old man went outside.
"I--I'm sure I don't know," said Daisy, gravely, "I think he was trying
to make love to me, Freddie."
"Wants to get his can beat off, eh?" remarked Beatty, carelessly; "well,
what-oh-what does my little girlie want worst, right now?"
"Breakfast," replied Daisy, plumply; ducking roguishly to avoid the
caress her questioner, imagining _that_ was the thing she "wanted
worst," sought to bestow.
"A-all right," said Beatty, swallowing his pique; "we'll go and see if
they can scare us up some poached-two-on, right now. Then 'm going to
take my baby out an' show her the best time _she_ ever had, in all her
young life--eh?"
"M'h'm," murmured Daisy, smiling to herself, as she followed her
companion into the dining-room.
Breakfast that morning was a notable affair, a milestone in Daisy
Nixon's days. Not because there was anything novel or striking about the
garniture of the Imperial Hotel dining-room, which was a plain homely
place, differing little from the eating-room of the Jubilee House in
Toddburn--but because there hummed, and called, and clanged, and
whistled through the open windows the multitudinous sounds of this new
urban life into which she had, as it were, plunged headlong. Daisy
listened absently to Beatty's chatter, conceding him an occasional
dimple or smile; but otherwise almost forgot him until, as the meal
ended, he laid his hand, hot and moist, over hers, and said:
"Well, how does my little-one feel about it now?"
Daisy glanced down at his white-pored hand, with its cigarette-yellowed
finger-tips and outstanding blue veins. Then she looked up at him, and
leaned one pretty cheek coaxingly close.
"You's baby feels ashamed in this old waist and skirt and hat," she
said, softly; "ain't you going to get her some nice things to be
married in?"
Beatty's hand squeezed hers.
"Your Freddie sure will do that for you," he said. "Let's go upstairs
now, and figure out what we'll need."
Daisy suffered him to pull her out of her chair by the hand he held.
Still retaining it, he led her out of the dining-room, along the hall,
and up the stairway. At the top, she halted--fetching her companion, who
had kept right on going, to a standstill with a jerk.
"Come on, come on," he said, making his tone matter-of-course, "the room
is No. 19."
"What's the number of _my_ room?" said Daisy, regarding him pleasantly
but with a kind of odd under-gleam in her eyes.
"Y--your room!" Even Beatty, the inured, was embarrassed by that
searching, direct look. "Why, I--I--darned if I remember the number."
Daisy continued to look at him a moment; then the shine in her eyes was
succeeded by a twinkle, and this by a promising, coaxing side-glance.
"Well, then, let's go into the women's sitting-room, Freddie--this
time."
Beatty knew when to yield a point--so he flattered himself.
"All right, Sweetest," he said, "you're the doctor--always."
They passed into the "ladies' parlor," which was empty, except for a
few articles of faded furniture, among which a new red settee in one
corner glowed with a preternatural brilliance. Beatty sat on the red
settee and drew the girl down beside him.
"Somebody got a kiss for her Freddie?" he said, his lips loosely apart
and wrinkles springing into view at the sides of his nostrils.
"Oh, I--do' know," Daisy dropped her head a little; "let's just talk.
It's nice to sit together an' talk, when we love each other so, isn't
it?"
Beatty's answer to this was to thrust his arm about her waist, push his
palm beneath her chin, and pull up her face toward his. The girl
resisted at first; then, with a motion of yielding, laid her head back
on his shoulder and raised her lips. Beatty kissed her, not reverently
but roughly; then kissed her again; then again and again: burying his
mouth into hers. A little hand came up and caressed his neck; then
slipped down within his coat and rested as it were, upon his
heart--moving softly, as though feeling for its beats.
Then hand and girl and all tore suddenly and strongly away--and Daisy
Nixon was upon her feet, her cheeks glowing like fire, laughing as she
held up the leather purse she had taken from his pocket.
"It was the only way!" she cried, breathlessly and sparklingly, as he
sat agape; "the only way to get out of you what you owe to me, for the
things I have let you think about me, Mr. Fred Beatty. You thought I
didn't know all about you--what you did to poor Pearlie Brodie, making
her the talk of Toddburn, with worse to come yet--a poor motherless
girl, who was given up by a decent fellow that would have married her,
if it hadn't been for you. You thought I didn't know. Yes: you thought I
'fell for you', as you'd call it. But I'll tell you what I did, an' you
can put it in your pipe an' smoke it, and I hope it'll do you good. I
needed you. I needed to get away from that place where I was wasting my
life, and I had no money--so I used you. I've met ginks like you before.
I could see through you from the first like a pane of glass--you poor,
miserable imitation of a man!
"Now, I'm going to take this money and use it, to keep me till I get a
job somewhere. Then I'm going to pay it back. But not to you--don't you
ever think it. I'm going to send it to Pearlie Brodie. She'll need it
badly enough, in a few months from now. She'd never have got it from you
straight--never in this world--so she'll get it through me. Now, you get
out of here! I've wasted too much breath talking to you. And keep this
in your memory-box: _I don't know you_! So don't speak to me, if I ever
have the bad luck to meet you again!"
The girl had barely finished speaking, when Beatty leaped at her,
grabbing for the purse which she held. But she stepped quickly
back--and, as he pressed in, gave him, with all the strength of her
virile young body, a push that sent him sprawling.
"You give me that money," Beatty said, his face pasty and mean with
fury, as he climbed to his feet and stood, slowly dusting off his
clothes; "that's all I want out o' you. Hand it over, or I'll go down
and phone for a constable, and have you taken to the police station.
"Yes--you will!" Daisy challenged. "I suppose you think no person around
Toddburn ever reads the city papers and notices what the law does to a
fellow that brings a girl sixteen years old to a hotel. Go down and
phone for the police, if you feel like it! I know who they'll take back
with them when they come, and it won't be me. And I'll tell you
something more, Mr. Smart Man: If you're not out of here in the next
three minutes or less, _I'll_ phone for the constable. It makes me sick
to look at you. I want to go and wash my mouth, too. It'll take a good
many washings to make it feel as clean as it did before _you_ touched
it. Get away from here!"
"Well," Beatty growled, after a moment, as a distant step down the hall
portended the coming of one of the hotel staff, probably attracted by
the sound of the raised voices and scuffling, "keep the money, then, you
blamed nickel's worth o' nothing. I'll get the worth of it out o' you
some other way, yet--you watch me! There's goin' to come a time when
you'll need me, an' you'd better fasten onto this," he took a card from
his pocket and tossed it down on the settee. "Till then, I'll bid you
'good-day'."
Therewith--in his intense self-reverence, half-expecting to be called
back before he reached the street-door--Mr. Frederick S. Beatty turned
on his heel and stalked out.
But Daisy did not call him back. Neither, be it said, did she hasten to
wash her mouth. As the slam of the door downstairs gave ostentatious
notice of Beatty's exit, she moved to the window, watching him up the
sidewalk with an odd, half-maternal look.
"That call-down may do you some good, Mr. Naughty man," she murmured;
"you've had too easy a time with girls--that's what ails you,
principally."