MR. GAMMELL PRESUMES.
MR. WAKEMAN, under whom she had been working comfortably, was now
displaced by a Mr. Gammell, whom she had barely seen and of whom she
had heard alarming tales. He had been made City Editor when Stilson was
promoted. Tireless and far-sighted and insatiable as a news-gatherer,
he drove those under him “as if eating and sleeping had been
abolished,” one of them complained. But he made the _Democrat’s_ local
news the best in New York, and this gradually impressed the public and
raised the circulation. Gammell was a sensationalist--“the yellowest
yet,” the reporters called him--and Stilson despised him. But Stilson
was too capable a journalist not to appreciate his value. He encouraged
him and watched him closely, taking care to keep from print the daily
examples of his reckless “overzeal.”
As the Sunday edition ought to be the most profitable issue of a big
newspaper, the proprietors decided to transfer Gammell to it, after
cautioning him to remember Stilson’s training and do nothing to destroy
the “character” of the paper. Gammell began with a “shake-up” of his
assistants. Emily, just returned from a midsummer vacation, was
opening her desk, when another woman of the Sunday staff, Miss Venable,
whom she had never seen at the office this early before, began to tell
her the dire news. “He’s good-looking and polite,” she said, “but he
has no respect for feelings and no consideration about the quantity of
work. He treats us as if we were so many machines.”
“That isn’t strange or startling, is it?” said Emily indifferently.
“He’s like most successful men. I always feared Mr. Wakeman was too
easy-going, too good to last. I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a
change before.”
“Just wait till you’ve had an experience with him. He told me--he
called me in this morning and said with a polite grin--what a horrid
grin he has!--that he was pained that I did not like my position on the
Sunday staff. And when I protested that I did, he said, ‘It’s good of
you to say so, Miss Venable, but your work tells a truth which you are
too considerate of me to speak.’ And then he went on to show that he
has been sneaking and spying on me about reading novels in office hours
and staying out too long at lunch time. Think of that!”
“He may be watching you now,” suggested Emily.
“No--he’s--good gracious, there he is!” and she fled to her desk.
Emily looked round and saw a notably slender, pale man of middle height
with the stoop of a student and restless, light-brown eyes. He was
walking rapidly, glancing from side to side and nervously swinging his
keys by their chain. He stopped at her desk and smiled--agreeably Emily
thought.
“Miss Bromfield?” he said.
“Yes. And you are Mr. Gammell?”
“I am that brute--that ogre--that Simon Legree,” he replied, with a
satirical smile which barely altered the line of his thin, pale lips
under his small moustache. “Will you come into my office, please--at
your leisure?” Emily thought she had never heard a polite phrase sound
so cynically hollow.
She rose and followed him. He began at once and talked swiftly, now
cutting up sheets of blank paper with a huge pair of shears, now
snapping the fingers of one hand against the knuckles of the other, now
twitching his eyes, now ruffling and smoothing his hair. He showed that
he had gone through her work for several months past and that he knew
both her strong points and her defects. He gave her a clear conception
first of what he did not want, then of what he did want.
As they talked she became uncomfortable. She admired his ability, but
she began to dislike his personality. And she soon understood why. He
was showing more and more interest in her personal appearance and less
and less interest in her work. Like all good-looking women, Emily was
too used to the sort of glances he was giving her to feel or pretend
to feel deep resentment. But it made her uneasy to reflect on what
those glances from a man in his position and of his audacity portended.
“I shall have trouble with him,” she was thinking, before they had
been together half an hour. And she became formal and studied in her
courtesy. But this seemed to have not this slightest effect upon him.
“However,” he said in conclusion, “don’t take what I’ve been saying too
seriously. You may do as you please. I’m sure I’ll like whatever you
do. And if you feel that you have too much work, just tell me and I’ll
turn it over to some one who was made to drudge.”
He was at her desk several times during the day. The last time he
brought a bundle of German and French illustrated papers and pointed
out to her in one of them a doubtful picture and the still more
doubtful jest printed underneath. He watched her closely. She looked
and read without a change of colour or expression. “I don’t think we
would reprint it,” she said indifferently, turning the page.
As he walked away she had an internal shudder of repulsion. “How crude
he is!” she thought. “He has evidently been well educated and well
bred. Yet he can’t distinguish among people. He thinks they’re all cut
from the same pattern, each for some special use of his. Yes, I shall
have trouble with him--and that soon.”
He hung about her desk, passing and repassing, often pausing and
getting as near as possible to her, compelling her pointedly to move.
She soon had his character from his own lips. She was discussing with
him a “human interest” story from a Colorado paper--about love and
self-sacrifice in a lone miner’s hut faraway among the mountains. “That
will catch the crowd,” he said. “We’ll spread it for a page with a big,
strong picture.”
“Yes, it’s a beautiful story,” said she. “No one could fail to be
touched by it.”
“It’s easy to make the mob weep,” he answered with a sneer. “What fools
they are! As if there was anything in that sort of slush.”
Emily was simply listening, was not even looking comment.
“I don’t suppose that anybody ever unselfishly cared for anybody
else since the world began,” he went on. “It’s always vanity and
self-interest. The difference between the mob and the intelligent few
is that the mob is hypocritical and timid, while intelligent people
frankly reach out for what they want.”
“Your scheme of life has at least the merit of directness,” said Emily,
turning away to go to her desk.
On the plea that he wished to discuss work with her he practically
compelled her to dine with him two or three times a week. While his
lips were busy with adroit praises of her ability his eyes were
appealing to her vanity as a woman--and he was not so unskilful at that
mode of attack as he had seemed at first. He exploited her articles in
the Sunday magazine, touching them up himself and--as she could not
but see--greatly improving them. He asked Stilson to raise her salary,
and it was done.
She did not discourage him. She was passive, maintaining her
business-like manner. But after leaving him she always had a feeling
of depression and self-disapproval. She liked the display of her work,
she liked the sense of professional importance which he gave her, she
did not dislike his flatteries. She tried to force herself to look at
the truth, to see that all he said and did arose from the basest of
motives, unredeemed by a single trace of an adornment of sentiment.
But, though she pretended to herself that she understood him perfectly,
her vanity was insidiously aiding her strong sense of the politic to
draw her on. “What can I do?” she pleaded to herself. “I must earn my
living. I must assume, as long as I possibly can, that everything is
all right.”
While she was thus drifting, helpless to act and desperately trying
to hope that a crisis was not coming, she met Stilson one morning in
the entrance-hall of the _Democrat_ Building. As always, his sombre
expression lighted and he stopped her.
“How are you getting on with Gammell?” he asked, in his voice that
exactly suited the resolute set of his jaw and the aggressive forward
thrust of his well-shaped head.
At Gammell’s name she became embarrassed, almost ashamed. No one knew
better than she what a powerful effect Stilson had upon sensitive
people in making them guiltily self-conscious if there was reason
for it. She could not help dropping her eyes, and her confusion was
not decreased by the fear that he would misconstrue her manner into a
confession worse than the truth. But she was showing less of her mind
than she thought.
“Oh--splendidly,” she replied. “I like him much better than at first.
He makes us work and that has been well for me.”
“Um--yes.” He looked relieved. “And I think it excellent work. Good
morning.”
Emily gazed after his tall strong figure with the expression that
is particularly good to see in eyes that are looking unobserved at
another’s back. “He knows Gammell,” she thought, “and had an idea he
might be annoying me. He wished to give me a chance to show that I
needed aid, if I did. What a strange man--and how much of a man!”
When she saw Gammell half an hour later, she unconsciously brought
herself up sharply. She was as distant as the circumstances of their
business relations permitted. But Gammell, deceived by her former
tolerance and by his vanity and his hopes, thought she was practising
another form of coquetry upon him. As she retreated, he pursued. The
first time they were alone, he put his arm about her and kissed her.
Emily had heard that women working in offices with men invariably have
some such experience as this sooner or later. And now, here she was,
face to face with the choice between self-respect and the enmity of
the man who could do her the most harm in the most serious way--her
living. And in fairness she admitted, perhaps more generously than
Gammell deserved, that she was herself in part responsible for his
conduct.
She straightened up--they were bending over several drawings spread
upon a table--and stiffened herself. She looked at him with a cold and
calm dignity that made him feel as futile and foolish as if he had
found himself embracing a marble statue. Anger he could have combated.
Appeal he would have disregarded. But this frozen tranquillity made
him drop his arm from her waist and begin confusedly to handle the
drawings. Emily’s heart beat wildly, and she strove in vain to control
herself so that she could begin to talk of the work in hand as if his
attempt had not been. His nervousness changed to anger. Instead of
letting the matter drop, he said sneeringly: “Oh, you needn’t pretend.
You understood perfectly all along. You were willing to use me. And
now----”
“Please don’t!” Emily’s voice was choked. She had an overpowering sense
of degradation. “It is my fault, I admit. I did understand in a way.
But I tried to make myself believe that we were just friends, like two
men.”
“What trash!” said Gammell contemptuously. “You never believed it
for an instant. You knew that there never was, and never will be,
a friendship between a young man and a young woman unless each is
thoroughly unattractive to the other.”
He was plucking up courage and Emily saw that he was mentally arranging
a future renewal of his attempt. “I must settle it now, once for all,
at any cost,” she said to herself, with the resoluteness that had never
failed her in crises. Then aloud, to him: “At any rate, we understand
each the other now. You know that I have not the faintest interest in
your plan for mixing sentiment and business.” Her look and tone were
convincing as they cut deep into his vanity. She turned to the drawings
and resumed the discussion of them. In a very few minutes he left her.
“He hates me,” she thought, “and I can’t blame him. I wonder what he’ll
do to revenge himself?”
But he gave no sign. When they met again and thereafter he treated
her with exaggerated courtesy and no longer annoyed her. “He’s
self-absorbed,” she concluded, “and too cool-headed to waste time and
energy in revenges.”
But when her articles were no longer displayed, were on the contrary
“cut” or altogether “side-tracked,” she began to think that probably
the pinched-in look of his mouth and nose and at the back of his neck
did not belie him. She felt an ominous, elusive insecurity. She debated
asking Stilson to transfer her to some other department.
But she hesitated to go to Stilson. For she now knew the whole secret
of his looks and actions, of which she had been thinking curiously ever
since the morning of their chance meeting in the Park.