CHAPTER VIII.
AMONG A STRANGE PEOPLE.
AS the office boy, after inquiry, showed Emily into Marlowe’s office on the third floor of the Democrat building, he was putting on his coat to receive her.
“Good morning,” he said, in a business tone. “You’ll forgive me. I’m in a rush to get away to Saratoga this evening—for the Republican convention. Let’s go to the City Editor at once, if you please.”
They went down a long hall to a door marked “News Room—Morning Edition.” Marlowe held open the door and she found herself in a large room filled with desks, at many of which were men in their shirt sleeves writing. They crossed to a door marked, “City Editor.” Marlowe knocked.
“Come in,” an irritated voice responded, “if you must. But don’t stay long.”
“What a bear,” said Marlowe cheerfully, not lowering his voice. “It’s a lady, Bobbie. So you must sheathe your claws.”
“Bobbie”—or Mr. Stilson—rose, an apology in his strong-featured, melancholy face.
“Pardon me, Miss Bromfield,” he said, when he had got her name. “They’ve been knocking at that door all day long, and coming in and driving me half mad with their nonsense.”
“Excuse me,” said Marlowe, “I must get away. This is the young woman I talked to you about. Don’t mind his manner, Miss Bromfield. He’s a ‘soft one’ in reality, and puts on the burrs to shield himself. Good-bye, good luck.” And he was gone, Emily noted vaguely that his manner toward “Bobbie” was a curious mixture of affection, admiration, and audacity—“like the little dog with the big one,” she thought.
Emily seated herself in a chair with newspapers in it but less occupied in that way than any other horizontal part of the little office. Stilson was apparently examining her with disapproval. But as she looked directly into his eyes, she saw that Marlowe had told the truth. They were beautiful with an expression of manly gentleness. And she detected the same quality in his voice, beneath a surface tone of abruptness.
“I can’t give you a salary,” he said. “We start our beginners on space. We pay seven and a half a column. You’ll make little at first. I hope Marlowe warned you against this business.”
“No,” replied Emily, doing her best to make her manner and voice pleasing. “On the contrary, he was enthusiastic.”
“He ought to be ashamed of himself. However, I suppose you’ve got to make a living. And if a woman must work, or thinks she must, she can’t discover the superiority of matrimony at its worst more quickly in any other business.”
Stilson pressed an electric button and said to the boy who came: “Tell Mr. Coleman I wish to speak to him.”
A fat young man, not well shaved, his shirt sleeves rolled up and exposing a pair of muscular, hairy arms to the elbows and above, appeared in the doorway with a “Yes, sir,” spoken apologetically.
“Miss Bromfield, Mr. Coleman. Here is the man who makes the assignments. He’ll give you something to do. Let her have the desk in the second row next to the window, Coleman,” Stilson nodded, opened a newspaper and gave it absorbed attention.
Emily was irritated because he had not risen or spoken the commonplaces of courtesy; but she told herself that such details of manners could not be kept up in the rush of business. She followed Coleman dejectedly to the table-desk assigned her. He called a poorly preserved young woman of perhaps twenty-five, sitting a few rows away, and introduced her as “Miss Farwell, one of the society reporters.” Emily looked at her with the same covert but searching curiosity with which she was examining Emily.
“You are new?” Miss Farwell asked.
“Very new and very frightened.”
“It is terrible for us women, isn’t it?” Miss Farwell’s plaintive smile uncovered irregular teeth heavily picked out with gold. “But you’ll find it not so unpleasant here after you catch on. They try to make it as easy as they can for women.”
Emily’s thoughts were painful as she studied her fellow-journalist, “Why do women get themselves up in such rubbish?” she said to herself as she noted Miss Farwell’s slovenly imitation of an imported model. “And why don’t they make themselves clean and neat? and why do they let themselves get fat and pasty?” Miss Farwell’s hair was in strings and thin behind the ears. Her hands were not well looked after. Her face had a shine that was glossiest on her nose and chin. Her dress, with its many loose ends of ruffle and puff, was far from fresh. She looked a discouraged young woman of the educated class. And her querulous voice, a slight stoop in her shoulders, and soft, projecting, pathetic eyes combined to give her the air of one who feels that she is out of her station, but strives to bear meekly a doom of being down-trodden and put upon. “If ever she marries,” thought Emily, “she will be humbly grateful at first, and afterwards a nagger.”
In the hope of seeing a less depressing object, Emily sent her glance straying about the room. The men had suspended work and were watching her with interest and frank pleasure. “No wonder,” she thought, as she remembered her own neatness, the freshness and simplicity of her blue linen gown—she had been able to get it at a fashionable shop for fifty dollars because it was a model and the selling season was ended. In the far corner sat another woman. Miss Farwell, noting on whom Emily’s glance paused, said: “That is Miss Gresham. She’s a Vassar girl who came on the paper last year. She’s a favorite with Mr. Stilson, so she gets on.”
Miss Gresham looked up from her writing and Miss Farwell beckoned. Emily’s spirits rose as Miss Gresham came. “This,” she thought, “is nearer my ideal of an intelligent, self-respecting working woman,” Miss Gresham was dressed simply but fitly—a properly made shirt-waist, white and clean and completed at the neck with a French collar; a short plain black skirt that revealed presentable feet in presentable boots. She shook hands in a friendly business-like way, and Emily thought; “She would be pretty if her hair were not so severely brushed back. As it is, she is handsome—and so clean.”
“I was just going out to lunch. Won’t you come with me?” asked Miss Gresham.
“I don’t know what I’m permitted to do.” Emily looked toward Mr. Coleman’s desk. He was watching her and now called her. As she approached, his grin became faintly flirtatious.
“Here is a little assignment for you,” he said graciously, extending one of his unpleasant looking arms with a cutting from the Evening Journal held in the large, plump hand. As he spoke the door of Mr. Stilson’s office immediately behind him opened, and Mr. Stilson appeared.
“What are you doing there?” he demanded.
Coleman jumped guiltily. “I was just going to start Miss Bromfield.” His voice was a sort of wheedling whine, like that of a man persuading a fractious horse on which he is mounted and of which he is afraid.
“Let me see.” Stilson took the cutting. “Won’t do. Send her with Miss Gresham.” And he turned away without looking at Emily or seeming conscious of her presence. But she sent a grateful glance after him. “How much more sensible,” she thought, “than turning me out to wander helplessly about alone.”
Miss Gresham’s assignment was a national convention of women’s clubs—“A tame affair,” said she, “unless the delegates get into a wrangle. If men squabble and lose their tempers and make fools of themselves, it’s taken as a matter of course. But if women do the very same thing in the very same circumstances, it’s regarded as proof of their folly and lack of capacity.”
“I suppose the men delight in seeing the women writhe under criticism,” said Emily.
“Well, it isn’t easy to endure criticism,” replied Miss Gresham. “But it must be borne, and it does one good, whether it’s just or unjust. It teaches one to realise that this world is not a hothouse.”
“I wish it were—sometimes,” confessed Emily. The near approach of “the struggle for existence” made her faint-hearted.
Miss Gresham could not resist a smile as she looked at Emily, in face, in dress, in manner, the “hothouse” woman. “It could be for you, if you wished it.”
“But I don’t,” said Emily, with sudden energy and a change of expression that brought out the strong lines of her mouth and chin. And Miss Gresham began to suspect that there were phases to her character other than sweetness and a fondness for the things immemorially feminine. “I purpose to learn to like the open air,” she said, and looked it.
Miss Gresham nodded approvingly. “The open air is best, in the end. It develops every plant according to its nature. The hothouses stunt the best plants, and disguise lots of rank weeds.”
As they were coming away from the convention, Miss Gresham said: “Instead of handing in your story to the City Desk, keep it, and we’ll go over it together this evening, after I’m through.”
“Thank you—it’s so good of you to take the trouble. Yes, I’ll try.” Emily hesitated and grew red.
“What is it?” asked Miss Gresham, encouragingly.
“I was thinking about—this evening. I never thought of it before—do you write at night? And how do you get home?”
“Certainly I write at night. And I go home as other business people do. I take the car as far as it will take me, then I walk.”
“I shall be frightened—horribly frightened.”
“For a few evenings, but you’ll soon be used to it. You don’t know what a relief it will be to feel free to go about alone. Of course, they’re careful at the office what kind of night-assignments they give women. But I make it a point not to let them think of my sex any more than is absolutely necessary. It’s a poor game to play in the end—to shirk on the plea of sex. I think most of the unpleasant experiences working-women have are due to that folly—dragging their sex into their business.”
Emily felt and looked dismal as she sat at her desk, struggling to put on paper her idea of what the newspaper would want of what she had seen and heard. She wasted so many sheets of paper in trying to begin that she was ashamed to look at the heap they made on the floor beside her. Also, she felt that every one was watching her and secretly laughing at her. After three hours of wretchedness she had produced seven loosely written pages—“enough to fill columns,” she thought, but in reality a scant half-column. “I begin to understand why Miss Farwell looks so mussy,” she said to herself, miserably eyeing her stained hands and wilted dress, and thinking of her hair, fiercely bent upon hanging out and down. She was so nervous that if she had been alone she would have cried.
“It is impossible,” she thought. “I can never do it. I’m of no account. What a weak, foolish creature I am.”
She looked round, with an idea of escaping, to hide herself and never return. But Miss Gresham was between her and the door. Besides, had she not burned her bridges behind her? She simply must, must, must make the fight.
She remembered Marlowe’s story of Cæsar and the pilot—“I can’t more than fail and die,” she groaned, “and if I am to live, I must work.” Then she laughed at herself for taking herself so seriously. She thought of Marlowe—“What would he say if he could see me now?” She went through her list of acquaintances, picturing to herself how each would look and what each would say at sight of her sitting there—a working-girl, begrimed by toil. She thought of Wayland—the contrast between her present position and what it would have been had she married him. Then she recalled the night he seized her and kissed her—her sensation of loathing, how she had taken a bath afterward and had gone to bed in the dark with her neck where he had kissed her smarting like a poisoned sore.
“You take the Madison Avenue car?” Miss Gresham interrupted, startling her so that she leaped in her chair. “We’ll go together and read what you’ve written.”
Miss Gresham went through it without changing expression. At the end she nodded reassuringly. “It’s a fairly good essay. Of course you couldn’t be expected to know the newspaper style.”
And she went on to point out the crudities—how it might have been begun, where there might have been a few lines of description, why certain paragraphs were too stilted, “too much like magazine literature.” She gave Emily a long slip of paper on which was about a newspaper column of print. “Here’s a proof of my story. I wrote it before dinner and it was set up early. Of course, it’s not a model. But after you leave me you can read it over, and perhaps it may give you some points. Then you might try—not to-night, but to-morrow morning—to write your story again. That’s the easiest and quickest way to catch on.”
At Emily’s corner Miss Gresham said, “I’ll take you home this once,” and left the car with her. As they went through the silent, empty street, their footsteps lightly echoing from house wall to house wall, Emily forgot her article and her other worriments in the foreboding of these midnight journeys alone. “It seems to me that I simply can’t,” she thought. “And yet I simply must—and of course I will. If only I had been doing it for a month, or even a week, instead of having to look forward to the first time.”
Miss Gresham took her to her door, then strode away down the street—an erect, resolute figure, business-like from head to heels. Emily looked after her with rising courage, “What a brave, fine girl she is,” she thought, “how intelligent, how capable. She is the kind of woman I have dreamt about.”
And she went in with a lightening heart.