CHAPTER XII.
A RISE AND A FALL.
WHEN Emily looked again two of the strikers, one waving a white rag at the end of a pole, were advancing toward the limp bodies in the centre of the square. They made three trips. Neither shots nor shouts broke the silence. Soon the only evidences of the tragedy were the pools and streaks of blood on the flagging.
Camp was once more at his drawing, rapidly outlining a big sketch of the scene they had witnessed. “Good stuff, wasn’t it?” he said, looking up with an apologetic grin and flush. “It couldn’t have been better if it had been fixed for a theatre.”
“It’ll make a good story,” replied Emily, struggling with some success to assume the calmly professional air and tone. “I’m going to my room. If I hear any more shots, I’ll come again. When Mr. Holyoke returns, please tell him I’d like to see him.”
She had rushed through that hall an hour before, a panic-stricken girl. She returned a woman, confident of herself. She had seen; she had felt; she had lived. She sat at her table, and, with little hesitation, wrote. When she had been at work an hour and a half, Holyoke interrupted her.
“Oh, I see you’re busy,” he began.
“I wanted to say,” said Emily, “that I shall send a little about the trouble a while ago—quite independently of the news, you know. So, just write as if I were not here at all.”
“All right. They’ll want every line we can both send.” Holyoke looked at her with friendly anxiety. “You look tired,” he said, “as if you’d been under a strain. It must have been an awful experience for you, sitting here. Don’t bother to write anything. I’ll sign both our names to my despatch.”
“Thank you, but I couldn’t let you do that. What were the names of those people who were killed out in the square?”
“They were a puddler named Jack Farron, and his son Tom, and Tom’s wife. Tom got married only last week. She insisted on going out with him. They had been scouting, and had news that the militia were moving to take the strikers from the rear and rout them out of their position. You heard about the shooting?”
“No—I saw it,” said Emily. “Mr. Camp and I watched from the parlour window. Is there going to be more trouble?”
“Not for a good many hours. The ‘scabs’ retreated, and won’t come back until they’re sure the way is clear.”
Emily took up her pencil and looked at her paper. “I’ll call again later,” said Holyoke, as he departed. “You can file your despatch downstairs. The Postal telegraph office is in the hotel.”
She wrote about four thousand words, and went over her “copy” carefully three times. It did not please her, but she felt that she had told the facts, and that she had avoided “slopping over”—the great offence against which every newspaper man and woman who had given her advice had warned her. She filed the despatch at nine o’clock.
“We can put it on the wire at once,” said the telegraph manager. “We’ll get a loop straight into the Democrat office. We knew you people would be flocking here, and so we provided against a crush. We’ve got plenty of wires and operators.”
Emily ate little of the dinner that had been saved for her, and at each sudden crash from the kitchen where noisy servants were washing dishes, her nerves leaped and the blood beat heavily against her temples. She went back to the little reception room and stood at the window, looking out into the square. In the bright moonlight she saw the soldiers marching up and down before the entrance to the stockade. The open space between it and her was empty, and the soft light flooded round the great dark stains which marked the site of the tragedy.
“Why aren’t you in bed?” It was Marlowe’s voice, and it so startled her that she gave a low cry and clasped her clinched hands against her breast. She had been thinking of him. The death of those lovers, its reminder of the uncertainty of life and of the necessity of seizing happiness before it should escape forever, had brought him, or, rather, love with him as the medium, vividly into her mind.
“You frightened me—I’m seeing ghosts to-night,” she said. “How did you reach here when there is no train?”
“Several of us hired a special and came down—just an engine and tender. We fancied there might be more trouble. But it’s all over. The Union knows it can’t fight the whole State, and the Company is very apologetic for the killing of those people, especially the woman. Still, her death may have saved a long and bloody strike. That must have been an awful scene this afternoon.” He was talking absently. His eyes, his thoughts were upon her, slender, pale, yet golden.
Emily briefly described what she had seen.
“It’s a pity you didn’t telegraph an account of it. Your picture of it would have been better than Holyoke’s, even if you didn’t see the shooting.”
“But I did see it!”
Marlowe’s look became dazed. “What?” he said. “How? Where were you?”
“Upstairs—in the parlour. I was so fascinated that I forgot to be afraid. And a bullet came through the window.”
He made a gesture as if to catch her in his arms. Instead he took her hands and kissed them passionately.
“I never dreamed you would be actually in danger,” he said pleadingly. “I was heedless—I—heedless of you—you who are everything to me. Forgive me, dear.”
She leaned against the casement, her eyes fixed dreamily upon the sky, the moonlight making her face ethereal.
“Was I too abrupt?” he asked. “Have I offended in saying it again at this time?” His exaggerated, nervous anxiety struck him as absurd, for him, but he admitted that his unprecedented fear of what a woman might think of him was real.
“No,” she answered. “But—I must go. I’m very tired. And I’m beginning to feel queer and weak.” She put out her hand. “Good-night,” she said, her eyes down and her voice very low.
When she was in her room she half-staggered to the bed. “I’ll rest a moment before I undress,” she thought, and lay down. She did not awaken until broad daylight. She looked at her watch. “Ten minutes to twelve—almost noon!” she exclaimed. She had been asleep twelve hours. As she took a bath and dressed again, she was in high spirits. “It’s good to be alive,” she said to herself, “to be alive, to be young, to be free, to be loved, and to—to like it.”
Was she in love with Marlowe? She thought so—or, at least, she was about to be. But she did not linger upon that. The luxury of being loved in a way that made her intensely happy was enough. She liked to think of his arms clasping her. She liked him to touch her. She liked to remember that look of exalted passion in his eyes, and to know that it was glowing there for her.
The late afternoon brought news that the strike had been settled by a compromise. Within an hour the New York special correspondents were on the way home. At Philadelphia the next morning Emily came into the restaurant car. “This way, Miss Bromfield,” said the steward, with a low bow. She wondered how he knew her. She noticed that the answering smiles she got as she spoke to the newspaper men she had met at Furnaceville were broader than the occasion seemed to warrant. She glanced at herself in the mirror to see whether omission or commission in dressing was the cause. Then she took the seat Marlowe had reserved for her, opposite himself.
“There were three of us in the dressing-room making it as disagreeable for each other as possible after the usual feminine fashion,” she began, and her glance fell upon the first page of the Democrat of the day before, which Marlowe was holding up. She gasped and stared. “Why!” she exclaimed, the red flaring up in her face, “where did they get it? It’s disgraceful!”
“It” was a large reproduction of a pen and ink sketch of herself. Under “it” in big type was the line, “Emily Bromfield, the Democrat’s Correspondent at the Strike.” Beside “it” under a “scare-head” was the main story of the strike, and the last line of the heading read, “By Emily Bromfield.” Then followed her account of what she had seen from the parlour window. What with astonishment, pleasure, and mortification over this sudden brazen blare of publicity for herself and her work, she was on the verge of a nervous outburst.
“Be careful,” said Marlowe. “They’re all looking at you. What I want to know is where did they get that sketch of you in a dreamy, thoughtful attitude at a desk covered with papers. It looks like an idyll of a woman journalist. All the out-of-town papers will be sure to copy that. But where did our people get it?”
Just then Camp came through on his way to the smoking car. “Who drew this, Camp?” asked Marlowe, stopping him.
Camp looked embarrassed and grinned. “I made it one day in the office,” he said to Emily. “They must have fished it out of my desk in the art room.”
Emily did not wish to hurt his feelings, so she concealed her irritation. Marlowe said: “A splendid piece of work! Lucky they knew about it and got it out.”
“Thanks,” said Camp, looking appealingly at Emily. “You’re not offended?” he asked.
“It gave me a turn,” Emily replied evasively. Camp took her smile for approval, thanked her and went on.
“You don’t altogether like your fame?” said Marlowe with a teasing expression. “But you’ll soon get used to it, and then you’ll be cross if you look in the papers and don’t find your name or a picture of yourself. That’s the way ‘newspaper notoriety’ affects everybody. They first loathe, then endure, then pursue.”
“Don’t mock at me, please. It’s good in a business way, isn’t it? And I’m sure the picture is not bad—in fact, it makes me look very—intellectual. And as they printed my despatch, that can’t have been so horribly bad. Altogether I’m beginning to be reconciled and shall presently be delighted.”
“You can get copies of the paper ready for mailing in the business office—a reduction on large quantities,” said Marlowe. “And you won’t need to unwrap them to mark where your friends must look.”
Emily was glancing at her story with pretended indifference. “It makes more than I thought,” she said carelessly, giving him the paper.
“Vanity! vanity! You know you are dying to read every word of it. I’ll wager you’ll go through it a dozen times once you are alone. We always do—at first.”
“Well, why not? It’s a harmless vanity and it ought to be called honest pride. And—I owe it to you—all to you. And I’m glad it is to you that I owe it.”
At the office she was the centre of interest—for a few hours. “Isn’t she a perfect picture?” said Miss Farwell to Miss Gresham, as they watched her receiving congratulations. “And she doesn’t exaggerate herself. She probably knows that it was her looks and her dresses that got her the assignment and that make them think she’s wonderful. She really didn’t write it so very well. You could tell all the way through that it was a beginner, couldn’t you?”
“Of course it wasn’t a work of genius,” admitted Miss Gresham. “But it was very good indeed.”
“A story like that simply tells itself.” Miss Farwell used envy’s most judicial tone. “It couldn’t be spoiled.”
Miss Gresham and Emily went uptown together. “I’ve read my special several times,” said Emily, “and I don’t feel so set up over it as I did at first. I suspect they would have rewritten it if it had not got into the office late.”
“You did wonderfully well,” Miss Gresham assured her. “And you’ve put yourself in a position where your work will be noted and, if it’s good, recognised. The hardest thing in the world is to get disentangled from the crowd so that those above are able to see one.”
The routine of petty assignments into which she sank again was wearisome and distasteful. She had expected a better kind of work. Instead, she got the same work as before. As Coleman was giving her one of these trifles, he looked cautiously round to make sure that no one was within hearing distance, then said in a low voice: “Don’t blame me for giving you poor assignments. I have orders from Mr. Stilson—strict orders.”
Emily did not like Coleman’s treachery to his superior, but her stronger feeling was anger against Stilson. “Why does he dislike me?” she thought. “What a mean creature he is. It must be some queer sort of jealous envy.” She laughed at herself for this vanity. But she had more faith in it than she thought, and it was with the latent idea of getting it a prop that she repeated to Miss Gresham what Coleman had said. “Why do you think Mr. Stilson told him that?” she asked.
“I don’t know, I can’t imagine,” replied Miss Gresham. She reflected a moment and then turned her head so that Emily could not see her eyes. She thought she had guessed the reason. “Stilson is trying to save her from the consequences of her vanity,” she said to herself, “I had better not tell her, as it would do no good and might make her dislike me.” And watching Emily more closely, she soon discovered that premature triumph had been a little too much for her good sense. Emily was entertaining an opinion of herself far higher than the facts warranted. “Stilson is doing her a service,” Miss Gresham thought, as Emily complained from time to time of trifling assignments. “He’ll restore her point of view presently.”
After a month of this Stilson called her into his office. He stood at the window, tall and stern—he was taller than Marlowe and dark; and while Marlowe’s expression was one of good-humoured, rather cynical carelessness, his was grave and haughty.
Without looking at her he began: “Miss Bromfield, we’ve been giving you a very important kind of work—the small items. They are the test of a newspaper’s standard of perfection. I’m afraid you don’t appreciate their importance.”
“I’m doing the best I can,” said Emily coldly.
He frowned, but she watched him narrowly, and saw that he was suffering acute embarrassment. “It isn’t easy for me to speak to you,” he went on. “But—it’s necessary. At first you did well. Now—you’re not doing well.”
There was a long, a painful silence. Then he suddenly looked at her. And in spite of herself, his expression melted resentment and obstinacy. “You can do well again,” he said. “Please try.”
The tone of the “Please try” made her feel his fairness and friendliness as she had not felt it before. “Thank you,” she said impulsively. “I will try.” She paused at the door and turned. “Thank you,” she said again, earnestly. He was bending over his desk and seemed to be giving his attention to his papers. But Emily understood him well enough now to know that he was trying to hide his embarrassment. When she was almost hidden from him by the closing door, she heard him begin to speak. “I beg your pardon,” she said, showing her head round the edge of the door, “What did you say?”
“No matter,” he replied, and she thought she saw, rather than heard, something very like a sigh.