CHAPTER XXV.
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.