Spring burst upon New York with a warm breath and a rush of green. The gentle season folded the city lovingly in its arms. Everywhere were the evidences of its magic presence. The trees shimmered with green, shrubbery that peeped through iron fence grillings vigorously put forth new leaves, patches of grass in the areaways of brownstone houses turned freshly verdant, hotels upon the Avenue took on a brave and festal aspect with blooming flower-boxes in their windows, florist shops exhaled delicate perfumes of field flowers and turned gay the sidewalks before their doors with rows of potted loveliness, the Park became an elysian field of soft invitingness, with emerald glades and vistas of enchantment like tapestries of Fontainebleau. Spring was evident in women’s hats, in shop windows, in the crowded tops of lumbering three-horse buses, in the reappearance of hansom cabs, in open automobiles, in the smiling faces of men and women, in the elastic step of pedestrians. Spring had come to New York; the very walls of houses and pavements of the streets flashed back joyously the golden caressing radiance of the sun.
Walking downtown to her office on an early morning through all this exhilarating loveliness, stepping along with almost a skip in her gait and a heart that danced to her brisk strides, Jeannette felt rather than saw a man’s shadow at her elbow and turned to find Roy Beardsley beside her, lifting his hat, and smiling at her with his tight little mouth, his blue eyes twinkling.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, her fingers pressed hard against her heart. She had been thinking of him almost from the moment she had left home.
“Morning.... You don’t mind if I walk along? ... It’s a wonderful morning; isn’t it glorious?”
“Oh, my, yes,—it’s glorious.” She had herself in hand by another moment and could return his smile. They had never stood near one another before, and the girl noticed he was half-a-head shorter than herself. There were other things the matter with him, seen thus upon the street while other men were passing, and with his hat on! Jeannette could not determine just what they were. Glancing at him furtively as they walked together down the Avenue, she was conscious of a vague disappointment.
“Do you walk downtown every morning?” he asked.
“Oh, sometimes. How did you happen to be up this way so early?”
“I take a stroll through the Park occasionally. It’s wonderful now.”
“Yes, it’s very beautiful.”
“I think New York’s the loveliest place in the world in spring.”
“Well, I guess it is,” she agreed.
“And you have to go through a long wet winter like this last one to appreciate it.”
“Yes, I think you do.”
“I thought we’d never get rid of the snow.”
“They clean the streets up awfully quickly though;—don’t you think so?”
“Yes, they have a great system here.”
“The poor horses have a terrible time when it’s slippery.”
“There was a big electric hansom cab stuck in the snow for four days in front of the place where I live. They had to dig it out,” he said.
“It makes the spring all the more enjoyable when the change comes.”
“Yes, the people seem to take a personal pride in the weather.”
“It’s as though they had something to do with it themselves.”
“That’s right I noticed it the first year I was here.”
“You’re not a New Yorker, then?”
“Oh, no; my home’s in San Francisco. I only came East three years ago to go to college.”
“I thought you were ... one of the girls at the office mentioned you were a Princeton man.”
“I was, but I ... well, I flunked out at Christmas. I was tired of college, anyway. I wanted to go into newspaper work, but I couldn’t get a job with any of the metropolitan dailies, so temporarily I am trying to help sell the Universal History of the World.”
They talked at random, the man inclined to give more of his personal history; the girl, pretending indifference, commented on the steady encroachment of stores upon these sacred fastnesses, the homes of the rich. She interrupted him with an exclamation every now and then, to point out some object of interest on the street, or something in a shop window.
It was thrilling to be walking together down the brilliant Avenue in the soft, morning sunshine. They paused at Madison Square before beginning to weave their way through the traffic of the street, and striking across the Park, gay with beds of yellow tulips, trees budding into leaf, and fountains playing. Roy put his hand under the girl’s forearm to guide her. The touch of his fingers burnt, and set her pulses thrilling. She pointedly disengaged herself, withdrawing her arm, when they reached the farther side of the Avenue.
Crossing the Square, she glanced at him critically once more. He seemed absurdly young,—a mere college boy with his cloth hat at a youthful angle, his slim young shoulders sharply outlined in the belted jacket. It was possible he was a few years her senior, but she felt vastly older.
He was commenting on the portentous date, May first, when the price of the History was to advance. The company had somehow succeeded in postponing the fateful day for two weeks, and the public was to have a fortnight longer in which to take advantage of the low prices.
“... and after that, no one knows what will happen. Perhaps we’ll all lose our jobs.”
“Oh,—do you really think so?” Jeannette was aghast.
“Well, some of us will go; they can’t continue to keep that mob on the pay-roll. I don’t think they’ll let you go, though, you’re such a dandy stenographer. I shall certainly recommend them to keep you, but I doubt if they’ll have any further use for me. They’ll let me out, all right.”
He smiled whimsically. It was this whimsical smile the girl found so appealing and so—so disconcerting.
“I shall be sorry if that happens,” she said slowly.
“Will you?”
“Why, of course.”
“But will you be really sorry if—if I’m no longer there?”
“We-ll,—it will be hard getting used to someone else’s dictation; I’m accustomed to yours now.”
“Yes,—I’ll be sorry to go,” he said after a moment. “I like the work, after a fashion, ... but, of course, it isn’t getting me anywhere. I want to write; I’ve always been interested in that. If I could get any kind of work on a newspaper or a magazine, it would suit me fine. My father’s awfully sore at me for being dropped at Princeton. He’s a minister, you know,”—Beardsley laughed deprecatingly with a glance at his companion’s face,—“and he didn’t like it a little bit. I didn’t want to go back home like—well—like the prodigal son, so I wrote him I’d get a job in New York, and see what I could do for myself.”
“I see,” the girl said with another swift survey of his clean features and tight, quaint smile. There was an extraordinary quality about him; he was pathetic somehow; she felt oddly sorry for him.
“I’d like to make good for my father’s sake.... He’s only got his salary.”
“I see,” she repeated.
“But summer’s the deuce of a time to get a job on a newspaper or magazine in New York, everybody tells me.... I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t get something.”
Jeannette wondered what she would do herself. She had begun to enjoy so thoroughly her daily routine, and to take such pride in herself! ... Well, it would be too bad....
They had reached the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Twenty-third Street where the ground was torn up in all four directions, and hardly passable.
“I’ll say a prayer of thankfulness when they get this subway finished, and stop tearing up the streets,” Jeannette remarked.
Once again Roy caught her elbow to help her over the pile of débris, across the skeleton framework of exposed tracks, and again the girl felt the touch of his young fingers like points of flame upon her arm. She caught a shining look in his eyes. Love leaped at her from their blueness. A moment’s giddiness seized her, and there came a terrifying feeling that something dreadful was about to happen, that she and this boy at her side were trembling on the brink of some dreadful catastrophe. Instinct rose in her, strong, combative. She turned abruptly into the open door of a candy shop and steadied herself as she bought a dime’s worth of peppermints.
Emotions, burning, chilling, conflicting, took possession of her the rest of the day. From her typewriter table she covertly studied Beardsley, as he leaned back in his armed swivel-chair before his flat-topped desk, his fingers loosely linked together across his chest, his eyes unseeing, fixed on some distant point through the window’s vista, dictating to the stenographer who bent over her note-book, as she scribbled beside him. What was it about him that moved her so strangely? What was it in his twinkling blue eyes, his quaint mouth with its whimsical smile that stirred her, and set her senses swimming? He was in love with her. Perhaps it was just because he cared so much that she was thus deeply stirred. There had been others, she reminded herself, who had been in love with her, but they had awakened no such emotion.
Had she come to care herself?
She asked the question with a beating heart. Was this love,—the feeling about which she had speculated so long? Love,—the great love? Was she to meet her fate so soon? Was her adventure among men to be so soon over? Was this all there was to it? The first man she met? She and Roy Beardsley?
She denied it vehemently. No, it was nonsense,—it was ridiculous! Roy Beardsley was a boy,—a mere youth who had been dropped from college. She would not permit herself to become interested in him. It was preposterous,—absurd!
She assured herself she would have no difficulty in controlling her emotion in future, but the emotion itself continued to puzzle her. What was it, she felt for this man? Was she in love,—really in love,—in love at last? She looked at him a long time. She wondered.
That he would meet her on the Avenue next morning she felt was almost certain. She said to herself a hundred times it would be much wiser for her to take the elevated train, or at least to walk down another street and avoid the possibility of such an encounter. If she were not to permit herself to become further interested, it was obvious she must see him as little as possible. But when morning came it was into Fifth Avenue she turned.... She felt so sure of herself; she wanted to see if he would really be there.
Once or twice she thought she recognized his distant figure coming toward her. Each time her heart came into her throat. She stopped and made a pretense of studying a milliner’s window, while she wrestled with herself. She was mad, she was a fool, she had no business to let herself play with fire this way! At the next corner she would turn eastward, and go down Fourth Avenue. But when she reached the cross street she decided to walk just one more block, and in that interval he stepped from a doorway where he had been watching for her, and joined her.
“Good-morning.”
“Oh—hello!”
The sudden sight of him, the sound of his voice affected her like fright. She hurried on, trying to still the pounding in her breast, turning her face toward the traffic in the street to hide her confusion.
“What’s the hurry?” he laughed. “It isn’t half past eight yet.”
“I have a personal letter to type before office hours,” Jeannette said abstractedly, but she lessened her pace.
“I love these early walks on the Avenue,” he said.
“I always walk down if I have time,” she replied. “I wouldn’t miss it for anything.” She gave him a quick inspection. He was insignificant,—he had a weak, effeminate expression,—his features were small and lacked resolution. And yet it was the same face with its blue eyes, always brightly alight, its twisted mouth and thin lips stretched tightly over his small, glittering, even teeth when he smiled, that haunted her through the day, pursued her to her home, gleamed at her from the blackness of her room after she had gone to bed, visited her in her dreams, and greeted her with its irresistible charm when she awoke in the mornings. She loved that irresolute face, with all its weakness, its curious eccentricities; she loved the grace of that slight boyish figure with its square, bony shoulders, its tapering, slim waist; she loved those thin, almost emaciated white wrists, and those long chalk-hued hands and attenuated fingers. She loved the way he bore himself, the poise of his figure, the lithesomeness and suppleness of his young body. And she despised herself for loving, and hated him for the emotion he stirred in her. She wanted to kiss him, she wanted to kill him, she wanted him in her arms, she wanted never to see him again; she wanted him to be madly, desperately in love with her, and she wanted herself to be coldly indifferent.
The spring sunlight flooded the Avenue gloriously; the green omnibuses, dragged by three horses harnessed abreast, rambled up and down; cabs teetered on their high wheels, and weaved their way through the traffic at a smart clip-clap; hurrying women, with the trimming of their flowered hats nodding to their energetic gait bustled upon their early morning errands; stores were being opened, shirt-sleeved porters were noisily folding the iron gates before the doors back into their daytime positions; shop-girls, and stenographers, briskly on their way to their offices, half smiled at one another as they passed.
It was impossible not to respond to the infectious quality that was in the air. Jeannette laughed happily into her companion’s face, and he gazed at her eagerly, his eyes shining, his mouth twisted into its whimsical smile. They were exhilarated, they were enthralled, they were oblivious to everything in the world except themselves.
He stopped her abruptly, a block from the office.
“I think perhaps ... I believe you would prefer it, Miss Sturgis, if—if you and I ... if you were not seen entering the building, with—with an escort. It might be easier, pleasanter for you, if I....”
He hesitated, floundering helplessly. They stood still a moment facing one another, each thinking of impossible things to say. Then Beardsley murmured: “Well ...” lifted his hat, and she put her hand in his. He held it tightly in the firm grip of his thin white fingers, until she had to free it. She laughed shakily, as she turned away.
“That was really very nice of him,” she thought as she hurried on. “That was really very nice. I shan’t mind walking with him occasionally, if it doesn’t set the office gossiping.”
Love swept them tumultuously onward. There was no time to pause, to consider, no time to calculate, none to take stock of one’s self. In a week Jeannette Sturgis and Roy Beardsley were friends, in ten days they were lovers. Every morning he met her on the Avenue and walked with her to within a block of the office, and in the evening he joined her for the tramp homeward. He begged her again and again to lunch with him but to this she would not agree. They knew they loved each other now, but dared not speak of it. He was diffident, eager to ingratiate himself with her, fearful of her displeasure; and she,—while she confessed her love to herself,—passionately resolved he should never guess it nor persuade her to acknowledge it. She had an unreasonable primitive dread of what might follow if Roy should speak. Their love was all too sweet as it was. She did not want to risk spoiling it, and trembled at the thought of its avowal.
Yet in her heart she knew what must inevitably happen. Their attraction for one another was stronger than either; it was rushing them both headlong down the swift current of its precipitous course.
On the very day the words were trembling on her lover’s lips came the staggering announcement that on the fifteenth day of May the activities of the Soulé Publishing Company in selling the Universal History of the World would cease, and the services of all employees would terminate on that date.
The girls told Jeannette the news the moment she arrived at the office, and she found it confirmed on a slip of paper in an envelope on her typewriting table.
“All? Every one?” she asked blankly. She had confidently expected that she would be kept on,—for a month at least.
“Well, that’s what they say; Mr. Beardsley, Miss Gibson,—everybody.”
“Oh,” murmured Jeannette, betraying her disappointment.
“Did you think they’d keep you on the pay-roll after the rest of us were fired?” asked Miss Flannigan airily.
Jeannette perceptibly straightened herself and levelled a cool glance at the girl.
“Perhaps,” she admitted.
“Oh-h,—is that so?” mimicked Miss Flannigan. “Well, you got another think coming,—didn’t you?”
Jeannette drowned the words by attacking her machine, her fingers flying, the warning ping of the tiny bell sounding at half-minute intervals. But her heart was lead within her, and her throat tightened convulsively. She was going to lose her job! She was going to be thrown out of work! She was going to be among the unemployed again! Her mother! ... And Alice! ... That precious five dollars a week that was all her own!
The rest of the day was dreary, interminable. Demoralization was in the air. The girls whispered openly among themselves, and filtered by twos and threes to the dressing-room, where they congregated and gossiped. The spring sunshine grew stale, and poured brazenly through the west windows. Miss Flannigan chewed gum incessantly as she giggled noisily over confidences with a neighbor. Even Beardsley seemed to have lost interest for Jeannette.
Yet when she came to his desk later in the day for the usual dictation, he handed her a paper on which he had written:
“You mustn’t be downhearted. There is always a demand for good stenographers. You won’t have the slightest difficulty in getting another job. I wish I was as sure of one myself. May I walk home with you this evening?”
She gave him no definite answer but she liked him for his encouragement and sympathy. Whenever she sat near his desk, note-book in hand, waiting for him to dictate to her, he was to her a superior being, one whose judgment and perception were above her own; he was her “boss.” It was different when she met him outside the office; he was just a boy then,—a boy who had flunked out of college. Now he, too, had lost his job. Like her, he would soon be unemployed. No longer need she fear his possible censure of her work, or take pleasure in his praise of it. She realized he had lost weight with her.
After office hours that evening, he met her outside the building and as he walked home with her was full of philosophical counsel.
“Why, Miss Sturgis, it’s never hard for a girl to get a job, —a,girl who’s got a profession, and who’s shown herself to be a first-rate stenographer. The offices downtown are just crazy to get hold of girls like you. You won’t have the slightest difficulty in finding another position.... If you were me, you’d have something to worry about. I’ve got to get a job that will land me somewhere,—a job in which I can rise to something better.”
“But so have I,” said Jeannette.
“Well, yes, I know.... But girls’re different. They only want a job for a little while,—a year, two or three years perhaps, and then they get married. Working for girls is only a sort of stop-gap.”
“No, it isn’t; not always. There’s many a girl who perhaps doesn’t regard matrimony with such awful importance as you men think. I mean girls who aren’t thinking about marriage at all, and who really want to become smart, capable business women.”
Roy smiled deprecatingly. “But I’m talking about the average girl,” he said.
“And so am I. Girls have a right to be economically independent, and I can’t see why they have to stop working just because they marry,—any more than men do.”
“Girls have to stay home and run the house.”
“Oh, what nonsense!” cried Jeanette. “It’s no more her home than it is the man’s.”
Roy shrugged his slight shoulders. He had no desire to argue with her. He was more concerned with the thought that in the future there would be no office to bring them together daily.
“There are only two days more. Saturday we get our last pay envelope.”
They walked on in silence.
“I hope you’ll let me come to see you. We’ve become such good friends. I’d hate to....”
He left the sentence awkwardly unfinished.
“Oh,—I’d like to have you call some evening,” she said with apparent indifference. “I’d like to have you meet my mother and sister.”
“I’d love to.... I want to know them both.”
“Well, come Sunday,—to—to dinner. We have it at one o’clock. I suppose it’s really lunch, but we’re awfully old-fashioned and we always have our Sunday dinner in the middle of the day.... You mustn’t expect much; we live very simply.”
“Thanks, awfully....”
“We don’t keep any servant, you know.”
“I quite understand. You’re very good to invite me.”
“I’m sure my mother and sister will be glad to meet you.”
“I’m awfully anxious to know them.”
“Well, come Sunday.”
“You bet I will.”
“Of course, they’ve heard about ‘Mr. Beardsley.’”
“Have they? ... Do you talk about me sometimes to them?”
“Why, of course! ... Naturally.... What do you expect?”
“I hope you’ve given me a good character.”
“I daresay they think you’re an old bald-headed man with a thick curly beard.”
“Oh, no! ... They’ll be terribly disappointed!”
“I’m going to tell them you’re a gruff old codger with a perpetual grouch.”
“Miss Sturgis,—please!”
They were both laughing hilariously.
“Here’s your home. I had no idea we had walked so far.... Shall I see you to-morrow? I’ll be waiting at the Seventy-second Street entrance to the Park.”
“All right.”
“At eight o’clock?”
She nodded, waved her hand to him, and ran up the stone steps. He waited until she had fitted her key into the lock, and the heavy glass-panelled door had closed behind her.
Saturday was their first intimate little meal by a window in a café. It had been their last morning at the office, and by noon the activities of the Soulé Publishing Company in selling the Universal History of the World had ceased. Pay envelopes had been distributed shortly after eleven, and an hour later all the little Jewesses with their absurd pompadours and high heels, the Misses Rosens and Flannigans, the office clerks and office boys had packed the great elevators for the last time, laughing and squeezing together, and swarmed out of the building not to return. And Roy and Jeannette were among them.
“You will go to lunch with me?” he had written on a sheet of paper and pushed toward her as she sat at his elbow. “I’ve got a lot of things to talk to you about, and it’s our last day here together.”
She had tried to consider the matter dispassionately, but a glimpse of his bright, eager eyes fixed on her had sent the blood flooding her neck and cheeks, and before she quite knew what she had done she had nodded.
He joined her at the street entrance and together they made a happy progress toward Broadway.
A great felicity descended upon them. Their senses thrilled to the beauty of the warm day and their being thus together. Roy piloted her through the hurrying noontime throng, his hand about her arm. She tingled again at the touch of his fingers, and loved it. Then they entered the café of a hotel, and found a cozy table for two by the window where, dazzled and enthralled by their great happiness, they smiled into one another’s eyes across the white cloth, glittering with cutlery and glasses.
Love was wonderful! He loved her; she loved him. They both knew it; they were drunk with the thought. This was their adventure,—theirs and theirs alone!
“I may have to go home this summer,” Roy said with a troubled air after he had given their order to the waiter. He stared at the winding crowd that surged back and forth beneath their window. “But I’m coming back right away. In August.”
“You mean to San Francisco?”
“My father wants me to come West for a month or two. He sent me my ticket.... I guess he expects me to settle down out there. Of course he wants me to. The ticket is only a one-way one. But he’s in for a disappointment. I can’t be happy in San Francisco; I want to come back to New York.”
They both fell silent, thinking their own thoughts. Jeannette was conscious of the dreariness and drabness of life once more; it was disheartening and depressing to be unemployed. All these people hurrying past the window, she reflected, were intent upon some particular errand; each one had a job; the whole world had jobs but herself. There would be nothing for her to do but “apply for employment.”
“Please can you give me a position? ... Excuse me, sir, I’m looking for work.... Could you use a stenographer?”
Oh, it was detestable, it was intolerable! It dragged her pride in the dust! ... And there would be no one to sympathize, to advise her,—or help her! She would be alone all summer in New York with no one interested!
Roy, watching her, guessed her thoughts.
“I’m coming back....”
She flushed warmly.
“Would you like me to come back? Would it make any difference to you, if I did? If you’ll just say you’d like me to come back, I will; ... I’ll promise! ... Will you?”
The girl bent over her plate, hiding her face with the brim of her hat. The giddiness she had experienced that day in the street threatened her.
“Would you want me to come back?” Roy insisted.
She raised her eyes and met his gaze; he held them with the burning intentness of his own, and for a long, long moment they stared at one another.
“You know I love you,” he said tensely.
His lip quivered; his face was aglow.
“I love you with every fibre of my being! I’ll come back to you,—I’ll come back from the ends of the earth. Only just say you love me, too, Jeannette.... You do love me, don’t you? ... You’re the most wonderful girl I’ve ever known, Jeannette! ... God, Jeannette, you’re just wonderful!”
Why was it that in the supreme moment of his great avowal he seemed a little ridiculous to her? She felt suddenly like laughing. He was so absurdly young, so juvenile, so school-boyish, leaning toward her across the table in his youthful Norfolk jacket, with his unruly hair sticking up on top his head!
He kissed her when they parted from one another late that afternoon. They had been absorbed in talk, and the hours slipped by until before they were aware it was five o’clock. He walked home with her and just inside the heavy glass doors of the old-fashioned apartment house where she lived he put his arms about her, their faces came close together, and for the briefest of moments their lips met. It was a shy kiss, hardly more than a touch of mouth to mouth. For another moment they stood raptly gazing into each other’s eyes, their fingers interlocked. Then Jeannette fled, running up the stairs, nor did she grant him another look, even when she reached the landing above and had to turn. But on the third flight of stairs she paused, held her breath to still the noise of her panting, and listened. There was nothing. A cautious glance over the balustrade down through the narrow well of the stairs revealed his shadow on the stone flagging below. She sank to the step, and waited to catch her breath, her ears strained for a sound. Presently she heard him moving; there was a crisp clip of his shoes; she guessed he was searching the gloom of the stairwell for a glimpse of her. But she would not look, and sat motionless with tightly clasped hands. After a long interval she heard his hesitating step again. The half-opened door swung slowly back, brightening the hallway below a moment with yellow daylight from the street, then closed with a dull jangle of heavy glass. She sat for a moment more, then a tiny choking sound burst from between her close-shut lips, and she buried her glowing face in her hot hands, pressing her fingertips hard against her eyeballs until the force of them hurt her.
That night Jeannette experienced all the exquisite joy and fierce agony of young love. It was an exhausting ordeal; she lived over and over the thrilling hours of the day that had terminated in that glorious, intoxicating second when the boy’s thin lips were against her own, and she had felt their warm, tingling pressure. The recollection brought to her wave upon wave of hot flushes that began somewhere deep down inside her being and flooded her with ecstasy. She strove against it, yet had no wish to control her thoughts. Shame,—some curious sense of wrong,—distressed her. It was not right;—it was all wrong! Instinct grappled with desire. She wept deliciously, convulsively, burying her head in her pillow and pressing its smothering softness against her mouth to stifle her sobbing breath that neither her mother nor Alice might hear it. Past midnight she rose and went noiselessly to the bathroom where she washed her face, carefully brushed and re-braided her hair. Her head ached and her swollen eyes were hot and painful. But she felt calmer. She studied her face for a long moment in the battered mirror that hung above the wash-stand, and as she looked a great quivering breath was wrung from her.
“Roy ... I can’t ... it can never be ... never, never be,” she whispered despairingly