MRS. SNIFFEN, who had looked after Annan for thirty years, found him bathed, shaved, and dressed, and busy writing when she brought him his breakfast tray.
“The gentleman in the other room, Mr. Barry—when is he to ’ave ’is breakfast?”
“It’s a lady, old dear.”
Mrs. Sniffen’s pointed nose went up with a jerk. He had been counting on that. He liked to see Mrs. Sniffen’s nose jerk upward.
“A pretty lady,” he added, “with bobbed hair. I met her accidentally about two o’clock this morning in Central Park.”
When the effect upon Mrs. Sniffen had sufficiently diverted him, he told her very briefly the story of Eris.
“I’m writing it now,” he added, grinning. “Sob-stuff, Xantippe. I’m going to make a little gem of it. It’ll be a heart-yanking tragedy—predestined woe from the beginning. That’s what they want to-day,—weeps. So I’m going to make ’em snivel.... Moral stuff, old dear. You’ll like it. Now, be nice to that girl in there when she wakes up——”
He put his arm around Mrs. Sniffen’s starched and angular shoulders as she indignantly placed his tray on the desk before him.
“Leave me be, Mr. Barry,” she said sharply.
Some of the parties given by Annan had been attended by what Mrs. Sniffen considered “hussies.” Annan gave various sorts of parties. Some were approved by Mrs. Sniffen, some she disapproved. Her sentiments made a chilling difference in her demeanour, not in her efficiency. She was a trained servant first of all. She had been in Annan’s family for forty years.
“Be kind to her,” repeated Annan, giving Mrs. Sniffen a pat and a hug. “She’s a good little girl.... Too good, perhaps, to survive long. She’s the sort of girl you read about in romance forty years ago. She’s a Drury Lane victim. They were all fools, you know. I couldn’t leave the suffering heroine of a Victorian novel out in the Park all night, could I, old dear?”
“It’s your ’ouse, Mr. Barry,” said Mrs. Sniffen grimly. “Don’t be trying to get around me with your imperent, easy ways——”
“I’m not trying to. When you see her and talk to her you’ll agree with me that she is as virtuous as she is beautiful. Of course,” he added, “virtue without beauty is unknown in polite fiction, and is to be severely discouraged.”
“You’re the master,” snapped Mrs. Sniffen. “I know my place. I ’ope others will know theirs—particularly minxes——”
“Now, Xantippe, don’t freeze the child stiff. I’m very sure she isn’t a minx——”
Mrs. Sniffen coldly laid down the law of suspects:
“I’ll know what she is when I see her.... There’s minxes and there’s ’ussies; and there’s sluts and scuts. And there’s them that walk in silk and them that wear h’aprons. And there’s them that would rather die where they lie than take bed and bread of a strange young gentleman who follows ’is fancy for a lark on a ’ot night in the Park. ’Ussies are ’ussies. And I’m not to be deceived at my time o’ life.”
Annan chipped an egg, undisturbed. “I know you, Xantippe,” he remarked. “You may not like some of the people who come here, but you’ll be nice to this girl.... Take her breakfast to her at ten-thirty; look her over; come in and report to me.”
“Very well, sir.”
Annan went on with his breakfast, leisurely. As he ate he read over his pencilled manuscript and corrected it between bites of muffin and bacon.
It was laid out on the lines of those modern short stories which had proven so popular and which had lifted Barry Annan out of the uniform ranks of the unidentified and given him an individual and approving audience for whatever he chose to offer them.
Already there had been lively competition among periodical publishers for the work of this new-comer.
His first volume of short stories was now in preparation. Repetition had stencilled his name and his photograph upon the public cerebrum. Success had not yet enraged the less successful in the literary puddle. The frogs chanted politely in praise of their own comrade.
The maiden, too, who sips the literary soup that seeps through the pages of periodical publications, was already requesting his autograph. Clipping agencies began to pursue him; film companies wasted his time with glittering offers that never materialised. Annan was on the way to premature fame and fortune. And to the aftermath that follows for all who win too easily and too soon.
There is a King Stork for all puddles. His law is the law of compensations. Dame Nature executes it—alike on species that swarm and on individuals that ripen too quickly.
Annan wrote very fast. There were about thirty-five hundred words in the story of Eris. He finished it by half-past ten.
Rereading it, he realised it had all the concentrated brilliancy of an epigram. Whether or not it would hold water did not bother him. The story of Eris was Barry Annan at his easiest and most persuasive. There was the characteristic and ungodly skill in it, the subtle partnership with a mindless public that seduces to mental speculation; the reassuring caress as reward for intellectual penetration; that inborn cleverness that makes the reader see, applaud, or pity him or herself in the sympathetic rôle of a plaything of Chance and Fate.
And always Barry Annan left the victim of his tact and technique agreeably trapped, suffering gratefully, excited by self-approval to the verge of sentimental tears.
“That’ll make ’em ruffle their plumage and gulp down a sob or two,” he reflected, his tongue in his cheek, a little intoxicated, as usual, by his own infernal facility.
He lit a cigarette, shuffled his manuscript, numbered the pages, and stuffed them into his pocket. The damned thing was done.
Walking to the window he looked out into Governor’s Place—one of those ancient and forgotten Greenwich streets, and now very still and deserted in the intense July sunshine.
Already the hazy morning threatened to be hotter than its humid predecessors. Nothing stirred in the street, not a cat, not an iceman, not even a sparrow.
Tall old trees, catalpa, maple, ailanthus,—remnants of those old-time double ranks that once lined both sidewalks,—spread solitary pools of shade over flagstone and asphalt. All else lay naked in the glare.
Mrs. Sniffen appeared, starched to the throat, crisp, unperspiring in her calico.
“She’s ’ad her breakfast, sir.”
“Oh! How is she feeling?”
“Could you lend her a bath-robe and slippers, sir?”
He smiled: “Has she concluded to stay here indefinitely?”
“Her clothes are in the tub, Mr. Barry.”
“In the bath-tub?”
“In the laundry tub.”
“Oh. So you’re going to do her laundry for her!”
“It’s no trouble, sir. I can ’ave them for her by early afternoon.”
“You’re a duck, Xantippe. You look after her. I’m going down-town to the office. Give her some lunch.”
“Very good, sir.”
He followed Mrs. Sniffen to the corridor, where his straw hat and malacca stick hung on a peg.
“Am I right, or is she a hussie?” he inquired, mischievously.
“She’s an idjit,” snapped Mrs. Sniffen. “Spanking is what she needs.”
“You give her one,” he suggested in guarded tones, glancing instinctively at the closed door beyond.
“Shall you be back to lunch, sir?”
He was descending the stairs, his story bulging in his coat pocket.
“No; but don’t let her go till I come back. I’m going to try to persuade her to go home to the pigs and cows.... And, Xantippe, there’ll be four to dinner. Eight o’clock will be all right.... I’d like a few flowers.”
“Very well, sir.”
Annan went out. The house had cooled during the night and the heat in the street struck him in the face.
“Hell,” he muttered, “isn’t there any end to this!”
There is no shabbier, dingier city in the world than New York in midsummer.
The metropolis seems to be inhabited by a race constitutionally untidy, indifferent to dirt, ignorant of beauty, of the elements of civic pride and duty.
For health and comfort alone, tree-shaded streets are a necessity; but in New York there is a strange hostility to trees. The few that survive mutilation by vandals,—animal and human,—are species that ought not to be planted in such a city.
A few miserable elms, distorted poplars, crippled maples, accentuate barren vistas. Lamp posts and fire boxes fill up the iron void, stark as the blasted woods of no-man’s land.
Annan found Coltfoot, the Sunday editor, in his undershirt, drops of sweat spangling the copy he was pencilling.
“You didn’t wait last night,” began Annan.
“What do you think I am!” growled Coltfoot “I need sleep if you don’t.” He picked up a cold cigar, relighted it.
“Do I get your ten or do you get mine?”
“There’s her story,” said Annan, tossing the manuscript onto the desk.
“Is it straight?”
“No, of course not. You yourself said that nothing really ever happens except in the human brain.”
“Then you hand me ten?”
“I found a news item and made a story of it. As the girl is still alive, I had to end my story by deduction.”
“What do you do, kill her off?”
“I do.”
“You and your morgue,” grunted Coltfoot. “—it’s a wonder your public stands for all the stiffs you bring in.... But they do.... They want more, too. It’s a murderous era. Fashion and taste have become necrological. But mortuary pleasures pass. Happy endings and bridal bells will come again. Then you tailors of Grubb Street will have to cut your shrouds according.”
He glanced at the first pencilled page, skimmed it, read the next sheet more slowly, lingered over the third—suddenly slapped the manuscript with open palm:
“All right. All right! You get away with murder, as usual.... Your stuff is dope. Anybody is an ass to try it. It’s habit-forming stuff. I don’t know now whether I owe you ten. I guess I do, don’t I?”
“We’ll have to wait and see what happens to her. If her story works out like my version of her story, you’ll owe me ten,” said Annan, laughing.
“What really happened last night after I left?” demanded Coltfoot.
Annan told him, briefly.
“What,” exclaimed the other, “is that tramp girl still in your house?”
“Yes, poor little devil. I’m going to ship her back to her native dairy this afternoon.... By the way, you’re dining with me, you know.”
Coltfoot nodded, pushed a button and dragged a bunch of copy toward him.
“Get out of here,” he said.
Annan lunched at the Pewter Mug, a club for clever professionals, where there were neither officers nor elections to membership, nor initiation fees, nor vouchers to sign.
Nobody seemed to know how it originated, how it was run, how members became members.
One paid cash for luncheon or dinner. The dues were fifty dollars yearly, dumped into a locked box in cash.
Of course, some one man managed the Pewter Mug. Several were suspected. But nobody in the large membership was certain of his identity.
Thither strolled Barry Annan after a scorching trip uptown. Wilted members drifted in to dawdle over cold dishes,—clever youngsters who had made individual splashes in their several puddles; professionals all,—players, writers, painters, composers, architects, engineers, physicians, sailors, soldiers,—the roll call represented all the creative and interpretive professions that America is heir to.
Annan’s left-hand neighbour at the long table was a boy officer whose aëroplane had landed successfully on Pike’s Peak, to the glory of the service and the star-spangled banner.
On his right a young man named Bruce ate cold lobster languidly. He was going to Newport to paint a great and formidable lady—“gild the tiger-lily,” as Annan suggested, to the horror of Mr. Bruce.
She had been a very great lady. Traditionally she was still a social power. But she had seen everything, done everything, and now, grown old and bad-tempered, she passed her declining days in making endless lists of people she did not want to know.
She was Annan’s great-aunt. She had never forgiven him for becoming a common public entertainer.
Once Annan wrote her: “I’ve a list of people you have overlooked and whom you certainly would not wish to know.”
Swallowing her dislike she wrote briefly requesting him to send her the list.
He sent her the New York Directory. The breach was complete.
“What can you offer me that I cannot offer myself?” Annan had inquired impudently, at their final interview.
“If you come out of that Greenwich gutter and behave as though you were not insane I can make you the most eligible young man in New York,” she had replied.
He preferred his “gutter,” and she washed her gem-laden hands of him.
But the curse clung to Barry Annan. “He’s a nephew of Mrs. Magnelius Grandcourt,” was still remembered against him when his name and his stories irritated the less successful among his confrères. The conclusion of the envious was that he had a “pull.”
Bruce rose to go—a dark, sleek young man, trimmed in Van Dyck fashion, with long, acquisitive fingers and something in his suave manner that suggested perpetual effort to please. But his eyes were opaque.
“Tell my aunt,” said Annan, “that if she’ll behave herself she can come and live a sporting life with me in Governor’s Place, and bring her cat, parrot, and geranium.”
Bruce’s shocked features were Annan’s reward. He grinned through the rest of luncheon; was still grinning when he left the Pewter Mug.
Outside he met Coltfoot, hot and without appetite.
“It’s ten degrees hotter down-town,” grunted the latter. “I’m empty, but the idea of food is repugnant. Where are you going, Barry?”
Annan had forgotten Eris. “I’m going to get out of town,” he said. “I think I’ll go out to Esperence and get some golf. We can be back by 7:30. Does it appeal to you, Mike?”
“It does, but I’m a business man, not a genius,” said Coltfoot, sarcastically. “Did you ship your tramp girl home?”
“Oh, Lord, I clean forgot her,” exclaimed Annan. “I’ve got to go back to Governor’s Place. I must get rid of her before dinner——”
He was already moving toward Sixth Avenue. He turned and called back, “Eight o’clock, Mike!”
“All set,” grunted Coltfoot.
An elevated train was Annan’s choice. Preoccupied with the problem of Eris, he arrived at No. 3 Governor’s Place before he had solved it. He didn’t want to hustle her out. He couldn’t have her there at eight o’clock.
Letting himself into the little brick house with a latch-key, he glanced along the corridor that led into the dining-room, and saw Mrs. Sniffen in the butler’s pantry beyond.
“Hello, Xantippe,” he said; “how’s the minx?”
Mrs. Sniffen placed a cup of hot clam broth upon a tray.
“Mr. Barry,” she said in an oddly altered voice, “that child is sick. She couldn’t keep her breakfast down.”
“For heaven’s sake——”
“I made her some broth for luncheon. No use at all. She couldn’t keep it.”
“What do you suppose is the matter with her?” he demanded nervously.
“Starvation. That’s my idea, sir. She’s that bony, Mr. Barry—no flesh on ’er except ’er ’ands and face,—and every rib to be seen plain as my nose!”
“You think she hasn’t had enough to eat?”
“That, and the stuff she did eat—and what with walking the streets in this ’eat and sleeping out in the Park——”
Mrs. Sniffen hauled up the dumb-waiter and lifted off a covered dish.
“Toasted biscuit,” she explained. “She can’t a-bear anything ’earty, Mr. Barry.”
“Well,” he said, troubled, “what are we going to do with her?”
“That’s for you to say, sir. You brought ’er ’ere.”
He looked at Mrs. Sniffen and thought he detected a glimmer of satisfaction at his predicament.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“In bed, sir. She wants to dress and go away but I wouldn’t ’ave it, Mr. Barry. Ambulance and ’ospital—that’s what would ’appen next. And I ’ad a time with her, Mr. Barry. She said she was in the way and didn’t want to give trouble. Hup she must get and h’off to the streets—But I ’ad ’er clothes I did, soaking in my tubs.... I let ’er cry. I don’t say it ’urt ’er, either. It ’elped, according to my way of thinking.”
“She can’t go if she’s ill,” he said; and looked at Mrs. Sniffen rather helplessly: “Do you think I’d better call in a doctor?”
“No, sir. I don’t mind looking out for her. A little care is all she needs.”
After a moment’s frowning reflection: “It will be awkward to-night,” he suggested.
Mrs. Sniffen’s nose went up: “The ladies will ’ave to powder their faces in your room, Mr. Barry, and keep their ’ands off the piano.”
He scowled at the prospect, then: “Here, give me that tray. I’ll feed her myself.”
He went upstairs with the tray, knocked at the closed door.
“Tuck yourself in,” he called to her. “I’ve come to nourish you. All set?”
After a few moments: “Yes,” she said calmly.
He went in. She sat huddled up in bed, swathed to the throat in a blue crash bath-robe.
“Well”, he exclaimed gaily, “I hear unruly reports about you. What do you mean by demanding to get up and beat it?”
“I can’t expect you to keep me here, Mr. Annan. I’ve been so much trouble already——”
“This is clam broth. I think you can keep it down. Sip it slowly. There are toasted crackers, too——”
He placed the tray on her knees.
“Now,” he said, encouragingly, “be a sport!”
“I’ll try.”
The process of absorption was a slow one. She was very pale, and there were dark smears under her eyes. Her bobbed chestnut hair accented the slender purity of face and neck. Her hands seemed plump, but the bath-robe sleeve revealed a wrist and fore-arm much too thin.
“How does it feel?” he inquired, when the cup was empty.
Eris flushed. He saw that it embarrassed her to discuss bodily ills with him. Memory of her morning sickness deepened the painful tint in her cheeks:
“I don’t know—know what to say to you,—I am so ashamed,” she faltered.
“Eris!” he interrupted sharply.
She looked up, startled, her grey eyes brilliant with unshed tears, and saw the boyish grin on his face.
“No weeps,” he said. “No apologies. It’s no trouble to have you here. And here you remain, my gay and independent little friend, until you’re fit to resume this disconcerting career of yours.”
“I feel well enough to dress, if Mrs. Sniffen would give me my clothes.”
“Where would you go?”
She made no reply.
“Look,” he said, laying a hundred-dollar bill on the counterpane, “I did your story this morning. Here’s your commission.”
“Please—I can’t——”
“Then I shall tear up my story and hand back to the Planet six hundred dollars that I need very badly.”
She gave him such a piteous look that he laughed.
That matter settled, he relieved her of the tray, set it outside, and returned to seat himself in a rocking-chair beside the bed.
“When they pull the galley proofs of your story, would you like to read them, Eris?”
“Yes, if I may.”
“Why not? It’s your story.”
“About—me?”
“It’s the story of Eris. I call it ‘The Gilded Apple.’ It’s sob-stuff. You begin to whimper after the first five hundred words. Then it degenerates into a snivel, and finally culminates in one heart-shattering sob.”
She had begun to understand his flippancy. And now her smile glimmered responsive to his.
“If it’s really about me,” she said, “why is the story tragic?”
“I gave a tragic turn to our adventure,” he explained.
“How?”
“I made myself out a bad sort. That was the situation,—a nice girl out o’ luck, a rotter, a quick etching in of the Park situation—then through remorseless logic I finish you in the spotlight. You’re done for; but I drift away through darkness, complacent, furtive, dangerous,—the bacteriological symbol of cosmic corruption,—the Eternal Cad.”
From the first moment he had spoken to her in the Park the night before, his every word had fascinated her.
Never before had she been in contact with that sort of mind, with the vocabulary that was his, with words employed as he employed them. The things this man did with words!
Not that she always understood them, or their intent, or the true intent of the man who uttered them. But this man’s speech had seemed, suddenly, to have awakened her from sleep. And, awakened, everything he said vaguely excited her.
Blind, unknown forces within her stirred when he spoke. Her mind quivered in response; her very blood seemed stimulated. It was as though, shrouding her mind, vast cloudy curtains were opening to disclose undreamed of depths darkly pulsating with veiled brilliancy. Out, into interstellar space, lay the road to Truth.
She thought of her dream—of her wings. She lay looking at Annan, waiting for words.
“Why do you look at me so oddly?” he asked, smiling.
“I like what you say.”
“About what?”
“About anything.”
No man is proof against the surprise and pleasure of so naïve an avowal. Annan reddened, laughed, flattered and a little touched by his power to please so easily.
Looking at her very amiably and complacently, he wondered what effect he might have on this odd little pilgrim if he chose to exert himself. He could be really eloquent when he chose. It was good practice. It gave him facility in his stories.
Considering her, now, a half-smile touching his lips, it occurred to him that here, in her, he saw his audience in the flesh. This was what his written words did to his readers. His skill held their attention; his persuasive technique, unsuspected, led them where he guided. His cleverness meddled with their intellectual emotions. The more primitive felt it physically, too.
When he dismissed them at the bottom of the last page they went away about their myriad vocations. But his brand was on their hearts. They were his—these countless listeners whom he had never seen—never would see.
But he had spoken, and they were his——
He checked his agreeable revery. This wouldn’t do. He was becoming smug. Reaction brought the inevitable note of alarm. Suppose his audience tired of him. Suppose he lost them. Chastened, he realised what his audience meant to him,—these thousands of unknown people whose minds he titivated, whose reason he juggled with, and whose heart-strings he yanked, his tongue in his cheek.
“Eris,” he said with much modesty, “have you ever read any of my stuff?”
“No. May I?” she asked, shyly.
“I wish you would. I’d like to know what you think of it——” Always with her in his mind typifying the average reader,——“I’ll get you my last Sunday’s story——” He jumped up and sped away like a boy eager to exhibit some new treasure.
When he returned from his own room with the Sunday edition, Eris was lying back on her pillows. Something about the girl suddenly touched him.
“You poor little thing,” he said, “I’m sorry you’re down and out.”
Her grey eyes regarded him with a sort of astonished incredulity, as though unable to comprehend why he should concern himself with so slight a creature as herself.