ABOUT eight that evening Annan knocked and entered, and found Eris intent on beef tea.
“How are you?” he asked in his winning, easy way, leaning down to look at her, and to inspect the broth.
Her awe of him and his golden tongue made her diffident. She tried now to respond to his light, informal kindness,—meet it part way.
She said, shyly, that she was quite recovered,—sat embarrassed under his amiable scrutiny, too bashful to continue eating.
“I’m having two or three people to dinner,” he remarked, adjusting the camelia in his button-hole. “I hope we won’t be noisy. If we keep you awake, pound on the floor.”
She thought that humorous. They both smiled. She looked at the camelia in the lapel of his dinner jacket. He leaned over and let her smell it.
“Tell me,” he said with that caressing accent of personal interest which in such men is merely normal affability, “do you really begin to feel better?”
She flushed, thanked him in a troubled voice. Mustering courage:
“I know I must be in the way here,” she ventured; “I could get up and dress, if you’d let me, Mr. Annan——”
“Dress? And go away?”
“Yes.”
“Go where?”
“You forget what you’ve given me. I have plenty of money to take a room.”
“Do you mean that commission which brought me in five hundred dollars?”
“You pretend it is that way.... Yes, I mean that money.”
“You funny child, I don’t want you to get up and dress. You can’t go yet. You’re not in the way here.”
She said, solemn and tremulous: “I’ll never forget—your kindness——”
“When you’re quite well again we’ll talk over things,” he said cheerily. He was thinking that if she found him so persuasive he’d have little trouble in starting her homeward.
The front doorbell rang. He got up, gave her arm a friendly little pat.
“I’ll look in later,” he said, “if you’re still awake.”
He went away, lightly. She followed him with fathomless grey eyes; listened to his steps descending the stairs—heard his gay greeting, the voices of arriving guests—women’s laughter—the deeper voice of another man. After a little while she continued her interrupted dinner, gravely.
Mrs. Sniffen arrived presently. She seemed as starched, as rigid, as angular and prim as ever. But there was no disdainful tilt to her sharp nose. For the Mrs. Sniffen who now approached Eris was not the chilling automaton who had just admitted Annan’s dinner guests with priggish disapproval.
Eris, shy of her, looked up at her in some apprehension.
“Well,” exclaimed Mrs. Sniffen with a wintry smile, “you did eat it all, didn’t you? That’s the way to grow ’ealthy and wealthy, not to say wise, isn’t it, now? ’Ome vittles ’elps all ’urts, big or little, to my way of thinking.”
“I enjoyed it so much, thank you,” murmured Eris.
“And glad I am to ’ear you say it, Miss. ’Ave you quite finished?”
“Yes, thank you very much.”
Mrs. Sniffen took the tray, hesitated by the bedside:
“I ’ope,” she said, “that you will soon be well, Miss.... New York is just as bad as London, every bit! I know them both, Missy; and they’re both uncommon nasty.”
“I like New York,” said Eris, shyly.
Mrs. Sniffen’s nose went up with a jerk.
“And sorry I am to hear you say it,” she retorted severely. “Them that has nice clean ’omes in the nice clean countryside don’t realise their blessings, according to my way of thinking.”
“Did you ever live in the country?” ventured Eris.
“Turnham Green, Miss.”
“Where is that?”
“London. It was all dirt and gin and barracks when I was a kiddy. If I’d a pretty ’ome in the nice clean countryside like you, Miss, I’d be biding there yet, no doubt.”
Eris shook her bobbed head: “I had to come where I can have a chance to learn something.”
“And what, may I ask, Miss, would you learn ’ereabouts?” inquired Mrs. Sniffen with elaborate irony. “There’s little to learn in New York that’s good for a body. It’s only a big, ’ot, dirty merry-go-round,—what with the outrageous noise and crowds and hurry and scurry, and wild capers and goings-on. No, Miss, you’ll learn nothing ’elpful ’ere, depend upon it!”
Eris said, thoughtfully: “Only where are many people gathered is there the foundation for a real education.... Good and evil are.... Only truth matters. The important thing is to know.”
“Who told you that?” demanded Mrs. Sniffen, amazed to hear such authoritative language.
“Nobody. But I’m quite sure it’s so. Books alone do not educate. They are like roughage for cattle. There is no nourishment in them but they help to digest Truth. I wish to see and hear for myself, and learn to understand in my own way.... What my eyes and ears tell me is what I ought to think about and try to understand. And I believe this is more important than reading in books what other people think of what they have seen and heard.”
“God bless her baby-face!” exclaimed Mrs. Sniffen, exasperated. “Where does a kiddy find such notions, and the outlandish words for them, now? What are young folk coming to, any’ow, gypsying about the world as they please these crazy days? It’s a bad world, Missy, and the worst of it settles in big cities like rancid grease in a sink.... Not that I’m the kind to push my nose into others’ business. I know better. No, Miss, I’ve troubles enough to mind of my own, I ’ave. But when I see a polite and well mannered young person turn her back on ’ealth and ’ome to come to a nasty, rotten place like New York and sleep in the public parks at that, ’ow can I ’elp expressing my opinion? I can’t ’elp expressing it. I’m bound to say you ought to go ’ome; and it would be a shame to me all my days if I ’adn’t spoken!”
She seemed to be in a temper. She marched out with her tray, her starched skirts bristling, her nose high. Opening the door, she looked back wrathfully at Eris, hesitated, door-knob gripped:
“I’ll ’ave some chicken for you before you sleep,” she snapped; and closed the door with a distinct bang.
Downstairs, Annan had entertained three friends at dinner—Coltfoot, Rosalind Shore, and Betsy Blythe.
Of the making of moving pictures there is no end—until the sheriff enters. And Miss Blythe helped make as many pictures as her rather brief career had, so far, permitted.
She was to have her own company now. The people interested finally had “come across”; Betsy talked volubly at dinner. Gaiety, excitement and congratulations reigned and rained.
Rosalind Shore, another stellar débutante, already in her first season, had won her place in musical comedy. She was one of those dark-eyed, white-skinned, plumply graceful girls, very lazy but saturated with talent. Which, however, would have meant little beyond the chorus unless her mother, an ex-professional, had literally clubbed musical and dramatic education into her.
Indolent, but immensely clever, little Miss Shore’s girlhood had been one endless hell of maternal maulings. She was whipped if she neglected voice and piano; beaten if she shirked dramatic drill; kicked into dancing school, and spanked if she loitered late away from home. Yet she’d never have been anybody otherwise.
She had Jewish blood in her. She was distractingly pretty.
“Mom’s a terror,” she used to remark, reflectively. “She thumped me till I saw so many stars that I turned into one.”
She sang the lead in “The Girl from Jersey”—into which a vigorous kick from her mother had landed her, to puzzle a public which never before had heard of Rosalind Shore.
The show ran until July and was to resume in September.
The girlhood of Bettina—or Betsy—Blythe, had been very different. She was one of a swiftly increasing number of well-born girls whom society had welcomed as débutantes, and who, after a first season, and great amateur success in the Junior League, had calmly informed her family that she had made a contract with some celluloid corporation to appear in moving pictures.
New York society was becoming accustomed to this sort of behaviour. It had to be. From the time that the nation’s war-bugles sounded assembly at Armageddon, the younger generation had taken the bit between its firm teeth. Nothing had yet checked them. They still were running away.
In Annan’s little drawing-room, where coffee had been served, the excited chatter continued to turn around Betsy’s brand new company,—this event being the reason for the dinner.
Every capitalist involved was discussed, and pulled to quivering pieces; every officer and director in the Betsy Blythe Company, Inc. was dissected under the merciless scrutiny of four young people who already had learned in New York to believe only what happened, and to turn deaf ears to mere words.
“Listen, Betsy,” said Rosalind Shore, “Mom says you’re all right with Cairo Cotton and Levant Tobacco behind you.”
“The main thing,” remarked Coltfoot, “is to begin in a businesslike way. Don’t start off staggering under a load of overheads, Betsy. Don’t let them take expensive offices. The people who’ll use ’em would have to sit in a Mills Hotel if you didn’t provide a loafing place for them.
“And don’t spill money down the coal hole for a plant. When you need a studio, hire it for the length of time you expect to use it. Hire everything. Spend your money on the people who’ll bring it back to you, not on human objects d’art and period furniture.”
“I know,” said Betsy, “but I can’t control those things, can I?”
Annan said: “Perhaps you can. You know, socially, some of the people who are putting up the money. Harry Sneyd has to account to them. He’s handling you and you can handle him.”
“You can see to it,” said Coltfoot, “that Levant Tobacco isn’t used to pension a bunch of bums and dumb-bells. You can see to it that the money is spent where it ought to be spent. Your people have got real money. You can’t buy a good story for nothing; you can’t buy a good director or a good camera-man for nothing. Those are the people to pay.”
Rosalind nodded: “And low pedal on art-directors and carpenters,” she added. “I’m not so sure that I need all I get. Scenery is on the toboggan, sister Bettina. You don’t want expensive sets. Neither does your audience. It wants you. And it wants your story. So don’t let your bunch start rebuilding devastated France in your back yard when a corner in a hall bed-room will do.... It will always do if the story and the acting go over. I don’t have to tell you that, either.”
“No interior ever made a picture,” agreed Annan, “and no exterior ever saved one. But I’d go as far as I liked on the scenery that you don’t have to pay God for.”
Miss Blythe laughed: “Are you going to do a story for me, Barry?” she asked. “You promised—when you were in love with me.”
“I am yet. But your people don’t like sob-stuff any better than does Rosalind’s audience.”
“You don’t have to squirt tears into every story you write,” retorted Betsy. “Did you ever see me cry? There are people, Barry, who manage to get on without snivelling every minute.”
“I never cry,” remarked Rosalind; “Mom spanked the last tear out of me years ago.” She rose and moved indolently to the piano.
Few professional pianists were better at her age,—thanks to “Mom,” who had been a celebrated one.
Rosalind talked and idled at the keys, played, chattered, sang enchantingly, killed loveliness with a jest, slew beauty to light a cigarette, cursed with caprice the charming theme developing or, capriciously and tenderly protected, nourished and cared for it until it grew to exquisitive maturity. Then strangled it with a “rag.”
“You little devil,” said Betsy, tremulous under the spell—“I wouldn’t strangle my own offspring as you do!—I couldn’t——” Emotion checked her.
Rosalind laughed: “It doesn’t matter when one can have all the offspring one wants.... You’ll never get on if you’re too serious, Bettina mia.”
“That’s your friend Barry talking, not you,” retorted Betsy. “He can get away with it—sitting all alone in a stuffy room where his readers can’t see him writing sob-stuff with his tongue in his cheek. But you and I had better wear faces that can be safely watched, my Rosalinda child!”
“I want to ask you,” said Rosalind, turning to Annan, “whether an audience can surmise what sort of private life one leads merely from watching one on the stage or screen.”
“I think so, in a measure,” he replied.
“Then it does pay to behave,” concluded Betsy, walking to a mirror to inspect herself. “Not guilty—so far,” she added, powdering her nose; “—am I, Barry?”
“Old Jule Cæsar’s wife was a schmeer in comparison,” he agreed.
“I’ll tell you, young man,” she remarked, “I’ve found the Broadway atmosphere healthier than it is in some New York younger sets.”
“Is that one answer to why do young men haunt stage doors?” inquired Coltfoot.
“You miserable cynic,” retorted Betsy, “the sort of young man who does that belongs in the sets I mentioned.”
“Anyway,” added Rosalind, with lazy humour, “you and Barry are spending a perfectly good evening as close to the stage as you can get. Why?”
“Why,” added Betsy, “do men prefer women of the stage?”
“Good God,” said Coltfoot, “take any Sunday supplement and compare the faces of Newport and Broadway. That’s one reason out of hundreds.”
“Few men chase a face that makes them ache,” added Barry, “even if the atmosphere in some sets smells of the stage door.... Tell me, beautiful Betsy, why you don’t canter about very much in your own gold-plated and exclusive social corral?”
“Because,” she replied tranquilly, “I have a better time with the people I meet professionally ... mavericks from the gold-plated corral like you, for instance. You and Mike and Rosalind are more amusing than Sally Snitface or Percy Pinhead. And you’re far more moral.”
“I wonder if I am moral,” mused Rosalind, shaking the cracked ice in her glass.
“God, your mother and your native laziness incline you that way,” said Barry, gravely. “You’re better than good; you’re apathetic. Inertia will see you through.”
“It takes energy to be a devil,” added Coltfoot. “Your perfect angel snoozes on a cloud. She’s too lazy to walk. That’s why she grew wings and why you take taxi-cabs, Rosalind.”
“I do. I use my legs sufficiently on the stage, thank you. Also, I admit I like to snooze.”
“Angel,” said Betsy from the mirror, “lend me your lipstick.” And, to Annan: “May I ascend to the rear room and make up properly?”
“No, go into my room.”
“But there’s no dressing table there——” starting to go.
“You can’t go up there,” he repeated. “I mean it.”
The girl turned: “Oh, is there a lady there?” she asked with that flippant freedom fashionable in certain sets, but mostly due to ignorance.
“There is,” said Annan, coolly.
Rosalind did not believe it, but she said carelessly: “That’s rather disgusting if it’s true.”
“It’s true,” said Coltfoot. He sketched the story. Rosalind, who had been sagging picturesquely, sat up straight. Betsy listened incredulously at first, then with knitted brows.
“I mean to ship her back to the old farm,” added Annan. “She needs a wet-nurse——”
“I want to see her,” said Miss Blythe abruptly.
“Well, she isn’t on exhibition,” returned Annan in a dry voice.
“Put yourself in her place. Would you feel comfortable, lying in the guest bed of a strange man? And would you care to have a fashionably gowned girl come flying in to stare at you?”
Betsy gazed at him scarcely listening. She turned to Rosalind:
“If she’s got as much nerve as that, couldn’t you or I do something?”
“All right,” nodded Rosalind.
“You’d better let her go home,” said Annan. “She has pluck and perhaps talent, but she hasn’t the sense to take care of herself. You let her alone, Bet, do you hear?”
Betsy’s nose went up. “Mind your business, Barry. If she works for me she needn’t worry.”
“You’d better take her on, then,” said Rosalind. “Mom bangs me around so that I’m too groggy to look out for anybody’s morals except my own.”
Betsy came up to Annan and put her hands on his shoulders:
“Let me see her; I shan’t eat her. I might use her. She’s a sandy kid.”
“She’s twenty. She told me so,” he retorted.
“It’s cruel to ship her back to the cows, Barry, when she’s gone through such a rotten novitiate. I think you’re taking a great responsibility if you use that easy and persuasive tongue of yours to send her back to the stupidity she ran away from. Don’t you?”
Rosalind said to her: “There’s no point in your pawing Barry Annan. I’ve done it. He lets you. Then he does what he pleases.”
Annan grinned faintly: Betsy suddenly slapped his face, not hard.
“That complacent smirk!” she said, exasperated.
Before Annan guessed what she was about, she turned and ran upstairs. He followed, too late. The guest-room door opened and slammed, and he heard the key turn inside.
He returned to the drawing-room, laughing but irritated.
“Little meddlesome devil,” he said, “talking to me of responsibility! Here’s where I wash my hands of the Eris kid. It’s Betsy’s deal now.”
It was.
Eris, listening to the laughter and music below, lying wide-eyed on her pillow, sat up startled and wider yet of eye when a scurry and flurry of scented skirts, followed by the clash of a swiftly locked door landed Betsy Blythe at her bedside.
She stared at the breathless vision of flushed beauty, too astounded to think of herself and her position.
Down on the bed’s edge dropped Miss Blythe, radiant, cheeks and eyes still brilliant from her victory.
“I’m Betsy Blythe,” she said. “I heard about you. How fine and plucky of you! What a perfectly rotten experience!... Tell me your name, won’t you?”
“Eris Odell,” said the girl mechanically, still under the spell of this sudden brightness which seemed to fill the whole room with rose colour.
“My dear,” said Betsy, “please forgive me for coming in on my head. Mr. Annan tried to prevent me. You mustn’t blame him. But when I heard how plucky you are I simply had to come up and tell you that I’m going to ask my manager to take you on. I haven’t seen our first script. They’re doing the continuity now. But I’m sure there must be something—something, at least, to start you going—so you won’t need to sleep in the park—you poor child——”
She impulsively caressed one of the hands that lay on the quilt; retained it, looking at Eris with increasing interest and kindness. Suddenly, for one fleeting moment, the subtle warning that a pretty woman feels in discovering greater beauty in another, touched Betsy Blythe. And passed.
“I’m in pictures,” she said, smilingly. “I should have told you that first. I have my own company now. When you are quite recovered, will you come and see me?”
“Yes, thank you.” The eyes of Eris were great wells of limpid grey; her lips, a trifle apart, burned deep scarlet.
“You are so pretty,” said Betsy,—“do you test well?”
“They thought so.”
“The Crystal Film people?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll have Mr. Sneyd give you another test. He’ll make you up. Or I will. You know, of course, that it won’t be a part that amounts to anything.”
“Oh, yes.”
“But it will be a part. We’ll carry you—not like an extra, you see——” Betsy rose, went over to a little desk, wrote her address and brought it to Eris.
“You do forgive me for coming in to see you this crazy way, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes—yes, I do——” Suddenly the grey eyes flashed tears.
“You sweet child!” said Betsy Blythe, stooping over her. “You’re nice. A woman can tell, no matter what a pig of a man might think. I like you, Eris. I want you to get on. I’d love to have you make good some day.” She added naïvely: “—If only to put Barry Annan’s nose out of joint.”
Eris had covered her wet lashes with her fore-arm. Now she removed it.
“Mr. Annan has been wonderful,” she said in a tear-congested voice.
“Three cheers!” said Betsy, laughing. “You’re a loyal youngster, aren’t you? Everybody likes Barry Annan. Several love him. But you mustn’t,” she added with a gravity that deceived Eris.
“Oh, no,” she said hurriedly, “I wouldn’t think of such a thing.”
At that Betsy’s clear laughter rang out in the room. Eris blushed furiously; then, suddenly and swiftly en rapport, laughed too.
“He’s so nice and so spoiled,” said Betsy. “That bland grin of his!—and he is clever—oh, very. He knows how to make your heart jump when he writes. In private character he’s kind but mischievous. He’ll experiment with a girl if she’ll let him. It interests him to try cause and effect on us. Don’t you let him. He has that terrible talent for swift intimacy. That caressing courtesy, that engaging and direct interest he seems to take in whoever he is with, means no more than a natural and kindly consideration for everybody. It misleads some women. I don’t mean he does, intentionally. Only any man, seeing a pretty girl inclined to be flattered, is likely to investigate further. I don’t blame him. We do it, too, don’t we?”
“I never did,” said Eris naïvely.
Betsy’s smile faded and she gave Eris a sharp look. Then, abruptly, she took both her hands and sat regarding her.
“I’ll tell you something,” she concluded, finally. “Men won’t fool you: you’ll fool them.”
“I shan’t try to,” said Eris.
“That’s how you’ll do it.... You’re unusual; do you realize it? What is it that interests you most?”
“I want to learn.”
“I thought so. I’ve known one or two girls like you. Pretty ones.... Almost as pretty as you, Eris. They raise the devil with men.”
“How?” asked Eris, astonished.
“Merely by being what they are,—absolutely normal under all conditions. Men are completely fooled. To a man, feminine youth and beauty mean a depthless capacity for sex sentiment. My dear, you have very little of that sort.... Or, if you have any, it’s the normal amount and is reserved for the great moment in life.”
“What is the great moment in life?” asked Eris.
“Love, I suppose.”
“I do not think I shall have time for it,” said Eris, thoughtfully.
“Good heavens!” exclaimed Betsy, laughing. “Don’t be unhuman!”
“Oh, no.... I only mean that it’s—it’s a thing which has not—occurred.... I have not thought about it, much.”
“Nor wished for it?”
“Oh, no.”
“Still,” said Betsy, smiling, “we’re made for it, you know.... That is, if we’re quite healthy.”
“I suppose so,” said Eris absently.
After a silence Betsy pressed her hands, rose, looked down at her with friendly gaze.
“I ought to join the others. You won’t forget to come? Please don’t: I’d like to have you with us. Good-night, Eris. Get well quickly!”
As she was going out: “Make my peace with Barry Annan,” she added. “I’m in dutch with that young man.”
The slangy girl really was not. Annan, at the piano, pounding out a rag while Rosalind and Coltfoot danced, merely called out to her that the responsibility for Eris Odell was hers from that moment and if they ever found the girl in the river it was none of his doings.
Betsy smiled scornfully: “I’d trust that girl anywhere,” she said. “Some day a girl like Eris will teach you a few new steps in the merry dance of life, Barry.”
“What new steps?” He continued playing but looked curiously up at Betsy, who had come over beside him.
“You’re so cocksure of yourself,” she said, “aren’t you, dear?”
“You mean I’m a prig?”
“No, just a very clever, good-looking boy with kind instincts and a fatal facility. You think you’re real. You think you write realisms. You’ll come up against the real thing some day. Then——”
“Yes, yes, go on!”
“Why,” she said, smiling at him, “then you’ll bump your complacent head, my dear. That will be reality. And maybe you’ll know it again when you run into it. Maybe it will rid you of that bland grin.”
“That’s a melting smile, not a grin, darling,”—pounding away vigorously. “But tell me about this ‘real thing’ that I’m to crack my noodle on.”
“A girl, ducky.”
“Sure. I’m cracked already on ’em all.”
“The one I mean is named Nemesis and she’ll knock your silly head off.... Like that child upstairs, for example.”
“She’s got a Greek name, too. I’d better remember to ‘fear the Greeks’—yes?”
“Little Eris could double you up.”
“Wh-at?”
“I don’t mean Eris in particular, dear friend. But one of her species.”
“What’s her species?”
“You, a writer!—and you haven’t even doped her out!”
“I have, however,” he contradicted her tranquilly.
“All right. Analyse her for me.”
“Quantitatively?”
“Certainly.”
“Here she is then: clean, plucky, uneducated, obstinate, immature; and, like any other girl, perfectly pliable when properly handled by an expert.”
“You?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, tweetums——”
“You don’t have to say it. But I’m glad you think you’re an expert. For it’s going to be that kind of girl who will some day put a crimp in you, Barry, and teach you what you don’t know anything about.”
“What’s that, Rose of my Harem?”
“Women,” she said maliciously, “and you make a living by writing about them. And the Great American Ass believes you know what you’re writing about!”
Coltfoot telephoned for his car after midnight and drove Annan’s fair guests homeward.
Annan, born with a detestation for sleep, locked up and put out the lights unwillingly.
As he passed Eris’ door on his way to his room, he halted a moment, listening.
“Are you awake, Eris?” he asked in a modulated voice.
“Yes,” she answered.
“That’s fine!” he exclaimed. “May I come in for a moment?”
“Yes, please.”
Her light was on. She was sitting up in bed. When he caught the first glimpse of the radiant face, flushed with happy excitement, he scarcely recognised the pinched and pallid girl of the park. In his astonishment he thought her the prettiest thing he remembered ever seeing; stood silent, quite overwhelmed by the unfamiliar beauty of the girl.
Entirely unconscious of admiration, she smiled enchantingly—a piquant and really charming picture in her bath-robe and bobbed hair.
“Thank you so much,” she said, “for asking Miss Blythe to see me. She pretended you wouldn’t let her come, but I knew she was joking. Miss Blythe asked me to join her own company. I simply can’t sleep for thinking of it.”
He came over to the bedside and took a chair.
“Eris,” he said, “I really didn’t want Miss Blythe to see you. I thought you ought to go home when you recover.”
She looked at him, startled.
“Maybe I’m wrong,” he said, “but I think so, still.”
After a silence: “You are wrong.... But I know you mean it kindly.”
“Hang it all, of course I do. You’re an unusual girl——” Betsy’s words, she remembered—“and you interest me; and I like you.... And I know something about Broadway.... It worries me a little—the combination of you and Broadway.”
“I—worry you?”
“In a way.... Your inexperience.... And you don’t know men.”
“No, I don’t know men.”
“Well—there you are,” he said, impatiently.
Yes, there she was,—in the guest-room bed of one of them.
She said, tranquilly: “It is kind of you to be interested in me. I feel it deeply, Mr. Annan. It seems wonderful to me, that a man so—a man like yourself—should have—have time to care what happens to a perfectly strange nobody.... But I can’t go home.... Not yet.... I shouldn’t care to live if I can’t have an opportunity to learn.... So—so that’s that.”
He, finally, laughed. “Is it, Eris?”
“Yes,” she said, smiling at him, “I’m afraid it is.”
“And that’s that,” he concluded.
“Yes, really it is.”
“All right.” He got up, stood fumbling with a cigarette. “All right, Eris. If ‘that’s’ the verdict, I guess I was wrong. I guess you know your business.”
“No. But I hope to.”
“You fascinatingly literal kid!——” He burst out laughing, went over and shook hands with her.
“Somebody else will have to milk the cows and feed the chickens. That’s plain as the permanent curls on your bobbed head, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said, laughing, “—and you’re so funny!”
“Oh, I’m a great wit,” he admitted. “Well, little pilgrim, you require sleep if I don’t.... I think I’ll go in and start a story.... Or read.... Your story is just beginning, isn’t it?”
She ventured a timid jest: “You finished my story for me, didn’t you?”
“I did. When it’s published, and you read it, you’ll never stop guying me, I suppose.”
She still ventured pleasantries: “So you didn’t tell how I left the Park and walked straight into an engagement, did you?”
“My dear, I bumped you off to sneak-music. It goes, you know, with my clients. They wouldn’t stand for what Miss Blythe did. Neither would the Planet. I’d get the hook.”
They both were laughing when he said good-night.
He went into his room but did not light the lamp. For a long while he sat by the open window looking out into the darkness of Governor’s Place.
It probably was nothing he saw out there that brought to his lips a slight, recurrent smile.
The bad habit of working late at night was growing on this young man. It is a picturesque habit, and one of the most imbecile, because sound work is done only with a normal mind.
He made himself some coffee. A rush of genius to the head followed stimulation. He had a grand time, revelling with pen and pad and littering the floor with inked sheets unnumbered and still wet. His was a messy genius. His plot-logic held by the grace of God and a hair-line. Even the Leaning Tower of Pisa can be plumbed; and the lead dangled inside Achilles’ tendon when one held the string to the medulla of Annan’s stories.
He rose at his usual early hour, rather pallid, and parched by too many pipes.
When he left the house for down-town, Mrs. Sniffen reported Eris still sound asleep. So Annan went away to deposit seven thousand words with Coltfoot.
“Off the bat just like that,” he said, tossing the untidy bundle onto Coltfoot’s desk.
“You mean that you did this story last night after we left?” demanded Coltfoot.
“That’s what I do, Mike,—sometimes. And sometimes I’m two or three weeks on this sort of thing. I think I’ll go back and do another. I feel like it.”
“Probably,” remarked the other, “this is punk.”
“Probably not,” said Annan serenely. “Are you lunching?”
“Probably not if I read this bunk first. Is it really up to your worst level?”
“Your readers will wail like a bunch of banshees over it. It’s dingy, squalid, photographic. What more does the Great American Ass require?”
“That’s his fodder,” admitted Coltfoot. “Now g’wan outa here, you licensed push-cart bandit!... By the way, how’s the park-bencher this morning?”
“Asleep when I left the house.” He seated himself sideways on Coltfoot’s desk:
“Mike, do you know she’s exceedingly pretty?”
“How should I know?... But trust you to pick that kind——”
“I forgot that you’ve never seen her. Well, last night after you left I stopped to look in on her, and, honestly, her beauty startled me. She’s beautiful thick chestnut hair and fine grey eyes, and the loveliest mouth—its expression is charming!—and really, Mike, her arms and hands are delicate enough for a Psyche. Maybe she milked and fed ducks, but I can’t see any of the hick about her——”
He smiled, made one of his characteristic, graceful gestures: “It’s funny, but there she is. And yet, I’d not venture to use her in a story ‘as is.’ Because my wise guys wouldn’t believe in her. I’d be damned as a romanticist. And you’d chuck me out of the Sunday Edition.”
Coltfoot sat gazing up at him for a few moments, then put on his reading-spectacles and pawed at a wad of proof.
“I’m going to chuck you out of this office anyway,” he grunted.
Exactly why Annan chose to lunch at home did not occur to him until, arriving there, Mrs. Sniffen handed him a note and announced the departure of Eris Odell.
“What!” he said irritably, “has she gone?”
“About eleven, Mr. Barry. And would you believe that child would ask me to take five dollars for making her bed? And she with scarce a penny. What’s one ’undred and twenty dollars in New York? I could ha’ birched her——”
“Give me the note,” he interrupted, disappointed. Because that was why he had come home to lunch,—to see this youngster who had so ungratefully and rudely departed.
He went upstairs to his room, seated himself, slit the envelope with a paper cutter, and leisurely but sulkily unfolded the sheet of note paper within.
A hundred-dollar bank note fell to the floor.
“Dear Friend,” he read,—a rural form of address that always annoyed Annan,—“please do not be offended if I leave without awaiting your return. Because I feel keenly that I ought not to impose upon your great kindness any longer.
“I am at a loss to express my gratitude. Your goodness has stirred my deepest sensibilities and has imprinted upon my innermost mind a sense of obligation never to be forgotten.
“I shall always marvel that so well known and successful a man could find time to trouble himself with the personal embarrassment of an insignificant stranger.
“What you have done for me is so wonderful that I can only feel it but cannot formulate my feeling in words.
“And thank you for the hundred dollars. But please, please understand that I could not keep it.
“Confident in the promise of Miss Blythe, I shall venture to take the room that sometimes I have taken for a single night. It is at 696 Jane Street.
“So good-bye—unless you ever would care to see me again—and thank you with a heart very full, dear Mr. Annan.
“Yours sincerely,
“ERIS.”