The Magpies Nest (20 page)

If in the face of that declaration it seemed foolish of her to be still so spent and undone, the point were missed. She suffered not from the mere loss of the desired object, but from the moral shock of seeing Tony as he was, and the following revelation of her marriage. To have her sand castle swept away by the tide was perhaps no great matter—but what dead men's bones had come to light in the backwash!

And now she firmly believed she was done with all that.

"Read Merimée," said Mary. "He has wisdom for you." She quoted: " 'You have troubles of the mind, pleasures of the mind, but the viscera called heart is developed at 25 years of age only, in the forty-sixth latitude. When you shall have a heart for good . . . you shall regret the good old days when you were living only by the mind, and you shall see that the evils which make you suffer now are only pinpricks in comparison with the stabs which shall rain on you when the days of passion come!' "

"Yes, no doubt," said Hope rather absently, but with a sudden unlooked-for kindling of energy in eyes and figure. "No; I mean, you're wide of the mark. You know why I was so anxious to have you come now."

"I thought you wanted to see me," Mary offered.

"So I did, idiot! But it was to say
morituri,
te
salutamus.
I am going away."

"Now, you've forestalled me," said Mary, with mild disgust. "I came to make you go. And where?"

"To find the forty-sixth latitude? No, of course not. I'm going to find the other things. There are other things, aren't there? No sentimental journey. I feel so, so
ridiculous
, after sitting around moping for three years. If you want to express a similar opinion, do so."

"No, I decline to waste words. But tell me, what do you really hope to find?" All Mary's worldly wisdom was in the anxious glance she bent on Hope. This romanticism—how it could disguise itself, reappear smiling with a fresh face! "Do you hope to be famous?"

"The woman is mad," scoffed Hope. "Famous? I? No. But I'm going to get
something,"
she said, with an assumption of dark mysteriousness that did not conceal a real determination.

"But what?" asked Mary rather wildly.

"I'll tell you when I get it." She sobered suddenly. "Why, Mary, I thought you believed in life?"

"Yes—no—of course I do. The only people who don't commit suicide."

"Too dogmatic. Some of 'em live just through inanition. Well, I'm going after the thing we believe in, whatever it is. It doesn't seem to be love."

"Much you know about love," scoffed Mary, under her breath.

Hope divined the words, and answered them only with an impudent sidelong glance.

"Whatever it is," she repeated calmly. "Maybe the thing itself is only knowledge of what it is. Giggle at my grandiloquence, if you like; but also admire my practical nature. I have a tender young shoot of a bank account already, provision against the seven lean years while I shall be walking around the walls of Jericho blowing my trumpet."

"Blowing your nose," returned Mary in mild exasperation. "When you mix your allusions, do it thoroughly. Now, why must you take the wind out of my sails, when my heart was set on meddling again?"

She meddled so far as to press an emergency fund on Hope of a hundred dollars. She did not mention that the money was not her own, but said it could be easily spared. In fact, it came from Edgerton, a sort of last tribute. He saw her, at Mary's determination— already confided to him—receding still further from him, in time and physical distance; and speeded her with gifts and garlands, like a Hawaiian host.

A week was all too short, Hope said pleadingly, for Mary's visit, which had been long deferred. She was silenced when Mary at last divulged her reason for haste.

"My divorce is to be heard," she said, "very shortly, before the Senate."

"Why, Mary!" Hope almost shrieked, "I never knew you were married!"

"No?" said Mary interestedly. "I suppose I forgot I had left all that behind me in the East. Some people there knew it, of course; I believe I took you for granted. But you never heard gossip. You are so tactful, though, that no doubt that was why I thought you never mentioned it. You have a tactful
heart.
You ought to get a divorce yourself. No family should be without one."

"It's expensive," said Hope dubiously. "And what would I do with it? I have so many other things to do. How does it come you are getting one now? You see, my heart has hardened."

"Because at last I have been able to produce a reason that convinces my worthy uncle." Mary smiled. "You shall hear it some time. Uncle is putting the divorce through quietly, and paying for it. With his influence, there will be no trouble—nor publicity. Now, we must plan for your descent on the great world."

They talked of that, and did not mention the divorce again.

So Hope was a-wing again when Mary left; or if not yet, still she was poised for flight; her resolution was made. There remained only the summer for preparation.

The curious thing about this was that she was going with neither joy nor interest, but merely urged by something iron in her own soul that refused to be still and rust.

CHAPTER XVIII

AFTER nearly a week in the train Hope felt that she never again wished to move one inch from where she lay. It was a long, long way she had come, not only in that week, but in-all the years since she had left home, and when the persistent daylight at last crept under her eyelids she merely turned and dragged another pillow over as a bulwark. New York was waiting for her to come out and conquer it, but at least it could not break into her hotel room and demand to be conquered immediately.

How bare the walls of an hotel room were. And they were all the background she had achieved. They must be furnished and decorated. What a lot of time she had wasted. Well, she would think about that tomorrow. She was hovering again on the verge of sleep, and beginning to feel hungry at the same time, when the sound of a turning knob brought her up sharply, a trifle wild-eyed, confronting the opening door with a ready-to-spring expression—much as if she suspected New York was indeed about to enter and demand either conquest or surrender.

"Who's there?" she cried. Her tone was so fierce that the maid, whose latch-key had served since Hope forgot, in the weariness of the night before, to shoot the bolt, started and dropped an armful of towels. "I beg your pardon," both women said fervently and simultaneously, and Hope added, "Do come in. I should like to hear a human voice."

The maid, a cheerful and not uncomely person, past her first youth, still looked rather alarmed, but entered.

"I'm sorry I disturbed you," she said. "It's a nice morning. I thought I'd seen you leave; I guess it was the lady next door."

"I will soon," Hope promised. "But I have just come from the Pacific Coast, and I need some rest "

"Really?" The maid also probably suffered from loneliness in her rounds. "I always thought I'd like to go there. But my folks live here, and I guess it's silly to throw up a good job and run off on a wild goose chase."

"Isn't it?" Hope agreed cordially, and wished Mary could hear. "Is your work nice here?"

"Oh, yes; we have a lovely housekeeper. I'm her assistant, but we're short-handed now, so I have to do this."

"Then you might take me on," said Hope.
"
I
used to be a room maid; I know enough to put the wide hem at the top, and I can put a pillow in a case without holding it in my teeth, and heaps of things."

"You were—oh, you're joking." The woman smiled, glancing at the silver-backed brushes and mirror on the dressing-table, and then at a
crêpe négligé
lying across the foot of the bed. Hope dressed to please herself, she said, and was extravagant in peculiarly personal ways.

"No, I'm not. And I came to New York to look for work."

"I guess you'll find it, all right," said the maid consolingly, laying out fresh towels with mathematical precision and small haste, glad of a pretext to linger. "This is a big town. What do you aim to do?"

"Draw pictures." Hope was rather enjoying herself; she told herself gravely that the footboard of the bed was a back fence, and she was really getting acquainted with New York.

"Well, you must be clever," said the good-hearted creature. 'Maybe I'll see them some day in the magazines."

"I'm going to attack the newspapers first," said Hope, smiling. "If I'm not good enough for them, maybe the magazines will do. And when I have spent my last nickel for a bun to eat in the park—I understand that's the thing to do—I'll come back here and ask you to take me on. Whom shall I ask for?"

"Mrs. Merrick. I'll certainly do it," said the other cordially.

Hope wondered where Mr. Merrick might be—wondered how many New York held of such unattached married women as herself.

"Now," she said, scrambling out of bed, "since I have an anchor to windward, I can go forth with confidence. Me for the shops." As she had avowed to Mary, she intended to "put up a front."

She went about dressing, gurgling a song into her shower bath and later executing a
pas seul
with only one shoe on, in a moment of unreflective enthusiasm.

So for three days she deployed and skirmished on the shops, with a wholly feminine joy of conflict. The vast city, mile on mile of brick and stone, filled her with mingled admiration, horror, and a sense of her own insignificance. In her moments of depression it was to her like a senseless triumph of destruction; for man had obliterated the face of nature, and, like some malevolent upheaval of primal forces, left scarcely a blade of grass alive where he had passed. Again, when she walked the length of Fifth Avenue on a sunny cool morning, the glitter and lightness of it, the marvellous windows and the dainty women who went by like artificial lilies of the field, were a magnificent show, useless, perishable, but infinitely costly and so remote from the common soil, so far from the strong roots of the world on which they flourished like rare parasites on the top of a great tree, as to carry a suggestion of the utter unreality of fairyland. The impression was heightened, perhaps, by Hope's peremptory need of human companionship, and the knowledge that to these people she did not exist; she might have "cried on them and they would not hear." But for a greeting once a day from Mrs. Merrick, who in truth came out of her way for it each morning, she had spoken to no one in New York.

"Why, it's worse than solitary confinement," she exclaimed suddenly, having reached the Plaza, pushed on and on, walking with that light elastic step she had gained on the prairie, and, traversing Central Park, come out at the upper end against fresh rows of stolid brick and mortar. "I can't get out—nor in!" A city of enchantment and terror and paradox. "It is big," she conceded, and for a long time pondered of what it reminded her, waking with a start to the conscious recollection of those endless reaches of soft dun-coloured landscape that had been her childish world. But there had been an end to that—when she had grown up to it—there must be to this. Some way to pierce or surmount it. "It's so big," she reflected again, "I'll have to find a little, little crack, and creep through like a mole; I want to get to the heart of it. I suppose I'd better begin!"

So she took a bus back to the Washington Arch, and thence, with splendid ostentation that concealed a doubt of her own ability to master the intricacies of Subway or Elevated, a taxicab carried her to Park Row. It was only three dollars—whatever it should have been—very little, indeed, to pay as
an initiation fee.

"A taxi!" the editor of the
Courier
remarked after her. Having a letter to him from a man he had long since forgotten—after the fashion of New York—she had not found him difficult of access. And he was the only editor in New York whose name—it was Kennard—was known to her. He had white hair, and the face of a young man who has known trouble. "Now, you don't want to come to work for us?" He seized a handful of damp page proofs from a boy, glanced at them with an air of hostility, and threw them to the floor in a crumpled mass, smiling at Hope before he had time to get his eyebrows disentangled from the frown of the moment before. It gave him a very curious expression—an expression of hopeless goodwill, she described it afterward. Perhaps because of the many hundreds of her he had seen before, and knew he would yet see. They fairly beat over him like a tide—the surge of youth against the rocks of experience. He always did what he could for them. "No," he said sadly, "you don't want to work for us. We can't afford taxi-cabs."

"Neither can I," she returned engagingly. "And I picked you out especially to work for; the taxi was simply a compliment."

"Umph!" He assaulted another bundle of proofs. "What can you do?"

Immediately, with the nervous deftness of a tyro prestidigitator, she unrolled beneath his nose a bundle of her choicest specimens. He seemed to be only pushing them aside; her heart went down and down, and jumped suddenly.

'I see," he said. "Come around next week; say Monday."

And she went out, propelled by the mere force of his will.

Evidently he meant all along to accept her services.

Or perhaps her sheer unspoken hopefulness decided him when she came again. In the meantime she had gone nowhere else, feeling as if it might cross her luck in her first attempt. At any rate, after a moment, when he appeared to be trying to remember where he had met her before, he abruptly swept her down the long city room and delivered her over, with an air of relief and the manner of one executing a writ of
habeas corpus,
to a sub-editor. The sub-editor, who was fat and worried-looking, in turn, after one harassed glance shooed her toward a thin, tired, sharply handsome woman of no particular age. This one sat before a typewriter in the attitude of one plucking out its vitals and flinging them in the face of a despised public.

"You'll work with Mrs. Garvice; she'll tell you what to do," said the fat sub-editor. "Come and see me about it later; we'll talk things over a bit. We're starting some new specials—women's dope."