The Magpies Nest (21 page)

Mrs. Garvice pushed a mass of fair hair from her brow, as if making room for a new impression to be devoted to Hope.

"How do you do? I'll be through with this in half an hour—mind waiting?" She fell on the typewriter again.

One or two reporters glanced at Hope casually, and looked away again. Hope knew and liked the atmosphere of a newspaper office; it suited her temperament; nowhere else in the world do men and women work together with such brusque friendliness, so little consciousness of sex; it is a workshop above everything, and those in it like their work or they would not be there. But for that very reason it is no place to look for personal companionship. Waiting, Hope wondered where then she might look. Not in a boarding-house; that she had never been able to endure. She stayed on at the hotel tentatively.

It did not seem possible to make friends with Mrs. Garvice, who was not unfriendly, but gave the impression of having her life already crowded beyond reason. In a week, two weeks, Hope knew her no better, though they went for material together almost every day, getting impressions of "prominent women," or women who would be prominent for at least a day when they were dished up to the public fancy.

Two weeks can be a very long time on a desert island, or worse, in a strange city. When Hope met Evelyn Curtis, she saw her with an eye sharpened by loneliness; here was another like herself. She was interviewing a wealthy woman who kept a
crèche
for a whim: she had been shown into a long, rather dark, luxurious drawing-room—to her mild surprise, on the second floor—of a brown stone house, one of forty exactly alike in a semi-fashionable street off Fifth Avenue. Hope remembered it very vaguely afterward; she had had so many new impressions, but even before she looked comprehendingly at her hostess she exchanged a quick glance of greeting with the thin, dark girl, who sat awkwardly, as if fearful of the unaccustomed softness, in a squat and puffy boudoir lounge.

Evelyn Curtis was very plain; her lack of beauty was positive; and her too bright black eyes admitted that she knew it thoroughly. There was infinite pathos in her smile, for it made her less lovely than before. She had no bloom: she looked as if she had never bloomed. She looked starved, body and soul; her mouth was not red, and her long black hair was lustreless. Only her eyes were terribly alive.

The two, strangers in every formal sense, looked at each other with sympathetic understanding, and felt that the woman they had both come to see was rather an interruption.

"She looked
stodged,"
said Hope to Miss Curtis, after they had escaped from the house together. "Her very voice was overfed and massaged. What a lot of New York women look like that!" She had seized the other's arm, as they went down the brown stone steps together, disdaining conventional advances.

"You haven't been here long, have you?" said Miss Curtis, smiling her ugly, pathetically appealing smile.

"No. Have you? How did you guess it?"

"You have a different accent. You're on the
Courier?"

"Yes. What are you with? Do you have to rush right down to the office? Won't you stop and have supper with me? I haven't eaten with a soul since
I
came to New York. Do, do come. Do you notice that people here don't ask you to eat? They ask you to have a drink. I almost felt insulted, at first. But
I
'll buy you a drink, if you like. Come to my hotel—it isn't far—and have supper in my room."

"Thank you," said Miss Curtis, obviously surprised, and perhaps a little grateful. "I'm free lancing;
I
don't have to rush off anywhere. Do you live here? You must be a millionaire." They were approaching the hotel.

"Indeed I'm not. It's astonishingly cheap here, but of course I must move. Tell me where
I
ought to look for a room. I haven't the least idea. Where do you live?"

"You wouldn't care for it," said Miss Curtis.
"
I
pay two dollars a week for my room, downtown. I have no heat, and the window looks on a blank wall."

"Ugh!" Hope shivered frankly, and unlocked her door. Her own room looked very comfortable, after that. "I can't stand cold—I've had too much of it. Wait till I tell them to send up food." She telephoned and resumed the conversation. "I suppose you live in Bohemia. I'm not Bohemian; I'm bourgeois to my marrow."

"No," said Miss Curtis simply, "I'm not Bohemian; I'm just poor," and she smiled again. "Newspapers are useful to keep off the cold; I wear them under my blouse." She put her hand to her meagre breast, and Hope heard a slight rustling to the pressure.

"But—but—oh, no," she stammered. "Not really! I've been poor, too, but..."

"Ah, well, I'm one of the unsuccessful ones. But I'd rather starve here than go back; I used to be a school-teacher," she said.

"But so was I, in a way; it wasn't as bad as that," protested Hope.

She did not quite realise that she was, after all, one of the capable ones, born to survive, intellectually independent, but economically adaptable, ready to use either her head or her hands, and to make the best of what she had, no matter how much she might protest and demand more. She was romantic, indeed; but Evelyn Curtis was a visionary. The story of her life, as she told it in a dozen sentences, was a better thing than she would ever write; it touched the deeps of simple tragedy. Materially she had been very comfortable as a school-teacher, but the mental drudgery of it had grown more than she could bear; and the Philistinism of her native city was equally intolerable. She loved books, and failed to grasp the fact that an appreciation of literature by no means predicates an ability to write.

In fact, she could not write. Authors were her demi-gods; she was a hero-worshipper.

So, with all her savings in hand, Evelyn had set out on a pilgrimage. She had sat at the feet of most of the prominent living authors, but even that failed to cure her. And, after travelling all over the Old World as cheaply as possible, she had come back content in her own way and hungry in the natural order of things.

Now, Hope was an iconoclast, born without reverence or fear, and with the knowledge, despite her one considerable folly, that man that is born of woman is small potatoes and few in a hill, in the words of some anonymous wit she had once read.

"My goodness," she said, overcome when the recital closed, "what does anyone want to meet an author for? Or a painter, either, or any famous person? You've got all the best of them in whatever they create. I'd as soon want to meet the cook because I liked the meal. This is rather good cold beef, isn't it? Of course the cook might be interesting..." Miss Curtis was laughing heartily, rather as if unused to the exercise. "But isn't it true?" insisted Hope. "The interesting people are quite often just interesting; more likely to be critical than creative. And I am fond of books, but I don't see what one can get out of them without actual experience as a key. Of course I understand you wanting to see the world But you really went abroad to see certain people whose lives and gifts you envied? Wanted to stand around and live their lives with them, through them. It cannot be done."

"Perhaps," said Evelyn. "You are very clever and cruel. Why are you here?"

"To discipline my soul, I suppose," said Hope, grinning. "There must be some meaning in those queer old religious terms, don't you think? I could feel the dry rot creeping over me, doing the little easy things that were nearest. I came on instinct. Something in me was trying to turn over in its sleep—having a nightmare. Maybe there is something here for me. Do you get any meaning at all out of what I'm saying?" Evelyn nodded, her liquid, bright, over-intelligent eyes answering. "If there isn't, I'll go on. I may stub my toe over it—the whatever-it-is—some day while I'm rushing madly along. Or I may never find it, but not because I didn't try. Or—
quien sabe?
—I've come to the end of my poor imagination."

"You are one of the interesting ones," said Evelyn musingly.

CHAPTER XIX

HOPE wrinkled her nose.

"That's what one says of a woman who is neither rich nor beautiful," she said. "But it's better than calling me clever. Thanks. But I warn you, to-morrow I may bore you to death. I do myself, quite often."

"No," insisted Evelyn, laughing, "you are. I can read other people's fortunes because I have none of my own. Now you, you'll marry again. I hope your husband is dead..." She paused, rather overcome
by her
gaucherie.

"So do I," said Hope piously, "but you're talking nonsense. Why should I marry again? Enough is sufficient, but too much is plenty. It sounds
posé,
but I am tired of men. I have met millions of them. Since I left home I have walked a long, long road, like a Devonshire lane, between solid hedges and banks of men. Making one's own living means entering a world of men. It was my sad mistake to take them seriously. Just as if I were a girl in her own home, where all the men I met were carefully sifted down to a sentimental residuum. But we others ought to be different. Since we've followed the men to their lairs, we ought to be good sports and let 'em alone. I intend to. I am an adventuress— no, I am not contradicting myself. I belong to the new order of honourable adventuresses. Unknown continents in life—Madam Columbus looking for the New World... Gold, and treasure, and much fame, you know, like the Raleighs and the Drakes went after; not a blackbirder out for slaves. There. I'm out of breath. But don't talk husbands to me; I intend to cultivate women only. Tell me, instead, that I am a great genius and will be hung by the Academy and bought by the Metropolitan Museum."

"Columbus was looking for the Indies," Evelyn reminded her. "But show me your work and I will prophesy."

Hope, with good-natured lamentations, dived head foremost into her trunk and emerged with a portfolio of remnants.

Evelyn pored over them attentively for a long time, and Hope suddenly, a little tired, took up a book and forgot about her. A quick exclamation roused her.

"What are these?" Evelyn was asking.

"Which?" Hope tumbled off the bed lazily and went to look. "Why, my Moon Babies; I had forgotten them. Mary Dark and I did them, like Alice in Wonderland, to amuse our landlady's kiddies. They're nothing. Throw them away—no, they were Mary's, too." She was suddenly homesick, and wondered when she should see Mary again.

"Let me have one story," said Evelyn, with a rather sly manner.

"Certainly; take what you like. Wait, that one's all torn; I'll make you a new heading." Hope took up her sketching block and busied herself for fifteen minutes. "There, these are your godchildren, specially made for you. They're so easy to do! I wish I could say the same of my other work." She yawned, looking suddenly older with the ashen tint of fatigue.

Evelyn rose, reluctant, and surveyed the room with a wistful air, as she buttoned her shabby jacket.

"You're tired"—apologetically—"I shouldn't have stayed so long."

"I wanted you," said Hope. "Don't mind my looks; that's New York. There's something about the air here—it's harsh, like hard water—makes my bones feel old. Will you dine with me to-morrow—no, the next day? To-morrow I have to go out to the races —fashions and society. But please come the next day."

She turned her head away suddenly, for there were tears in Evelyn's eyes. It made her feel rather ashamed that she should have thought herself so forlorn. After Evelyn had gone she examined her own case as disinterestedly as she could. After all, life had given her something, and if she had been able to keep but little, what did that matter? At the end, no one could keep anything, save memories. Perhaps even those went also, at the last. And hers were amusing memories, all save one or two that she resolutely excluded from the present company.

She had liked a number of people—unconsciously she counted her gains thus in reverse order—Agnes, and Evan Hardy, and Allen Kirby, and above all Mary and Lisbeth. And Edgerton, who had a place of his own in the gallery. The flattery of having deflected him from his orbit toward hers, he the fixed star and she the small stray comet, made his memory stick. And they had all liked her. And—now she went over carefully all that Mary had told her, and all that she had guessed, measuring facts against facts, her own deeds and misdeeds against the world's requirements, as they were being borne in upon her—she had undoubtedly upset and annoyed a great many worthy people she did not know and would not have liked if she had known. That was something. Sitting on the bed, with her knees hugged under her chin, she laughed in a queer, quiet, impish way, all to herself. If she had lived at all through that, with the odds so heavily against her, might she not win the next time, by carefully ranging herself on the right side?

"It isn't the wicked that are punished; it's the fools." So she reflected. "Now, what do I want? And I will see what I must do to get it." And there she halted, her mirth slowly evaporating, leaving her very cold and heavy.

"I do not want anything," she said, and rolled her hair into a tight bun and kicked her clothes on to the floor and crept into bed.

That was the mood that had kept her prisoner within herself for nearly three years now; she had fled from it, and found it in her pack at the end of the journey. It disgusted her. There was something so slack, so puerile and whimpering about it. One imagined it as garbed in a kimono, with tousled hair. To fight it was the harder, because of her heavy handicap of physical listlessness; she felt half-ill. The price of her own silly moping, she knew; nights of black despair and self-indulgent tempers, meals foregone for sheer spiteful rage. She set her teeth to pay it, replacing zest with courage. If not gaily, then it must be done grimly. Not that she wanted to become a simpering and toothful optimist of the current brand, a creature exuding hollow mirth and sonorous, maddeningly inept platitudes. She only wanted to get outside herself, her own sorrow and humiliation; to regain the dignity of unselfconsciousness.

But she felt that, despite the most conscientious and unwilling care of her toilette, she looked thirty years old and hopeless of this life and the next, as she sat in the press-box at the races the next day. The reaction of having talked herself out with Evelyn left her without two words for anyone; she scowled at the ticket-taker, and was barely civil to a well-meaninig reporter who found her a chair.