Читать книгу Bread - Charles G. Norris - Страница 18

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.