Читать книгу The Woman Gives - Owen Johnson - Страница 3

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It was Christmas Eve in Lincoln Square. A fine snow was sifting out of the leaden night, coating the passers-by with silver but dissolving on the warm asphalt stretches in long, gleaming lakes where a thousand reflections quivered. From the glowing subway entrances, the holiday crowds surged up, laden with mysterious packages, scurrying home for the decking out of tinseled trees and the plotting of Christmas surprises. The shop windows flared through the crowds so brightly that they seemed to have brought up electric reinforcements. The restaurants were crowded with brilliant garlands gay with red berries and festal ribbons, while amid the turbulent traffic of the avenues, impudent little taxi-cabs went scooting merrily, with rich glimpses of heaped-up boxes inside.

At Healy’s, under the strident elevated station, a few guests were entering the blazing dining-rooms, laughing and expectant. The tension of the city’s nerves seemed everywhere relaxed. For one merry hour in the long, grinding year, united in the unselfish spirit of revelry, with the zest of secrets to be guarded and secrets to be discovered, the metropolitan crowd bumped good-humoredly on its way, gay with the democracy of good cheer.

King O’Leary left the throng at the bar at Healy’s, whistling loudly to himself, flung a half-dollar to the blind news-dealer under the elevated steps, calling with gruff gusto, “Merry Christmas!” and, resuming his whistling, crossed the square to where Teagan’s Arcade rose in shanty splendor, six stories above Broadway, filling the block with its flashing electric signs which hung against the night like so much cheap jewelry.

If King O’Leary continued to whistle with exaggerated gaiety, tricking himself into a set smile, it was because deep in his heart he felt the irresistible closing-in of his black hour. As he neared the glass descent into the rumbling underground, a flurried eruption of parcel-laden crowds whirled momentarily about him, wrapping him around with youth, laughter, and the aroma of friendship and affection. Home! He felt it so keenly; he saw so clearly rising before him a hundred visions of family groups gathered in the warmth of cozy houses, he felt so out of it, so socially excommunicated, that his pretense at gaiety flattened out. He shifted the soft-brimmed hat over his eyes, as though to shut out memories, turned up the collar of his coat, and, digging his great hands into capacious pockets, swung doggedly on. The world for this one night had run away from him. In the whole city he could think of no door where he could leave a present or imagine from what direction one might descend upon him. With the exception of the half-dollar flung to the blind news-dealer, and a few tips jingling in his pockets, his Christmas giving was over. Twice a year, in his happy-go-lucky existence, rolling down incredible avenues of life from Singapore to Nome, Alaska, meeting each day with unfailing zest, leader and boon companion through whatever crowds he passed—twice a year, at Christmas and on a certain day in mid-April, the secret of which lay buried in his memory, King O’Leary went down into the dark alleys of remembrance.

He entered the Arcade, which was like a warm, friendly furnace after the wet, shivering snow flurries, transparent shops on either side, and ahead the gleam of brass railings barring the entrance to the vaudeville theater, whose evening program shrieked at him from colored sheets of mystery and guaranteed thrills.

“Lord, but this is awful!” he said solemnly, gazing absent-mindedly into the glowing tonsorial parlors inscribed “Joey Shine.” “Wish to the deuce I could think of some one to give a present to!”

All at once he perceived the manicurist, a tall, Amazonian young lady, with reddish hair coiled in amazing tangles, who was examining him with friendly curiosity. He came out of his abstraction, wondered where he had seen her, half smiled, and went slowly on his way to the elevator, an old-fashioned vehicle, which came settling down like an ancient barge.

“Merry Christmas, Mistah O’Leary!”

“Back to you, Sam!” he said, dropping a dollar in the box which was conspicuously advertised. And he added, “Up six.”

“Thank you, sah; thank you!” said Sam, whose eyeballs rolled whitely at the magnificence of the tip.

The twin elevators in the Arcade were sleepy affairs, unoppressed by a sense of time, while the voyage upward was never guaranteed. They were large, open, cage-like affairs, littered with announcements: rooms to be sublet or to be shared; trousers pressed and old clothes bought; washing cheaply offered; instruction in typewriting and stenography; dental parlors; the future foretold and confidential advice given at reasonable rates by Madame Probasco on the fifth floor; while only temporarily reversed, a large sign announced:

OUT OF ORDER

TAKE OTHER ELEVATOR

Sam lingered a moment, humming sleepily, as though to coax forth another passenger from the shadows. This failing, he shuffled out for a languid survey of the Arcade.

“No hurry here,” said O’Leary, yawning indifferently and settling into the cushioned chair which soothed the attendant in his weary hours.

Thus encouraged, Sam lounged away for a final reconnoitering, slouched back, vacillated a moment on one foot, and had his hand on the sliding gate, when out of the dusk came a hallo in a high, nasal English accent.

“I say there, Sassafras, my man, hold him in!”

Sam began laughing immediately, in a thin, treble, body-shaking laugh,

“He-he-he, Mr. Kidder; I sartainly knew you was coming—yassah!”

A young fellow, barely five feet six, with the figure of a jockey, hopped into the car, and, seizing the regulator, rattled off:

“Cast away there! Smartly now, my man, smartly! Take in your spinnaker! Ship the maintop-gallant sheets! Douse the poop-deck! Stand by the battens!”

In response to this rapid salvo, the elevator began to budge, creaking and protesting, rising at about the rate of six inches a second.

“Do you think we can make it?” said Kidder, with assumed alarm. “How’s the old scow to-night, mate?”

“Why, most surprisin’ well—yassah, most surprisin’.”

“It’s a stormy night, and there’s a bad reef above the fourth. Well, mate, we’re in the hands of Providence. It’s will be done!”

All at once, seeming to perceive King O’Leary for the first time, he inquired anxiously:

“Excuse me, sir, does my presence at the helm cause you any anxiety?”

“Not here,” said King O’Leary, who, in his amusement, had been tricked out of his glumness.

“What floor can I serve you, sir?”

“The sixth will be about right for me.”

“Then we sink or swim, survive or perish, together!”

He was dapperly dressed, and though his yellowish checks were evidently ready-made, they were squeezed in at the waist and hoisted over the ankles in the latest style. He had the hatchet face of the clever Yankee, alert, sharply defined, with a high-bridged and rather bold English nose.

“Youngster looks like a pocket edition of the Duke of Wellington,” thought King O’Leary, registering his favorable impressions, and, before the other’s infectious spirits, he began to recover his natural zest.

Tootles—to give Mr. St. George Kidder at once his workaday name—meanwhile had been examining his companion with the impressionable eye of the artist. He saw the bulky body of a man approaching middle age, yet full of rough, brawny substance and weather-tried endurance. The great half-moon of a mouth was now turning up in its usual indomitable attitude toward life under the broad-spaced, jovial nose set between full cheeks breaking into dimples. Underneath wisps of tawny hair, rather Mephistophelian, were clear-blue eyes, brilliant and sharp as a brigand’s. The whole had a combination of companionable good humor, and instant aggression when necessary.

“Rather a rough nun in case of a scrap, I should fancy,” thought Tootles, who had his own way of expressing things. “However, he has a sense of humor—of my humor—which is distinctly in his favor.”

Suddenly he exclaimed aloud:

“Whoa there! All hands on deck stand by the lifeboats!”

The elevator, having drifted gradually past one dark floor after the other, had now come to a jolting stop between the third and the fourth, and began to churn up and down in a manner distinctly alarming.

“Sassafras, you’re feeding Tessie too much red meat,” said Tootles, shifting his metaphors as Sam came to the rescue.

Another moment of joggling and bucking, and the elevator, as though too weary to continue its exertions, suddenly glided up and to a rest at the sixth floor.

“Whew! My eyes and whiskers!” exclaimed Tootles, springing out.

He turned with an air of grave solicitude.

“Sassafras, I do believe I forgot to pay the chauffeur. Small change, you know, is such a nuisance. I’m going to let you be my banker for a couple of days. Give him a liberal tip. And I say, when the florist comes in the morning with my boutonnière, attend to that, too, will you? Oh, yes, if Mrs. Van Astorbilt calls again this evening, tell her I have gone to the country—but discreetly, Sassafras, discreetly, in your best manner. Remember—she is a woman, like your mother.”

The sparkling elevator sagged out of sight, burying in the cavernous shaft the body-shaking peals of laughter, leaving O’Leary and Tootles moving down the spacious, murky corridor of the sixth floor back. There was a moment of silence, each rather watching the other out of the corner of his eye, and then Tootles heaved a prodigious sigh.

“Say, this is a hell of a place on Christmas eve, isn’t it?”

“Why, boy, I didn’t know it hit you that way,” said King O’Leary, surprised.

“It sure does. ‘Christmas comes but once a year, when it comes it brings good cheer!’ Yes, it does! Wish I could sleep it over. Ugh! Well, anyhow!”

He stopped at the door which bore the inscription:

No Models Wanted.

King O’Leary reluctantly continued farther up the bare hallway to his room.

“I say, over there!”

O’Leary turned, looking back at Tootles, who stood dimly revealed in the light of the half-open door, his head on one side, scratching his ear, as though, by some instinct, he had divined the shadow over the other man’s heart.

“Well, son, what is it?”

“Merry Christmas, and all that sort of thing, you know!”

“Oh, sure—back to you. Merry Christmas?” said the other, as though trying it on his ear, and a loud guffaw followed. “Yes, it’ll be a merry Christmas—I think—NOT!”

King O’Leary turned the lock and flung open the door on the dim solitude of his room. Then he threw on the electric light, and each bare detail came suddenly out—a cot with the cover still turned down, a wash-stand, and an upright piano with an armchair before it, turned sideways, so that he could avail himself of the height of the arm when he played. In one corner was a low hair trunk, reenforced with leather of the make sailors were wont to use.

He closed the door, whistling gloomily, went over to the piano and struck a few aimless chords.

“Anywhere else in civilization, Vladivostok, Valparaiso, or Honolulu, a white man could speak to another on such a night as this; but in this God-forsaken wilderness, I suppose they’d think I was after their watch.”

He turned again to the keyboard, and, playing by ear, with a truly sensitive touch, ran into the Feuer Motif of “Die Walküre.”

“God, that’s great—that is great!” he said solemnly. “That is it—earth, fire, and water!”

He tried another start—shut the piano viciously and rose.

“Damn New York!” he said, with his nose to the curtainless window, peering out at the opposite side of the court, with its chilly, bare outline. “Damn New York for an unfriendly stuck-up port, anyhow! Dozens of poor devils sitting around nursing their misery and afraid to say hello to another human being. Danged if I don’t try it!” he said, all at once, and, slapping on his hat, he went out of his room and up to the corner studio, near which a dozen boxes were piled.

“I’ll try each in turn,” he said grimly, and knocked.

But a moment’s pounding convinced him that the studio was unoccupied, and he turned to the opposite room, which lay next to his, and rapped on it as though to summon forth a spirit.

The door was presently opened, and the figure of a young woman appeared.

“My name’s King O’Leary,” he said desperately, taking off his hat. “I’m looking for some mortal being, man, woman or child, who’s as plumb lonely as I am, to go out and help me through this night. I’m not a thug or a pickpocket, and I’m not fresh. Anywhere else on this blessed globe except here, people would understand me. Well, how about it? I suppose you think I’m crazy?”

She stood a little defensively, her hands behind her back in an attitude which seemed to bar the way into the studio, which lay behind, warm and inviting with the charm her feminine touch had laid over its crude outlines, as the spreading ivy softens the ugliness of a ruin. Her hat and coat were on a near-by chair, as though she were preparing to go out. Though she stood against the light, he was struck with the oddity of her appearance—a certain defiant, youthful erectness in her body, the depth of darkness that lay over her, in the black of her hair, which was braided and coiled about her forehead, and the brown oval of the face—brown as an Indian’s. He could not see the eyes for the moment.

“You’re in the room next to me, aren’t you—the one who was playing?” she said, in a matter-of-fact tone, and her voice was gutturally pleasant, so different from the high-pitched excitement of the New Yorker that he stared at her in surprise.

“Yes; I’m just about twenty miles away,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Well, I suppose I’m letting myself in for a throw-down, but here goes. Honestly, I mean what I say. I’m stranded here—don’t know a soul. I’m just craving for some one to talk to. Fact. If you’re in the same box and can size a man up for what he is, why—” he added, in an embarrassed rush, aware by the white gleam of her teeth that the girl was watching him, amused at his embarrassment—“I say, what do you do to a man who has the nerve to knock on your door and ask you to go out to dinner?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, yes; that’s what I expected. Well, I meant it all right,” he said ruefully.

“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I’m going out to dinner.”

As she said this she seemed to relax, as though satisfied of the sincerity of his appeal, and, turning, for the first time the light fell clear across her face. What the color of her eyes was in the daytime he did not know, only now, in the darkness and the artificial light, there was something luminous and deep and full, and yet they struck him as a sort of barrier held against those who sought to read deeper. These eyes looked straight into his, quiet, restrained—not quite the eyes of a young girl nor yet the eyes of a woman. The whole swift impression on him was of some one quite unlike the rest, an inflexibility of purpose, something decisive in look and attitude and, at the same time, something withheld—a flash of elfin wildness cruelly mastered.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, conscious that he had looked too intently; and he added, in blunt tribute: “Yes, of course, you would be going somewhere.”

“I’m sorry,” she said; and this time she smiled, a smile like the woman, curiously devoid of coquetry and yet at the same time haunting the imagination.

“Do you mean you would have come?” he said eagerly.

“Of course,” she said, as though this were the most natural thing in the world.

“Lord, this looks human!” he said, hungrily glancing into the studio. “Wish you could see the cell I’m in.” He hesitated a moment and then said abruptly, “I’d like—well, just to get the feeling of it—can I step in—just a moment?”

She hesitated in turn and studied his face intently.

“Just a minute, then,” she said, but she remained by the open door.

King O’Leary strode into the room over the grateful softness underneath.

“Rugs!” he said ecstatically, and he put his head back as though to inhale the welcome odor of a home. “Lord, I can just smell it!” he said. “It just warms you up—makes you feel real.”

He stood, hat in hand, his face glowing, surveying the blending shades of gray and green, the subdued glow of the table-lights, the grateful touches of warm colors here and there, and the easel covered with a cloak of mellow golden velvet that was in itself calming to look at.

“You’re an artist?” he said.

“Yes.”

She made no move to question him, watching him with a quiet sense of dignity that seemed to accord him what he needed and no more. He turned regretfully from his contemplation.

“You’re sure about dinner?”

“Yes.”

He wanted to shake hands, but her attitude did not seem to permit it. He made a last attempt.

“Say, if I annoy you with my pounding—just rap on the wall and shut me up.”

“I like it.”

“Really—anything in particular?”

“No; I like it all.”

“I’m glad of that.” He hesitated again, moved toward the door. “I’m sorry about that dinner.”

She nodded, and he thought she was still watching him with her disconcerting amusement.

“Good luck!”

The door closed, leaving King O’Leary, who had met women, good, bad, and indifferent, in many climes and held his own with Irish audacity, so thoroughly perplexed that he stood staring at the warm light playing on the glass of the door a long moment before he squared his shoulders and advanced to the next test.