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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Romance Island, by Zona Gale
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: Romance Island
Author: Zona Gale
Release Date: October 13, 2004 [EBook #13731]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROMANCE ISLAND ***
Produced by Janet Kegg and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed
Proofreading Team
[Illustration: frontispiece]
ROMANCE ISLAND
By
ZONA GALE
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
HERMANN C. WALL
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
1906
"Who that remembers the first kind glance of her
whom he loves can fail to believe in magic?"
--NOVALIS
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I DINNER TIME
II A SCRAP OF PAPER
III ST. GEORGE AND THE LADY
IV THE PRINCE OF FAR-AWAY
V OLIVIA PROPOSES
VI TWO LITTLE MEN
VII DUSK, AND SO ON
VIII THE PORCH OF THE MORNING
IX THE LADY OF KINGDOMS
X TYRIAN PURPLE
XI THE END OF THE EVENING
XII BETWEEN-WORLDS
XIII THE LINES LEAD UP
XIV THE ISLE OF HEARTS
XV A VIGIL
XVI GLAMOURIE
XVII BENEATH THE SURFACE
XVIII A MORNING VISIT
XIX IN THE HALL OF KINGS
XX OUT OF THE HALL OF KINGS
XXI OPEN SECRETS
ROMANCE ISLAND
CHAPTER I
DINNER TIME
As _The Aloha_ rode gently to her buoy among the crafts in the
harbour, St. George longed to proclaim in the megaphone's monstrous
parody upon capital letters:
"Cat-boats and house-boats and yawls, look here. You're bound to
observe that this is my steam yacht. I own her--do you see? She
belongs to me, St. George, who never before owned so much as a piece
of rope."
Instead--mindful, perhaps, that "a man should not communicate his
own glorie"--he stepped sedately down to the trim green skiff and
was rowed ashore by a boy who, for aught that either knew, might
three months before have jostled him at some ill-favoured lunch
counter. For in America, dreams of gold--not, alas, golden
dreams--do prevalently come true; and of all the butterfly
happenings in this pleasant land of larvae, few are so spectacular as
the process by which, without warning, a man is converted from a
toiler and bearer of loads to a taker of his _bien_. However, to
none, one must believe, is the changeling such gazing-stock as to
himself.
Although countless times, waking and sleeping, St. George had
humoured himself in the outworn pastime of dreaming what he would do
if he were to inherit a million dollars, his imagination had never
marveled its way to the situation's less poignant advantages. Chief
among his satisfactions had been that with which he had lately seen
his mother--an exquisite woman, looking like the old lace and Roman
mosaic pins which she had saved from the wreck of her fortune--set
off for Europe in the exceptional company of her brother, Bishop
Arthur Touchett, gentlest of dignitaries. The bishop, only to look
upon whose portrait was a benediction, had at sacrifice of certain
of his charities seen St. George through college; and it made the
million worth while to his nephew merely to send him to Tuebingen to
set his soul at rest concerning the date of one of the canonical
gospels. Next to the rich delight of planning that voyage, St.
George placed the buying of his yacht.
In the dusty, inky office of the _New York Evening Sentinel_ he had
been wont three months before to sit at a long green table fitting
words about the yachts of others to the dreary music of his
typewriter, the while vaguely conscious of a blur of eight telephone
bells, and the sound of voices used merely to communicate thought
and not to please the ear. In the last three months he had sometimes
remembered that black day when from his high window he had looked
toward the harbour and glimpsed a trim craft of white and brass
slipping to the river's mouth; whereupon he had been seized by such
a passion to work hard and earn a white-and-brass craft of his own
that the story which he was hurrying for the first edition was quite
ruined.
"Good heavens, St. George," Chillingworth, the city editor, had
gnarled, "we don't carry wooden type. And nothing else would set up
this wooden stuff of yours. Where's some snap? Your first paragraph
reads like a recipe. Now put your soul into it, and you've got less
than fifteen minutes to do it in."
St. George recalled that his friend Amory, as "one hackneyed in the
ways of life," had gravely lifted an eyebrow at him, and the new men
had turned different colours at the thought of being addressed like
that before the staff; and St. George had recast the story and had
received for his diligence a New Jersey assignment which had kept
him until midnight. Haunting the homes of the club-women and the
common council of that little Jersey town, the trim white-and-brass
craft slipping down to the river's mouth had not ceased to lure him.
He had found himself estimating the value--in money--of the
bric-a-brac of every house, and the self-importance of every
alderman, and reflecting that these people, if they liked, might own
yachts of white and brass; yet they preferred to crouch among the
bric-a-brac and to discourse to him of one another's violations and
interferences. By the time that he had reached home that dripping
night and had put captions upon the backs of the unexpectant-looking
photographs which were his trophies, he was in that state of
comparative anarchy to be effected only by imaginative youth and a
disagreeable task.
Next day, suddenly as its sun, had come the news which had
transformed him from a discontented grappler with social problems to
the owner of stocks and bonds and shares in a busy mine and other
things soothing to enumerate. The first thing which he had added
unto these, after the departure of his mother and the bishop, had
been _The Aloha_, which only that day had slipped to the river's
mouth in the view from his old window at the _Sentinel_ office. St.
George had the grace to be ashamed to remember how smoothly the
social ills had adjusted themselves.
Now they were past, those days of feverish work and unexpected
triumph and unaccountable failure; and in the dreariest of them St.
George, dreaming wildly, had not dreamed all the unobvious joys
which his fortune had brought to him. For although he had accurately
painted, for example, the delight of a cruise in a sea-going yacht
of his own, yet to step into his dory in the sunset, to watch _The
Aloha's_ sides shine in the late light as he was rowed ashore past
the lesser crafts in the harbour; to see the man touch his cap and
put back to make the yacht trim for the night, and then to turn his
own face to his apartment where virtually the entire day-staff of
the _Evening Sentinel_ was that night to dine--these were among the
pastimes of the lesser angels which his fancy had never compassed.
A glow of firelight greeted St. George as he entered his apartment,
and the rooms wore a pleasant air of festivity. A table, with covers
for twelve, was spread in the living-room, a fire of cones was
tossing on the hearth, the curtains were drawn, and the sideboard
was a thing of intimation. Rollo, his man--St. George had easily
fallen in all the habits which he had longed to assume--was just
closing the little ice-box sunk behind a panel of the wall, and he
came forward with dignified deference.
"Everything is ready, Rollo?" St. George asked. "No one has
telephoned to beg off?"
"Yes, sir," answered Rollo, "and no, sir."
St. George had sometimes told himself that the man looked like an
oval grey stone with a face cut upon it.
"Is the claret warmed?" St. George demanded, handing his hat. "Did
the big glasses come for the liqueur--and the little ones will set
inside without tipping? Then take the cigars to the den--you'll have
to get some cigarettes for Mr. Provin. Keep up the fire. Light the
candles in ten minutes. I say, how jolly the table looks."
"Yes, sir," returned Rollo, "an' the candles 'll make a great
difference, sir. Candles do give out an air, sir."
One month of service had accustomed St. George to his valet's gift
of the Articulate Simplicity. Rollo's thoughts were doubtless
contrived in the cuticle and knew no deeper operance; but he always
uttered his impressions with, under his mask, an air of keen and
seasoned personal observation. In his first interview with St.
George, Rollo had said: "I always enjoy being kep' busy, sir. _To
me_, the busy man is a grand sight," and St. George had at once
appreciated his possibilities. Rollo was like the fine print in an
almanac.
When the candles were burning and the lights had been turned on in
the little ochre den where the billiard-table stood, St. George
emerged--a well-made figure, his buoyant, clear-cut face accurately
bespeaking both health and cleverness. Of a family represented by
the gentle old bishop and his own exquisite mother, himself
university-bred and fresh from two years' hard, hand-to-hand
fighting to earn an honourable livelihood, St. George, of sound body
and fine intelligence, had that temper of stability within vast
range which goes pleasantly into the mind that meets it. A symbol of
this was his prodigious popularity with those who had been his
fellow-workers--a test beside which old-world traditions of the
urban touchstones are of secondary advantage. It was deeply
significant that in spite of the gulf which Chance had digged the
day-staff of the _Sentinel_, all save two or three of which were not
of his estate, had with flattering alacrity obeyed his summons to
dine. But, as he heard in the hall the voice of Chillingworth, the
difficulty of his task for the first time swept over him. It was
Chillingworth who had advocated to him the need of wooden type to
suit his literary style and who had long ordered and bullied him
about; and how was he to play the host to Chillingworth, not to
speak of the others, with the news between them of that million?
When the bell rang, St. George somewhat gruffly superseded Rollo.
"I'll go," he said briefly, "and keep out of sight for a few
minutes. Get in the bath-room or somewhere, will you?" he added
nervously, and opened the door.
At one stroke Chillingworth settled his own position by dominating
the situation as he dominated the city room. He chose the best chair
and told a good story and found fault with the way the fire burned,
all with immediate ease and abandon. Chillingworth's men loved to
remember that he had once carried copy. They also understood all the
legitimate devices by which he persuaded from them their best
effort, yet these devices never failed, and the city room agreed
that Chillingworth's fashion of giving an assignment to a new man
would force him to write a readable account of his own entertainment
in the dark meadows. Largely by personal magnetism he had fought his
way upward, and this quality was not less a social gift.
Mr. Toby Amory, who had been on the Eleven with St. George at
Harvard, looked along his pipe at his host and smiled, with
flattering content, his slow smile. Amory's father had lately had a
conspicuous quarter of an hour in Wall Street, as a result of which
Amory, instead of taking St. George to the cemetery at Clusium as he
had talked, himself drifted to Park Row; and although he now knew
considerably less than he had hoped about certain inscriptions, he
was supporting himself and two sisters by really brilliant work, so
that the balance of his power was creditably maintained. Surely the
inscriptions did not suffer, and what then was Amory that he should
object? Presently Holt, the middle-aged marine man, and Harding
who, since he had lost a lightweight sparring championship, was
sporting editor, solemnly entered together and sat down with the
social caution of their class. So did Provin, the "elder giant," who
gathered news as he breathed and could not intelligibly put six
words together. Horace, who would listen to four lines over the
telephone and therefrom make a half-column of American newspaper
humour or American newspaper tears, came in roaring pacifically and
marshaling little Bud, that day in the seventh heaven of his first
"beat." Then followed Crass, the feature man, whose interviews were
known to the new men as literature, although he was not above
publicly admitting that he was not a reporter, but a special writer.
Mr. Crass read nothing in the paper that he had not written, and St.
George had once prophesied that in old age he would use his
scrap-book for a manual of devotions, as Klopstock used his
_Messiah_. With him arrived Carbury, the telegraph editor, and later
Benfy, who had a carpet in his office and wrote editorials and who
came in evening clothes, thus moving Harding and Holt to instant
private conversation. The last to appear was Little Cawthorne who
wrote the fiction page and made enchanting limericks about every one
on the staff and went about singing one song and behaving, the
dramatic man flattered him, like a motif. Little Cawthorne entered
backward, wrestling with some wiry matter which, when he had
executed a manoeuvre and banged the door, was thrust through the
passage in the form of Bennie Todd, the head office boy,
affectionately known as Bennietod. Bennietod was in every one's
secret, clipped every one's space and knew every one's salary, and
he had lately covered a baseball game when the man whose copy he was
to carry had, outside the fence, become implicated in allurements.
He was greeted with noise, and St. George told him heartily that he
was glad he had come.
"He made me," defensively claimed Bennietod; frowning deferentially
at Little Cawthorne.
"Hello, St. George," said the latter, "come on back to the office.
Crass sits in your place and he wears cravats the colour of goblin's
blood. Come back."
"Not he," said Chillingworth, smoking; "the Dead-and-Done-with
editor is too keen for that; I won't give him a job. He's ruined.
Egg sandwiches will never stimulate him now."
St. George joined in the relieved laugh that followed. They were
remembering his young Sing Sing convict who had completed his
sentence in time to step in a cab and follow his mother to the
grave, where his stepfather refused to have her coffin opened. And
St. George, fresh from his Alma Mater, had weighted the winged words
of his story with allusions to the tears celestial of Thetis, shed
for Achilles, and Creon's grief for Haemon, and the Unnatural Combat
of Massinger's father and son; so that Chillingworth had said things
in languages that are not dead (albeit a bit Elizabethan) and the
composing room had shaken mailed fists.
"Hi, you!" said Little Cawthorne, who was born in the South, "this
is a mellow minute. I could wish they came often. This shall be a
weekly occurrence--not so, St. George?"
"Cawthorne," Chillingworth warned, "mind your manners, or they'll
make you city editor."
A momentary shadow was cast by the appearance of Rollo, who was
manifestly a symbol of the world Philistine about which these guests
knew more and in which they played a smaller part than any other
class of men. But the tray which Rollo bore was his passport.
Thereafter, they all trooped to the table, and Chillingworth sat at
the head, and from the foot St. George watched the city editor break
bread with the familiar nervous gesture with which he was wont to
strip off yards of copy-paper and eat it. There was a tacit
assumption that he be the conversational sun of the hour, and in
fostering this understanding the host took grateful refuge.
"This is shameful," Chillingworth began contentedly. "Every one of
you ought to be out on the Boris story."
"What is the Boris story?" asked St. George with interest. But in
all talk St. George had a restful, host-like way of playing the role
of opposite to every one who preferred being heard.
"I'll wager the boy hasn't been reading the papers these three
months," Amory opined in his pleasant drawl.
"No," St. George confessed; "no, I haven't. They make me homesick."
"Don't maunder," said Chillingworth in polite criticism. "This is
Amory's story, and only about a quarter of the facts yet," he added
in a resentful growl. "It's up at the Boris, in West Fifty-ninth
Street--you know the apartment house? A Miss Holland, an heiress,
living there with her aunt, was attacked and nearly murdered by a
mulatto woman. The woman followed her to the elevator and came
uncomfortably near stabbing her from the back. The elevator boy was
too quick for her. And at the station they couldn't get the woman to
say a word; she pretends not to understand or to speak anything
they've tried. She's got Amory hypnotized too--he thinks she can't.
And when they searched her," went on Chillingworth with enjoyment,
"they found her dressed in silk and cloth of gold, and loaded down
with all sorts of barbarous ornaments, with almost priceless jewels.
Miss Holland claims that she never saw or heard of the woman before.
Now, what do you make of it?" he demanded, unconcernedly draining
his glass.
"Splendid," cried St. George in unfeigned interest. "I say,
splendid. Did you see the woman?" he asked Amory.
Amory nodded.
"Yes," he said, "Andy fixed that for me. But she never said a word.
I _parlez-voused_ her, and _verstehen-Sied_ her, and she sighed and
turned her head."
"Did you see the heiress?" St. George asked.
"Not I," mourned Amory, "not to talk with, that is. I happened to be
hanging up in the hall there the afternoon it occurred;" he modestly
explained.
"What luck," St. George commented with genuine envy. "It's a
stunning story. Who is Miss Holland?"
"She's lived there for a year or more with her aunt," said
Chillingworth. "She is a New Yorker and an heiress and a great
beauty--oh, all the properties are there, but they're all we've got.
What do you make of it?" he repeated.
St. George did not answer, and every one else did.
"Mistaken identity," said Little Cawthorne. "Do you remember
Provin's story of the woman whose maid shot a masseuse whom she took
to be her mistress; and the woman forgave the shooting and seemed to
have her arrested chiefly because she had mistaken her for a
masseuse?"
"Too easy, Cawthorne," said Chillingworth.
"The woman is probably an Italian," said the telegraph editor,
"doing one of her Mafia stunts. It's time they left the politicians
alone and threw bombs at the bonds that back them."
"Hey, Carbury. Stop writing heads," said Chillingworth.
"Has Miss Holland lived abroad?" asked Crass, the feature man.
"Maybe this woman was her nurse or ayah or something who got fond of
her charge, and when they took it away years ago, she devoted her
life to trying to find it in America. And when she got here she
wasn't able to make herself known to her, and rather than let any
one else--"
"No more space-grabbing, Crass," warned Chillingworth.
"Maybe," ventured Horace, "the young lady did settlement work and
read to the woman's kid, and the kid died, and the woman thought
she'd said a charm over it."
Chillingworth grinned affectionately.
"Hold up," he commanded, "or you'll recall the very words of the
charm."
Bennietod gasped and stared.
"Now, Bennietod?" Amory encouraged him.
"I t'ink," said the lad, "if she's a heiress, dis yere
dagger-plunger is her mudder dat's been shut up in a mad-house to a
fare-you-well."
Chillingworth nodded approvingly.
"Your imagination is toning down wonderfully," he flattered him. "A
month ago you would have guessed that the mulatto lady was an
Egyptian princess' messenger sent over here to get the heart from an
American heiress as an ingredient for a complexion lotion. You're
coming on famously, Todd."
"The German poet Wieland," began Benfy, clearing his throat, "has,
in his epic of the _Oberon_ made admirable use of much the same
idea, Mr. Chillingworth--"
Yells interrupted him. Mr. Benfy was too "well-read" to be wholly
popular with the staff.
"Oh, well, the woman was crazy. That's about all," suggested
Harding, and blushed to the line of his hair.
"Yes, I guess so," assented Holt, who lifted and lowered one
shoulder as he talked, "or doped."
Chillingworth sighed and looked at them both with pursed lips.
"You two," he commented, "would get out a paper that everybody would
know to be full of reliable facts, and that nobody would buy. To be
born with a riotous imagination and then hardly ever to let it riot
is to be a born newspaper man. Provin?"
The elder giant leaned back, his eyes partly closed.
"Is she engaged to be married?" he asked. "Is Miss Holland engaged?"
Chillingworth shook his head.
"No," he said, "not engaged. We knew that by tea-time the same day,
Provin. Well, St. George?"
St. George drew a long breath.
"By Jove, I don't know," he said, "it's a stunning story. It's the
best story I ever remember, excepting those two or three that have
hung fire for so long. Next to knowing just why old Ennis
disinherited his son at his marriage, I would like to ferret out
this."
"Now, tut, St. George," Amory put in tolerantly, "next to doing
exactly what you will be doing all this week you'd rather ferret out
this."
"On my honour, no," St. George protested eagerly, "I mean quite what
I say. I might go on fearfully about it. Lord knows I'm going to see
the day when I'll do it, too, and cut my troubles for the luck of
chasing down a bully thing like this."
If there was anything to forgive, every one forgave him.
"But give up ten minutes on _The Aloha_," Amory skeptically put it,
adjusting his pince-nez, "for anything less than ten minutes on _The
Aloha_?"
"I'll do it now--now!" cried St. George. "If Mr. Chillingworth will
put me on this story in your place and will give you a week off on
_The Aloha_, you may have her and welcome."
Little Cawthorne pounded on the table.
"Where do I come in?" he wailed. "But no, all I get is another wad
o' woe."
"What do you say, Mr. Chillingworth?" St. George asked eagerly.
"I don't know," said Chillingworth, meditatively turning his glass.
"St. George is rested and fresh, and he feels the story. And
Amory--here, touch glasses with me."
Amory obeyed. His chief's hand was steady, but the two glasses
jingled together until, with a smile, Amory dropped his arm.
"I _am_ about all in, I fancy," he admitted apologetically.
"A week's rest on the water," said Chillingworth, "would set you on
your feet for the convention. All right, St. George," he nodded.
St. George leaped to his feet.
"Hooray!" he shouted like a boy. "Jove, won't it be good to get
back?"
He smiled as he set down his glass, remembering the day at his desk
when he had seen the white-and-brass craft slip to the river's
mouth.
Rollo, discreet and without wonder, footed softly about the table,
keeping the glasses filled and betraying no other sign of life. For
more than four hours he was in attendance, until, last of the
guests, Little Cawthorne and Bennietod departed together, trying to
remember the dates of the English kings. Finally Chillingworth and
Amory, having turned outdoors the dramatic critic who had arrived
at midnight and was disposed to stay, stood for a moment by the fire
and talked it over.
"Remember, St. George," Chillingworth said, "I'll have no
monkey-work. You'll report to me at the old hour, you won't be late;
and you'll take orders--"
"As usual, sir," St. George rejoined quietly.
"I beg your pardon," Chillingworth said quickly, "but you see this
is such a deuced unnatural arrangement."
"I understand," St. George assented, "and I'll do my best not to get
thrown down. Amory has told me all he knows about it--by the way,
where is the mulatto woman now?"
"Why," said Chillingworth, "some physician got interested in the
case, and he's managed to hurry her up to the Bitley Reformatory in
Westchester for the present. She's there; and that means, we need
not disguise, that nobody can see her. Those Bitley people are like
a rabble of wild eagles."
"Right," said St. George. "I'll report at eight o'clock. Amory can
board _The Aloha_ when he gets ready and take down whom he likes."
"On my life, old chap, it's a private view of Kedar's tents to me,"
said Amory, his eyes shining behind his pince-nez. "I'll probably
win wide disrespect by my inability to tell a mainsail from a
cockpit, but I'm a grateful dog, in spite of that."
When they were gone St. George sat by the fire. He read Amory's
story of the Boris affair in the paper, which somewhere in the
apartment Rollo had unearthed, and the man took off his master's
shoes and brought his slippers and made ready his bath. St. George
glanced over his shoulder at the attractively-dismantled table, with
its dying candles and slanted shades.
"Gad!" he said in sheer enjoyment as he clipped the story and saw
Rollo pass with the towels.
It was so absurdly like a city room's dream of Arcady.
CHAPTER II
A SCRAP OF PAPER
To be awakened by Rollo, to be served in bed with an appetizing
breakfast and to catch a hansom to the nearest elevated station were
novel preparations for work in the _Sentinel_ office. The
impossibility of it all delighted St. George rather more than the
reality, for there is no pastime, as all the world knows, quite like
that of practising the impossible. The days when, "like a man
unfree," he had fared forth from his unlovely lodgings clandestinely
to partake of an evil omelette, seemed enchantingly far away. It
was, St. George reflected, the experience of having been released
from prison, minus the disgrace.
Yet when he opened the door of the city room the odour of the
printers' ink somehow fused his elation in his liberty with the
elation of the return. This was like wearing fetters for bracelets.
When he had been obliged to breathe this air he had scoffed at its
fascination, but now he understood. "A newspaper office," so a
revered American of letters who had begun his life there had once
imparted to St. George, "is a place where a man with the
temperament of a savant and a recluse may bring his American vice of
commercialism and worship of the uncommon, and let them have it out.
Newspapers have no other use--except the one I began on." When St.
George entered the city room, Crass, of the goblin's blood cravats,
had vacated his old place, and Provin was just uncovering his
typewriter and banging the tin cover upon everything within reach,
and Bennietod was writhing over a rewrite, and Chillingworth was
discharging an office boy in a fashion that warmed St. George's
heart.
But Chillingworth, the city editor, was an italicized form of
Chillingworth, the guest. He waved both arms at the foreman who
ventured to tell him of a head that had one letter too many, and he
frowned a greeting at St. George.
"Get right out on the Boris story," he said. "I depend on you. The
chief is interested in this too--telephoned to know whom I had on
it."
St. George knew perfectly that "the chief" was playing golf at Lenox
and no doubt had read no more than the head-lines of the Holland
story, for he was a close friend of the bishop's, and St. George
knew his ways; but Chillingworth's methods always told, and St.
George turned away with all the old glow of his first assignment.
St. George, calling up the Bitley Reformatory, knew that the Chances
and the Fates were all allied against his seeing the mulatto woman;
but he had learned that it is the one unexpected Fate and the one
apostate Chance who open great good luck of any sort. So, though the
journey to Westchester County was almost certain to result in
refusal, he meant to be confronted by that certainty before he
assumed it. To the warden on the wire St. George put his inquiry.
"What are your visitors' days up there, Mr. Jeffrey?"
"Thursdays," came the reply, and the warden's voice suggested
handcuffs by way of hospitality.
"This is St. George of the _Sentinel_. I want very much to see one
of your people--a mulatto woman. Can you fix it for me?"
"Certainly not," returned the warden promptly. "The _Sentinel_ knows
perfectly that newspaper men can not be admitted here."
"Ah, well now, of course," St. George conceded, "but if you have a
mysterious boarder who talks Patagonian or something, and we think
that perhaps we can talk with her, why then--"
"It doesn't matter whether you can talk every language in South
America," said the warden bruskly. "I'm very busy now, and--"
"See here, Mr. Jeffrey," said St. George, "is no one allowed there
but relatives of the guests?"
"Nobody,"--crisply.
"I beg your pardon, that is literal?"
"Relatives, with a permit," divulged the warden, who, if he had had
a sceptre would have used it at table, he was so fond of his little
power, "and the Readers' Guild."
"Ah--the Readers' Guild," said St. George. "What days, Mr. Jeffrey?"
"To-day and Saturdays, ten o'clock. I'm sorry, Mr. St. George, but
I'm a very busy man and now--"
"Good-by," St. George cried triumphantly.
In half an hour he was at the Grand Central station, boarding a
train for the Reformatory town. It was a little after ten o'clock
when he rang the bell at the house presided over by Chillingworth's
"rabble of wild eagles."
The Reformatory, a boastful, brick building set in grounds that
seemed freshly starched and ironed, had a discoloured door that
would have frowned and threatened of its own accord, even without
the printed warnings pasted to its panels stating that no
application for admission, with or without permits, would be
honoured upon any day save Thursday. This was Tuesday.
Presently, the chains having fallen within after a feudal rattling,
an old man who looked born to the business of snapping up a
drawbridge in lieu of a taste for any other exclusiveness peered at
St. George through absurd smoked glasses, cracked quite across so
that his eyes resembled buckles.
"Good morning," said St. George; "has the Readers' Guild arrived
yet?"
The old man grated out an assent and swung open the door, which
creaked in the pitch of his voice. The bare hall was cut by a wall
of steel bars whose gate was padlocked, and outside this wall the
door to the warden's office stood open. St. George saw that a
meeting was in progress there, and the sight disturbed him. Then the
click of a key caught his attention, and he turned to find the old
man quietly and surprisingly swinging open the door of steel bars.
"This way, sir," he said hoarsely, fixing St. George with his buckle
eyes, and shambled through the door after him locking it behind
them.
If St. George had found awaiting him a gold throne encircled by
kneeling elephants he could have been no more amazed. Not a word had
been said about the purpose of his visit, and not a word to the
warden; there was simply this miraculous opening of the barred door.
St. George breathlessly footed across the rotunda and down the dim
opposite hall. There was a mistake, that was evident; but for the
moment St. George was going to propose no reform. Their steps echoed
in the empty corridor that extended the entire length of the great
building in an odour of unspeakable soap and superior disinfectants;
and it was not until they reached a stair at the far end that the
old man halted.
"Top o' the steps," he hoarsely volunteered, blinking his little
buckle eyes, "first door to the left. My back's bad. I won't go up."
St. George, inhumanely blessing the circumstance, slipped something
in the old man's hand and sprang up the stairs.
The first door at the left stood ajar. St. George looked in and saw
a circle of bonnets and white curls clouded around the edge of the
room, like witnesses. The Readers' Guild was about leaving; almost
in the same instant, with that soft lift and touch which makes a
woman's gown seem sewed with vowels and sibilants, they all arose
and came tapping across the bare floor. At their head marched a
woman with such a bright bonnet, and such a tinkle of ornaments on
her gown that at first sight she quite looked like a lamp. It was
she whom St. George approached.
"I beg your pardon, madame," he said, "is this the Readers' Guild?"
There was nothing in St. George's grave face and deferential
stooping of shoulders to betray how his heart was beating or what a
bound it gave at her amazing reply.
"Ah," she said, "how do you do?"--and her manner had that violent
absent-mindedness which almost always proves that its possessor has
trained a large family of children--"I am so glad that you can be
with us to-day. I am Mrs. Manners--forgive me," she besought with
perfectly self-possessed distractedness, "I'm afraid that I've
forgotten your name."
"My name is St. George," he answered as well as he could for virtual
speechlessness.
The other members of the Guild were issuing from the room, and Mrs.
Manners turned. She had a fashion of smiling enchantingly, as if to
compensate her total lack of attention.
"Ladies," she said, "this is Mr. St. George, at last."
Then she went through their names to him, and St. George bowed and
caught at the flying end of the name of the woman nearest him, and
muttered to them all. The one nearest was a Miss Bella Bliss Utter,
a little brown nut of a woman with bead eyes.
"Ah, Mr. St. George," said Miss Utter rapidly, "it has been a
wonderful meeting. I wish you might have been with us. Fortunately
for us you are just in time for our third floor council."
It had been said of St. George that when he was writing on space and
was in need, buildings fell down before him to give him two columns
on the first page; but any architectural manoeuvre could not have
amazed him as did this. And too, though there had been occasions
when silence or an evasion would have meant bread to him, the
temptation to both was never so strong as at that moment. It cost
St. George an effort, which he was afterward glad to remember having
made, to turn to Mrs. Manners, who had that air of appointing
committees and announcing the programme by which we always recognize
a leader, and try to explain.
"I am afraid," St. George said as they reached the stairs, "that you
have mistaken me, Mrs. Manners. I am not--"
"Pray, pray do not mention it," cried Mrs. Manners, shaking her
little lamp-shade of a hat at him, "we make every allowance, and I
am sure that none will be necessary."
"But I am with the _Evening Sentinel_," St. George persisted, "I am
afraid that--"
"As if one's profession made any difference!" cried Mrs. Manners
warmly. "No, indeed, I perfectly understand. We all understand," she
assured him, going over some papers in one hand and preparing to
mount the stairs. "Indeed, we appreciate it," she murmured, "do we
not, Miss Utter?"
The little brown nut seemed to crack in a capacious smile.
"Indeed, indeed!" she said fervently, accenting her emphasis by
briefly-closed eyes.
"Hymn books. Now, have we hymn books enough?" plaintively broke in
Mrs. Manners. "I declare, those new hymn books don't seem to have
the spirit of the old ones, no matter what _any one_ says," she
informed St. George earnestly as they reached an open door. In the
next moment he stood aside and the Readers' Guild filed past him. He
followed them. This was pleasantly like magic.
They entered a large chamber carpeted and walled in the garish
flowers which many boards of directors suppose will joy the
cheerless breast. There were present a dozen women inmates,--sullen,
weary-looking beings who seemed to have made abject resignation
their latest vice. They turned their lustreless eyes upon the
visitors, and a portly woman in a red waist with a little American
flag in a buttonhole issued to them a nasal command to rise. They
got to their feet with a starched noise, like dead leaves blowing,
and St. George eagerly scanned their faces. There were women of
several nationalities, though they all looked raceless in the ugly
uniforms which those same boards of directors consider _de rigueur_
for the soul that is to be won back to the normal. A little negress,
with a spirit that soared free of boards of directors, had tried to
tie her closely-clipped wool with bits of coloured string; an
Italian woman had a geranium over her ear; and at the end of the
last row of chairs, towering above the others, was a creature of a
kind of challenging, unforgetable beauty whom, with a thrill of
certainty, St. George realized to be her whom he had come to see.
So strong was his conviction that, as he afterward recalled, he even
asked no question concerning her. She looked as manifestly not one
of the canaille of incorrigibles as, in her place, Lucrezia Borgia
would have looked.
The woman was powerfully built with astonishing breadth of shoulder
and length of limb, but perfectly proportioned. She was young,
hardly more than twenty, St. George fancied, and of the peculiar
litheness which needs no motion to be manifest. Her clear skin was
of wonderful brown; and her eyes, large and dark, with something of
the oriental watchfulness, were like opaque gems and not more
penetrable. Her look was immovably fixed upon St. George as if she
divined that in some way his coming affected her.
"We will have our hymn first." Mrs. Manners' words were buzzing and
pecking in the air. "What can I have done with that list of numbers?
We have to select our pieces most carefully," she confided to St.
George, "so to be sure that _Soul's Prison_ or _Hands Red as
Crimson_, or, _Do You See the Hebrew Captive Kneeling?_ or anything
personal like that doesn't occur. Now what can I have done with that
list?"
Her words reached St. George but vaguely. He was in a fever of
anticipation and enthusiasm. He turned quickly to Mrs. Manners.
"During the hymn," he said simply, "I would like to speak with one
of the women. Have I your permission?"
Mrs. Manners looked momentarily perplexed; but her eyes at that
instant chancing upon her lost list of hymns, she let fall an
abstracted assent and hurried to the waiting organist. Immediately
St. George stepped quietly down among the women already fluttering
the leaves of their hymn books, and sat beside the mulatto woman.
Her eyes met his in eager questioning, but she had that temper of
unsurprise of many of the eastern peoples and of some animals. Yet
she was under some strong excitement, for her hands, large but
faultlessly modeled, were pressed tensely together. And St. George
saw that she was by no means a mulatto, or of any race that he was
able to name. Her features were classic and of exceeding fineness,
and her face was sensitive and highly-bred and filled with repose,
like the surprising repose of breathing arrested in marble. There
was that about her, however, which would have made one, constituted
to perceive only the arbitrary balance of things, feel almost
afraid; while one of high organization would inevitably have been
smitten by some sense of the incalculably higher organization of her
nature, a nature which breathed forth an influence, laid a
spell--did something indefinable. Sometimes one stands too closely
to a statue and is frightened by the nearness, as by the nearness
of one of an alien region. St. George felt this directly he spoke to
her. He shook off the impression and set himself practically to the
matter in hand. He had never had greater need of his faculty for
directness. His low tone was quite matter-of-fact, his manner
deferentially reassuring.
"I think," he said softly and without preface, "that I can help you.
Will you let me help you? Will you tell me quickly your name?"
The woman's beautiful eyes were filled with distress, but she shook
her head.
"Your name--name--name?" St. George repeated earnestly, but she had
only the same answer. "Can you not tell me where you live?" St.
George persisted, and she made no other sign.
"New York?" went on St. George patiently. "New York? Do you live in
New York?"
There was a sudden gleam in the woman's eyes. She extended her hands
quickly in unmistakable appeal. Then swiftly she caught up a hymn
book, tore at its fly-leaf, and made the movement of writing. In an
instant St. George had thrust a pencil in her hand and she was
tracing something.
He waited feverishly. The organ had droned through the hymn and the
women broke into song, with loose lips and without restraint, as
street boys sing. He saw them casting curious, sullen glances, and
the Readers' Guild whispering among themselves. Miss Bella Bliss
Utter, looking as distressed as a nut can look, nodded, and Mrs.
Manners shook her head and they meant the same thing. Then St.
George saw the attendant in the red waist descend from the platform
and make her way toward him, the little American flag rising and
falling on her breast. He unhesitatingly stepped in the aisle to
meet her, determined to prevent, if possible, her suspicion of the
message. "Is it the barbarism of a gentleman," Amory had once
propounded, "or is it the gentleman-like manners of a barbarian
which makes both enjoy over-stepping a prohibition?"
"I compliment you," St. George said gravely, with his deferential
stooping of the shoulders. "The women are perfectly trained. This,
of course, is due to you."
The hard face of the woman softened, but St. George thought that one
might call her very facial expression nasal; she smiled with evident
pleasure, though her purpose remained unshaken.
"They do pretty good," she admitted, "but visitors ain't best for
'em. I'll have to request you"--St. George vaguely wished that she
would say "ask"--"not to talk to any of 'em."
St. George bowed.
"It is a great privilege," he said warmly if a bit incoherently,
and held her in talk about an institution of the sort in Canada
where the women inmates wore white, the managers claiming that the
effect upon their conduct was perceptible, that they were far more
self-respecting, and so on in a labyrinth of defensive detail. "What
do you think of the idea?" he concluded anxiously, manfully holding
his ground in the aisle.
"I think it's mostly nonsense," returned the woman tartly, "a big
expense and a sight of work for nothing. And now permit me to say--"
St. George vaguely wished that she would say "let."
"I agree with you," he said earnestly, "nothing could be simpler and
neater than these calico gowns."
The attendant looked curiously at him.
"They are gingham," she rejoined, "and you'll excuse me, I hope, but
visitors ain't supposed to converse with the inmates."
St. George was vanquished by "converse."
"I beg your pardon," he said, "pray forgive me. I will say good-by
to my friend."
He turned swiftly and extended his hand to the strange woman behind
him. With the cunning upon which he had counted she gave her own
hand, slipping in his the folded paper. Her eyes, with their
haunting watchfulness, held his for a moment as she mutely bent
forward when he left her.
The hymn was done and the women were seating themselves, as St.
George with beating heart took his way up the aisle. What the paper
contained he could not even conjecture; but there _was_ a paper and
it _did_ contain something which he had a pleasant premonition would
be invaluable to him. Yet he was still utterly at loss to account
for his own presence there, and this he coolly meant to do.
He was spared the necessity. On the platform Mrs. Manners had risen
to make an announcement; and St. George fancied that she must
preside at her tea-urn and try on her bonnets with just that same
formal little "announcement" air.
"My friends," she said, "I have now an unexpected pleasure for you
and for us all. We have with us to-day Mr. St. George, of New York.
Mr. St. George is going to sing for us."
St. George stood still for a moment, looking into the expectant
faces of Mrs. Manners and the other women of the Readers' Guild, a
spark of understanding kindling the mirth in his eyes. This then
accounted both for his admittance to the home and for his welcome by
the women upon their errand of mercy. He had simply been very
naturally mistaken for a stranger from New York who had not arrived.
But since he had accomplished something, though he did not know
what, inasmuch as the slip of paper lay crushed in his hand unread,
he must, he decided, pay for it. Without ado he stepped to the
platform.
"I have explained to Mrs. Manners and to these ladies," he said
gravely, "that I am not the gentleman who was to sing for you.
However, since he is detained, I will do what I can."