Lifted Masks Part 8

That accomplished, an ostentatious hunt ensued, resulting in the triumphant flourish of a feather duster. Several knocks at the table, and the dust of many months--perhaps likewise of many dreams--ascended to a resting place on the endors.e.m.e.nt of Dr.

Bunting's Kidney and Bladder Cure. He next produced a short, straight-backed chair which she recognised as brother to the one which used to stand behind their kitchen stove. He gave it a shake, thus delicately indicating that she was receiving special favours in this matter of an able-bodied chair, and then announced with brisk satisfaction: "So! Now we are ready to begin." She murmured a "Thank you," seated herself and her buried hopes in this chair which did not whirl round, and leaned her arms upon a table which did not even dream in mahogany.

In the _other_ publis.h.i.+ng house, one pushed b.u.t.tons and uniformed menials appeared--noiselessly, quickly and deferentially.

At this moment a boy with sandy hair brushed straight back in a manner either statesmanlike or clownlike--things were too involved to know which--shuffled in with an armful of yellow paper which he flopped down on the pine table. After a minute he returned with a warbled "Take Me Back to New York Town" and a paste-pot. And upon his third appearance he was practising gymnastics with a huge pair of shears, which he finally presented, grinningly.

There was a long pause, broken only by the sonorous voice of Dr.

Bunting upbraiding someone for not having billed out that stuff to Apple Grove, and then the sandy-haired boy appeared bearing a large dictionary, followed by the man in the skull cap behind a dictionary of equal unwieldiness. These were set down on either side of the yellow paper, and he who was filling the position of cultivated gentleman pulled up a chair, briskly.

"Has Professor Lee explained to you the nature of our work?" he wanted to know.

"No," she replied, half grimly, a little humourously, and not far from tearfully, "he didn't--explain."

"Then it is my pleasure to inform you," he began, blinking at her importantly, "that we are engaged here in the making of a dictionary."

"A _dic--?_" but she swallowed the gasp in the laugh coming up to meet it, and of their union was born a saving cough.

"Quite an overpowering thought, is it not?" he agreed pleasantly.

"Now you see you have before you the two dictionaries you will use most, and over in that case you will find other references. The main thing"--his voice sank to an impressive whisper--"is _not_ to infringe the copyright. The publisher was in yesterday and made a little talk to the force, and he said that any one who handed in a piece of copy infringing the copyright simply employed that means of writing his own resignation. Neat way of putting it, was it not?"

"Yes, _wasn't_ it--neat?" she agreed, wildly.

She was conscious of a man's having stepped in behind her and taken a seat at the table next hers. She heard him opening his dictionaries and getting out his paper. Then the man in the skull cap had risen and was saying genially: "Well, here is a piece of old Webster, your first 'take'--no copyright on this, you see, but you must modernise and expand. Don't miss any of the good words in either of these dictionaries. Here you have dictionaries, copy-paper, paste, and Professor Lee a.s.sures me you have brains--all the necessary ingredients for successful lexicography. We are to have some rules printed to-morrow, and in the meantime I trust I've made myself clear.

The main thing"--he bent down and spoke it solemnly--"is _not_ to infringe the copyright." With a cheerful nod he was gone, and she heard him saying to the man at the next table: "Mr. Clifford, I shall have to ask you to be more careful about getting in promptly at eight."

She removed the cover from her paste-pot and dabbled a little on a piece of paper. Then she tried the unwieldy shears on another piece of paper. She then opened one of her dictionaries and read studiously for fifteen minutes. That accomplished, she opened the other dictionary and pursued it for twelve minutes. Then she took the column of "old Webster," which had been handed her pasted on a piece of yellow paper, and set about attempting to commit it to memory. She looked up to be met with the statement that Mrs. Marjory Van Luce De Vane, after spending years under the so-called best surgeons of the country, had been cured in six weeks by Dr.

Bunting's Famous Kidney and Bladder Cure. She pushed the dictionaries petulantly from her, and leaning her very red cheek upon her hand, her hazel eyes blurred with tears of perplexity and resentment, her mouth drawn in pathetic little lines of uncertainty, looked over at the sprawling warehouse on the opposite side of Dearborn Street. She was just considering the direct manner of writing one's resignation--not knowing how to infringe the copyright--when a voice said: "I beg pardon, but I wonder if I can help you any?"

She had never heard a voice like that before. Or, _had_ she heard it?--and where? She looked at him, a long, startled gaze.

Something made her think of the voice the prince used to have in long-ago dreams. She looked into a face that was dark and thin and--different. Two very dark eyes were looking at her kindly, and a mouth which was a baffling combination of things to be loved and things to be deplored was twitching a little, as though it would like to join the eyes in a smile, if it dared.

Because he saw both how funny and how hard it was, she liked him. It would have been quite different had he seen either one without the other.

"You can tell me how _not_ to infringe the copyright," she laughed. "I'm not sure that I know what a copyright is."

He laughed--a laugh which belonged with his voice. "Mr. Littletree isn't as lucid as he thinks he is. I've been here a week or so, and picked up a few things you might like to know."

He pulled his chair closer to her table then and gave her a lesson in the making of copy. Edna Willard was never one-half so attractive as when absorbed in a thing which someone was showing her how to do. Her hazel eyes would widen and glisten with the joy of comprehending; her cheeks would flush a deeper pink with the coming of new light, her mouth would part in a child-like way it had forgotten to outgrow, her head would nod gleefully in token that she understood, and she had a way of pulling at her wavy hair and making it more wavy than it had been before. The man at the next table was a long time in explaining the making of a dictionary. He spoke in low tones, often looking at the figure of the man in the skull cap, who was sitting with his back to them, looking over copy. Once she cried, excitedly: "Oh--I _see_!" and he warned, "S--h!" explaining, "Let him think you got it all from him. It will give you a better stand-in." She nodded, appreciatively, and felt very well acquainted with this kind man whose voice made her think of something--called to something--she did not just know what.

After that she became so absorbed in lexicography that when the men began putting away their things it was hard to realise that the morning had gone. It was a new and difficult game, the evasion of the copyright furnis.h.i.+ng the stimulus of a hazard.

The man at the next table had been watching her with an amused admiration. Her child-like absorption, the way every emotion from perplexity to satisfaction expressed itself in the poise of her head and the pucker of her face, took him back over years emotionally barren to the time when he too had those easily stirred enthusiasms of youth. For the man at the next table was far from young now. His mouth had never quite parted with boyishness, but there was more white than black in his hair, and the lines about his mouth told that time, as well as forces more aging than time, had laid heavy hand upon him. But when he looked at the girl and told her with a smile that it was time to stop work, it was a smile and a voice to defy the most tell-tale face in all the world.

During her luncheon, as she watched the strange people coming and going, she did much wondering. She wondered why it was that so many of the men at the dictionary place were very old men; she wondered if it would be a good dictionary--one that would be used in the schools; she wondered if Dr. Bunting had made a great deal of money, and most of all she wondered about the man at the next table whose voice was like--like a dream which she did not know that she had dreamed.

When she had returned to the straggling old building, had stumbled down the narrow, dark hall and opened the door of the big bleak room, she saw that the man at the next table was the only one who had returned from luncheon. Something in his profile made her stand there very still. He had not heard her come in, and he was looking straight ahead, eyes half closed, mouth set--no unsurrendered boyishness there now. Wholly unconsciously she took an impulsive step forward. But she stopped, for she saw, and felt without really understanding, that it was not just the moment's pain, but the revealed pain of years. Just then he began to cough, and it seemed the cough, too, was more than of the moment. And then he turned and saw her, and smiled, and the smile changed all.

As the afternoon wore on the man stopped working and turning a little in his chair sat there covertly watching the girl. She was just typically girl. It was written that she had spent her days in the happy ways of healthful girlhood. He supposed that a great many young fellows had fallen in love with her--nice, clean young fellows, the kind she would naturally meet. And then his eyes closed for a minute and he put up his hand and brushed back his hair; there was weariness, weariness weary of itself, in the gesture. He looked about the room and scanned the faces of the men, most of them older than he, many of them men whose histories were well known to him.

They were the usual hangers on about newspaper offices; men who, for one reason or other--age, dissipation, antiquated methods--had been pitched over, men for whom such work as this came as a G.o.dsend. They were the men of yesterday--men whom the world had rushed past. She was the only one there, this girl who would probably sit here beside him for many months, with whom the future had anything to do.

Youth!--Goodness!--Joy!--Hope!--strange things to bring to a place like this. And as if their alienism disturbed him, he moved restlessly, almost resentfully, bit his lips nervously, moistened them, and began putting away his things.

As the girl was starting home along Dearborn Street a few minutes later, she chanced to look in a window. She saw that it was a saloon, but before she could turn away she saw a man with a white face--white with the peculiar whiteness of a dark face, standing before the bar drinking from a small gla.s.s. She stood still, arrested by a look such as she had never seen before: a panting human soul sobbingly fluttering down into something from which it had spent all its force in trying to rise. When she recalled herself and pa.s.sed on, a mist which she could neither account for nor banish was dimming the clear hazel of her eyes.

The next day was a hard one at the dictionary place. She told herself it was because the novelty of it was wearing away, because her fingers ached, because it tired her back to sit in that horrid chair. She did not admit of any connection between her flagging interest and the fact that the place at the next table was vacant.

The following day he was still absent. She a.s.sumed that it was nervousness occasioned by her queer surroundings made her look around whenever she heard a step behind her. Where was he? Where had that look carried him? If he were in trouble, was there no one to help him?

The third day she did an unpremeditated thing. The man in the skull cap had been showing her something about the copy. As he was leaving, she asked: "Is the man who sits at the next table coming back?"

"Oh yes," he replied grimly, "he'll be back."

"Because," she went on, "if he wasn't, I thought I would take his shears. These hurt my fingers."

He made the exchange for her--and after that things went better.

He did return late the next morning. After he had taken his place he looked over at her and smiled. He looked sick and shaken--as if something that knew no mercy had taken hold of him and wrung body and soul.

"You have been ill?" she asked, with timid solicitude.

"Oh no," he replied, rather shortly.

He was quiet all that day, but the next day they talked about the work, laughed together over funny definitions they found. She felt that he could tell many interesting things about himself, if he cared to.

As the days went on he did tell some of those things--out of the way places where he had worked, queer people whom he had known. It seemed that words came to him as gifts, came freely, happily, pleased, perhaps, to be borne by so sympathetic a voice. And there was another thing about him. He seemed always to know just what she was trying to say; he never missed the unexpressed. That made it easy to say things to him; there seemed a certain at-homeness between his thought and hers. She accounted for her interest in him by telling herself she had never known any one like that before. Now Harold, the boy whom she knew best out at the university, why one had to _say_ things to Harold to make him understand! And Harold never left one wondering--wondering what he had meant by that smile, what he had been going to say when he started to say something and stopped, wondering what it was about his face that one could not understand. Harold never could claim as his the hour after he had left her, and was one ever close to anyone with whom one did not spend some of the hours of absence? She began to see that hours spent together when apart were the most intimate hours of all.

And as Harold did not make one wonder, so he did not make one worry.

Never in all her life had there been a lump in her throat when she thought of Harold. There was often a lump in her throat when the man at the next table was coughing.

One day, she had been there about two months, she said something to him about it. It was hard; it seemed forcing one's way into a room that had never been opened to one--there were several doors he kept closed.

"Mr. Clifford," she turned to him impetuously as they were putting away their things that night, "will you mind if I say something to you?"

He was covering his paste-pot. He looked up at her strangely. The closed door seemed to open a little way. "I can't conceive of 'minding' anything you might say to me, Miss Noah,"--he had called her Miss Noah ever since she, by mistake, had one day called him Mr.

Webster.

"You see," she hurried on, very timid, now that the door had opened a little, "you have been so good to me. Because you have been so good to me it seems that I have some right to--to--"

His head was resting upon his hand, and he leaned a little closer as though listening for something he wanted to hear.

"I had a cousin who had a cough like yours,"--brave now that she could not go back--"and he went down to New Mexico and stayed for a year, and when he came back--when he came back he was as well as any of us. It seems so foolish not to"--her voice broke, now that it had so valiantly carried it--"not to--"

He looked at her, and that was all. But she was never wholly the same again after that look. It enveloped her being in a something which left her richer--different. It was a look to light the dark place between two human souls. It seemed for the moment that words would follow it, but as if feeling their helplessness--perhaps needlessness--they sank back unuttered, and at the last he got up, abruptly, and walked away.

One night, while waiting for the elevator, she heard two of the men talking about him. When she went out on the street it was with head high, cheeks hot. For nothing is so hard to hear as that which one has half known, and evaded. One never denies so hotly as in denying to one's self what one fears is true, and one never resents so bitterly as in resenting that which one cannot say one has the right to resent.

That night she lay in her bed with wide open eyes, going over and over the things they had said. "_Cure?_"--one of them had scoffed, after telling how brilliant he had been before he "went to pieces"--"why all the cures on earth couldn't help him! He can go just so far, and then he can no more stop himself--oh, about as much as an ant could stop a prairie fire!"

She finally turned over on her pillow and sobbed; and she wondered why--wondered, yet knew.

But it resulted in the flowering of her tenderness for him. Interest mounted to defiance. It ended in blind, pa.s.sionate desire to "make it up" to him. And again he was so different from Harold; Harold did not impress himself upon one by upsetting all one's preconceived ideas.