The Job Part 16

Pretty Mrs. Gray was hurt and indignant, while her husband growled: "Aw, don't pay any attention to that human phonograph, Amy. He's got bats in his belfry."

Una had acquired a hesitating fondness for the mute gentleness of the others, and it infuriated her that this insect should spoil their picnic. But after dinner Phil Benson dallied over to her, sat on the arm of her chair, and said: "I'm awfully sorry that I make such a b.u.m hit with you, Miss Golden. Oh, I can see I do, all right. You're the only one here that can understand. Somehow it seems to me--you aren't like other women I know. There's something--somehow it's different. A--a temperament. You dream about higher things than just food and clothes.

Oh," he held up a deprecating hand, "don't deny it. I'm mighty serious about it, Miss Golden. I can see it, even if you haven't waked up to it as yet."

The absurd part of it was that, at least while he was talking, Mr. Phil Benson did believe what he was saying, though he had borrowed all of his sentiments from a magazine story about hobohemians which he had read the night before.

He also spoke of reading good books, seeing good plays, and the lack of good influences in this wicked city.

He didn't overdo it. He took leave in ten minutes--to find good influences in a Kelly pool-parlor on Third Avenue. He returned to his room at ten, and, sitting with his shoeless feet c.o.c.ked up on his bed, read a story in _Racy Yarns_. While beyond the part.i.tion, about four feet from him, Una Golden lay in bed, her smooth arms behind her aching head, and worried about Phil's lack of opportunity.

She was finding in his loud impudence a twisted resemblance to Walter Babson's erratic excitability, and that won her, for love goes seeking new images of the G.o.d that is dead.

Next evening Phil varied his tactics by coming to dinner early, just touching Una's hand as she was going into the dining-room, and murmuring in a small voice, "I've been thinking so much of the helpful things you said last evening, Miss Golden."

Later, Phil talked to her about his longing to be a great surgeon--in which he had the tremendous advantage of being almost sincere. He walked down the hall to her room, and said good-night lingeringly, holding her hand.

Una went into her room, closed the door, and for full five minutes stood amazed. "Why!" she gasped, "the little man is trying to make love to me!"

She laughed over the absurdity of it. Heavens! She had her Ideal. The Right Man. He would probably be like Walter Babson--though more dependable. But whatever the nature of the paragon, he would in every respect be just the opposite of the creature who had been saying good-night to her.

She sat down, tried to read the paper, tried to put Phil out of her mind. But he kept returning. She fancied that she could hear his voice in the hall. She dropped the paper to listen.

"I'm actually interested in him!" she marveled. "Oh, that's ridiculous!"

- 5

Now that Walter had made a man's presence natural to her, Una needed a man, the excitation of his touch, the solace of his voice. She could not patiently endure a cloistered vacuousness.

Even while she was vigorously representing to herself that he was preposterous, she was uneasily aware that Phil was masculine. His talons were strong; she could feel their clutch on her hands. "He's a rat. And I do wish he wouldn't--spit!" she shuddered. But under her scorn was a surge of emotion.... A man, not much of a man, yet a man, had wanted the contact of her hand, been eager to be with her.

Sensations vast as night or the ocean whirled in her small, white room.

Desire, and curiosity even more, made her restless as a wave.

She caught herself speculating as she plucked at the sleeve of her black mourning waist: "I wonder would I be more interesting if I had the orange-and-brown dress I was going to make when mother died?... Oh, shame!"

Yet she sprang up from the white-enameled rocker, tucked in her graceless cotton corset-cover, stared at her image in the mirror, smoothed her neck till the skin reddened.

- 6

Phil talked to her for an hour after their Sunday-noon dinner. She had been to church; had confessed indeterminate sins to a formless and unresponsive deity. She felt righteous, and showed it. Phil caught the cue. He sacrificed all the witty things he was prepared to say about Mrs. Gray's dumplings; he gazed silently out of the window till she wondered what he was thinking about, then he stumblingly began to review a sermon which he said he had heard the previous Sunday--though he must have been mistaken, as he shot several games of Kelly pool every Sunday morning, or slept till noon.

"The preacher spoke of woman's influence. You don't know what it is to lack a woman's influence in a fellow's life, Miss Golden. I can see the awful consequences among my patients. I tell you, when I sat there in church and saw the colored windows--" He sighed portentously. His hand fell across hers--his lean paw, strong and warm-blooded from ma.s.saging puffy old men. "I tell you I just got sentimental, I did, thinking of all I lacked."

Phil melted mournfully away--to indulge in a highly cheerful walk on upper Broadway with Miss Becky Rosenthal, sewer for the Sans Peur Pants and Overalls Company--while in her room Una grieved over his forlorn desire to be good.

- 7

Two evenings later, when November warmed to a pa.s.sing Indian summer of golden skies that were pitifully far away from the little folk in city streets, Una was so restless that she set off for a walk by herself.

Phil had been silent, glancing at her and away, as though he were embarra.s.sed.

"I wish I could do something to help him," she thought, as she poked down-stairs to the entrance of the apartment-house.

Phil was on the steps, smoking a cigarette-sized cigar, scratching his chin, and chattering with his kinsmen, the gutter sparrows.

He doffed his derby. He spun his cigar from him with a deft flip of his fingers which somehow agitated her. She called herself a little fool for being agitated, but she couldn't get rid of the thought that only men snapped their fingers like that.

"Goin' to the movies, Miss Golden?"

"No, I was just going for a little walk."

"Well, say, walks, that's where I live. Why don't you invite Uncle Phil to come along and show you the town? Why, I knew this burg when they went picnicking at the reservoir in Bryant Park."

He swaggered beside her without an invitation. He did not give her a chance to decline his company--and soon she did not want to. He led her down to Gramercy Park, loveliest memory of village days, houses of a demure red and white ringing a fenced garden. He pointed out to her the Princeton Club, the Columbia Club, the National Arts, and the Players', and declared that two men leaving the last were John Drew and the most famous editor in America. He guided her over to Stuyvesant Park, a barren square out of old London, with a Quaker school on one side, and the voluble Ghetto on the other. He conducted her through East Side streets, where Jewish lovers parade past miles of push-carts and venerable Rabbis read the Talmud between sales of cotton socks, and showed her a little cafe which was a hang-out for thieves. She was excited by this contact with the underworld.

He took her to a Lithuanian restaurant, on a street which was a debacle.

One half of the restaurant was filled with s.h.a.ggy Lithuanians playing cards at filthy tables; the other half was a clean haunt for tourists who came to see the slums, and here, in the heart of these "slums," saw only one another.

"Wait a while," Phil said, "and a bunch of Seeing-New-Yorkers will land here and think we're crooks."

In ten minutes a van-load of sheepish trippers from the Middle West filed into the restaurant and tried to act as though they were used to c.o.c.ktails. Una was delighted when she saw them secretly peering at Phil and herself; she put one hand on her thigh and one on the table, leaned forward and tried to look tough, while Phil pretended to be quarreling with her, and the trippers' simple souls were enthralled by this glimpse of two criminals. Una really enjoyed the acting; for a moment Phil was her companion in play; and when the trippers had gone rustling out to view other haunts of vice she smiled at Phil unrestrainedly.

Instantly he took advantage of her smile, of their companions.h.i.+p.

He was really as simple-hearted as the trippers in his tactics.

She had been drinking ginger-ale. He urged her now to "have a real drink." He muttered confidentially: "Have a nip of sherry or a New Orleans fizz or a Bronx. That'll put heart into you. Not enough to affect you a-tall, but just enough to cheer up on. Then we'll go to a dance and really have a time. Gee! poor kid, you don't get any fun."

"No, no, I _never_ touch it," she said, and she believed it, forgetting the claret she had drunk with Walter Babson.

She felt unsafe.

He laughed at her; a.s.sured her from his medical experience that "lots of women need a little tonic," and boisterously ordered a gla.s.s of sherry for her.

She merely sipped it. She wanted to escape. All their momentary frankness of a.s.sociation was gone. She feared him; she hated the complaisant waiter who brought her the drink; the fat proprietor who would take his pieces of silver, though they were the price of her soul; the policeman on the pavement, who would never think of protecting her; and the whole hideous city which benignly profited by saloons. She watched another couple down at the end of the room--an obese man and a young, pretty girl, who was hysterically drunk. Not because she had attended the Women's Christian Temperance Union at Panama and heard them condemn "the demon rum," but because the sickish smell of the alcohol was all about her now, she suddenly turned into a crusader. She sprang up, seized her gloves, snapped, "I will not touch the stuff." She marched down the room, out of the restaurant and away, not once looking back at Phil.

In about fifteen seconds she had a humorous picture of Phil trying to rush after her, but stopped by the waiter to pay his check. She began to wonder if she hadn't been slightly ridiculous in attempting to slay Demon Rum by careering down the restaurant. But "I don't care!" she said, stoutly. "I'm glad I took a stand instead of just rambling along and wondering what it was all about, the way I did with Walter."

Phil caught up to her and instantly began to complain. "Say, you certainly made a sight out of yourself--and out of me--leaving me sitting there with the waiter laughing his b.o.o.b head off at me. Lord!

I'll never dare go near the place again."

"Your own fault." This problem was so clear, so unconfused to her.

"It wasn't all my fault," he said. "You didn't have to take a drink."

His voice fell to a pathetic whimper. "I was showing you hospitality the best way I knew how. You won't never know how you hurt my feelin's."