The Magpies Nest

by Isabel Paterson

  CHAPTER XVIII

  AFTER nearly a week in the train Hope felt that she never again wished to move one inch from where she lay. It was a long, long way she had come, not only in that week, but in-all the years since she had left home, and when the persistent daylight at last crept under her eyelids she merely turned and dragged another pillow over as a bulwark. New York was waiting for her to come out and conquer it, but at least it could not break into her hotel room and demand to be conquered immediately.

  How bare the walls of an hotel room were. And they were all the background she had achieved. They must be furnished and decorated. What a lot of time she had wasted. Well, she would think about that tomorrow. She was hovering again on the verge of sleep, and beginning to feel hungry at the same time, when the sound of a turning knob brought her up sharply, a trifle wild-eyed, confronting the opening door with a ready-to-spring expression—much as if she suspected New York was indeed about to enter and demand either conquest or surrender.

  "Who's there?" she cried. Her tone was so fierce that the maid, whose latch-key had served since Hope forgot, in the weariness of the night before, to shoot the bolt, started and dropped an armful of towels. "I beg your pardon," both women said fervently and simultaneously, and Hope added, "Do come in. I should like to hear a human voice."

  The maid, a cheerful and not uncomely person, past her first youth, still looked rather alarmed, but entered.

  "I'm sorry I disturbed you," she said. "It's a nice morning. I thought I'd seen you leave; I guess it was the lady next door."

  "I will soon," Hope promised. "But I have just come from the Pacific Coast, and I need some rest "

  "Really?" The maid also probably suffered from loneliness in her rounds. "I always thought I'd like to go there. But my folks live here, and I guess it's silly to throw up a good job and run off on a wild goose chase."

  "Isn't it?" Hope agreed cordially, and wished Mary could hear. "Is your work nice here?"

  "Oh, yes; we have a lovely housekeeper. I'm her assistant, but we're short-handed now, so I have to do this."

  "Then you might take me on," said Hope. "I used to be a room maid; I know enough to put the wide hem at the top, and I can put a pillow in a case without holding it in my teeth, and heaps of things."

  "You were—oh, you're joking." The woman smiled, glancing at the silver-backed brushes and mirror on the dressing-table, and then at a crêpe négligé lying across the foot of the bed. Hope dressed to please herself, she said, and was extravagant in peculiarly personal ways.

  "No, I'm not. And I came to New York to look for work."

  "I guess you'll find it, all right," said the maid consolingly, laying out fresh towels with mathematical precision and small haste, glad of a pretext to linger. "This is a big town. What do you aim to do?"

  "Draw pictures." Hope was rather enjoying herself; she told herself gravely that the footboard of the bed was a back fence, and she was really getting acquainted with New York.

  "Well, you must be clever," said the good-hearted creature. 'Maybe I'll see them some day in the magazines."

  "I'm going to attack the newspapers first," said Hope, smiling. "If I'm not good enough for them, maybe the magazines will do. And when I have spent my last nickel for a bun to eat in the park—I understand that's the thing to do—I'll come back here and ask you to take me on. Whom shall I ask for?"

  "Mrs. Merrick. I'll certainly do it," said the other cordially.

  Hope wondered where Mr. Merrick might be—wondered how many New York held of such unattached married women as herself.

  "Now," she said, scrambling out of bed, "since I have an anchor to windward, I can go forth with confidence. Me for the shops." As she had avowed to Mary, she intended to "put up a front."

  She went about dressing, gurgling a song into her shower bath and later executing a pas seul with only one shoe on, in a moment of unreflective enthusiasm.

  So for three days she deployed and skirmished on the shops, with a wholly feminine joy of conflict. The vast city, mile on mile of brick and stone, filled her with mingled admiration, horror, and a sense of her own insignificance. In her moments of depression it was to her like a senseless triumph of destruction; for man had obliterated the face of nature, and, like some malevolent upheaval of primal forces, left scarcely a blade of grass alive where he had passed. Again, when she walked the length of Fifth Avenue on a sunny cool morning, the glitter and lightness of it, the marvellous windows and the dainty women who went by like artificial lilies of the field, were a magnificent show, useless, perishable, but infinitely costly and so remote from the common soil, so far from the strong roots of the world on which they flourished like rare parasites on the top of a great tree, as to carry a suggestion of the utter unreality of fairyland. The impression was heightened, perhaps, by Hope's peremptory need of human companionship, and the knowledge that to these people she did not exist; she might have "cried on them and they would not hear." But for a greeting once a day from Mrs. Merrick, who in truth came out of her way for it each morning, she had spoken to no one in New York.

  "Why, it's worse than solitary confinement," she exclaimed suddenly, having reached the Plaza, pushed on and on, walking with that light elastic step she had gained on the prairie, and, traversing Central Park, come out at the upper end against fresh rows of stolid brick and mortar. "I can't get out—nor in!" A city of enchantment and terror and paradox. "It is big," she conceded, and for a long time pondered of what it reminded her, waking with a start to the conscious recollection of those endless reaches of soft dun-coloured landscape that had been her childish world. But there had been an end to that—when she had grown up to it—there must be to this. Some way to pierce or surmount it. "It's so big," she reflected again, "I'll have to find a little, little crack, and creep through like a mole; I want to get to the heart of it. I suppose I'd better begin!"

  So she took a bus back to the Washington Arch, and thence, with splendid ostentation that concealed a doubt of her own ability to master the intricacies of Subway or Elevated, a taxicab carried her to Park Row. It was only three dollars—whatever it should have been—very little, indeed, to pay as an initiation fee.

  "A taxi!" the editor of the Courier remarked after her. Having a letter to him from a man he had long since forgotten—after the fashion of New York—she had not found him difficult of access. And he was the only editor in New York whose name—it was Kennard—was known to her. He had white hair, and the face of a young man who has known trouble. "Now, you don't want to come to work for us?" He seized a handful of damp page proofs from a boy, glanced at them with an air of hostility, and threw them to the floor in a crumpled mass, smiling at Hope before he had time to get his eyebrows disentangled from the frown of the moment before. It gave him a very curious expression—an expression of hopeless goodwill, she described it afterward. Perhaps because of the many hundreds of her he had seen before, and knew he would yet see. They fairly beat over him like a tide—the surge of youth against the rocks of experience. He always did what he could for them. "No," he said sadly, "you don't want to work for us. We can't afford taxi-cabs."

  "Neither can I," she returned engagingly. "And I picked you out especially to work for; the taxi was simply a compliment."

  "Umph!" He assaulted another bundle of proofs. "What can you do?"

  Immediately, with the nervous deftness of a tyro prestidigitator, she unrolled beneath his nose a bundle of her choicest specimens. He seemed to be only pushing them aside; her heart went down and down, and jumped suddenly.

  'I see," he said. "Come around next week; say Monday."

  And she went out, propelled by the mere force of his will.

  Evidently he meant all along to accept her services.

  Or perhaps her sheer unspoken hopefulness decided him when she came again. In the meantime she had gone nowhere else, feeling as if it might cross her luck in her first attempt. At any rate, after a moment, when he appeared to be trying to remember where he ha
d met her before, he abruptly swept her down the long city room and delivered her over, with an air of relief and the manner of one executing a writ of habeas corpus, to a sub-editor. The sub-editor, who was fat and worried-looking, in turn, after one harassed glance shooed her toward a thin, tired, sharply handsome woman of no particular age. This one sat before a typewriter in the attitude of one plucking out its vitals and flinging them in the face of a despised public.

  "You'll work with Mrs. Garvice; she'll tell you what to do," said the fat sub-editor. "Come and see me about it later; we'll talk things over a bit. We're starting some new specials—women's dope."

  Mrs. Garvice pushed a mass of fair hair from her brow, as if making room for a new impression to be devoted to Hope.

  "How do you do? I'll be through with this in half an hour—mind waiting?" She fell on the typewriter again.

  One or two reporters glanced at Hope casually, and looked away again. Hope knew and liked the atmosphere of a newspaper office; it suited her temperament; nowhere else in the world do men and women work together with such brusque friendliness, so little consciousness of sex; it is a workshop above everything, and those in it like their work or they would not be there. But for that very reason it is no place to look for personal companionship. Waiting, Hope wondered where then she might look. Not in a boarding-house; that she had never been able to endure. She stayed on at the hotel tentatively.

  It did not seem possible to make friends with Mrs. Garvice, who was not unfriendly, but gave the impression of having her life already crowded beyond reason. In a week, two weeks, Hope knew her no better, though they went for material together almost every day, getting impressions of "prominent women," or women who would be prominent for at least a day when they were dished up to the public fancy.

  Two weeks can be a very long time on a desert island, or worse, in a strange city. When Hope met Evelyn Curtis, she saw her with an eye sharpened by loneliness; here was another like herself. She was interviewing a wealthy woman who kept a crèche for a whim: she had been shown into a long, rather dark, luxurious drawing-room—to her mild surprise, on the second floor—of a brown stone house, one of forty exactly alike in a semi-fashionable street off Fifth Avenue. Hope remembered it very vaguely afterward; she had had so many new impressions, but even before she looked comprehendingly at her hostess she exchanged a quick glance of greeting with the thin, dark girl, who sat awkwardly, as if fearful of the unaccustomed softness, in a squat and puffy boudoir lounge.

  Evelyn Curtis was very plain; her lack of beauty was positive; and her too bright black eyes admitted that she knew it thoroughly. There was infinite pathos in her smile, for it made her less lovely than before. She had no bloom: she looked as if she had never bloomed. She looked starved, body and soul; her mouth was not red, and her long black hair was lustreless. Only her eyes were terribly alive.

  The two, strangers in every formal sense, looked at each other with sympathetic understanding, and felt that the woman they had both come to see was rather an interruption.

  "She looked stodged," said Hope to Miss Curtis, after they had escaped from the house together. "Her very voice was overfed and massaged. What a lot of New York women look like that!" She had seized the other's arm, as they went down the brown stone steps together, disdaining conventional advances.

  "You haven't been here long, have you?" said Miss Curtis, smiling her ugly, pathetically appealing smile.

  "No. Have you? How did you guess it?"

  "You have a different accent. You're on the Courier?"

  "Yes. What are you with? Do you have to rush right down to the office? Won't you stop and have supper with me? I haven't eaten with a soul since I came to New York. Do, do come. Do you notice that people here don't ask you to eat? They ask you to have a drink. I almost felt insulted, at first. But I'll buy you a drink, if you like. Come to my hotel—it isn't far—and have supper in my room."

  "Thank you," said Miss Curtis, obviously surprised, and perhaps a little grateful. "I'm free lancing; I don't have to rush off anywhere. Do you live here? You must be a millionaire." They were approaching the hotel.

  "Indeed I'm not. It's astonishingly cheap here, but of course I must move. Tell me where I ought to look for a room. I haven't the least idea. Where do you live?"

  "You wouldn't care for it," said Miss Curtis. "I pay two dollars a week for my room, downtown. I have no heat, and the window looks on a blank wall."

  "Ugh!" Hope shivered frankly, and unlocked her door. Her own room looked very comfortable, after that. "I can't stand cold—I've had too much of it. Wait till I tell them to send up food." She telephoned and resumed the conversation. "I suppose you live in Bohemia. I'm not Bohemian; I'm bourgeois to my marrow."

  "No," said Miss Curtis simply, "I'm not Bohemian; I'm just poor," and she smiled again. "Newspapers are useful to keep off the cold; I wear them under my blouse." She put her hand to her meagre breast, and Hope heard a slight rustling to the pressure.

  "But—but—oh, no," she stammered. "Not really! I've been poor, too, but..."

  "Ah, well, I'm one of the unsuccessful ones. But I'd rather starve here than go back; I used to be a school-teacher," she said.

  "But so was I, in a way; it wasn't as bad as that," protested Hope.

  She did not quite realise that she was, after all, one of the capable ones, born to survive, intellectually independent, but economically adaptable, ready to use either her head or her hands, and to make the best of what she had, no matter how much she might protest and demand more. She was romantic, indeed; but Evelyn Curtis was a visionary. The story of her life, as she told it in a dozen sentences, was a better thing than she would ever write; it touched the deeps of simple tragedy. Materially she had been very comfortable as a school-teacher, but the mental drudgery of it had grown more than she could bear; and the Philistinism of her native city was equally intolerable. She loved books, and failed to grasp the fact that an appreciation of literature by no means predicates an ability to write.

  In fact, she could not write. Authors were her demi-gods; she was a hero-worshipper.

  So, with all her savings in hand, Evelyn had set out on a pilgrimage. She had sat at the feet of most of the prominent living authors, but even that failed to cure her. And, after travelling all over the Old World as cheaply as possible, she had come back content in her own way and hungry in the natural order of things.

  Now, Hope was an iconoclast, born without reverence or fear, and with the knowledge, despite her one considerable folly, that man that is born of woman is small potatoes and few in a hill, in the words of some anonymous wit she had once read.

  "My goodness," she said, overcome when the recital closed, "what does anyone want to meet an author for? Or a painter, either, or any famous person? You've got all the best of them in whatever they create. I'd as soon want to meet the cook because I liked the meal. This is rather good cold beef, isn't it? Of course the cook might be interesting..." Miss Curtis was laughing heartily, rather as if unused to the exercise. "But isn't it true?" insisted Hope. "The interesting people are quite often just interesting; more likely to be critical than creative. And I am fond of books, but I don't see what one can get out of them without actual experience as a key. Of course I understand you wanting to see the world But you really went abroad to see certain people whose lives and gifts you envied? Wanted to stand around and live their lives with them, through them. It cannot be done."

  "Perhaps," said Evelyn. "You are very clever and cruel. Why are you here?"

  "To discipline my soul, I suppose," said Hope, grinning. "There must be some meaning in those queer old religious terms, don't you think? I could feel the dry rot creeping over me, doing the little easy things that were nearest. I came on instinct. Something in me was trying to turn over in its sleep—having a nightmare. Maybe there is something here for me. Do you get any meaning at all out of what I'm saying?" Evelyn nodded, her liquid, bright, over-intelligent eyes answering. "If there isn't, I'll go on. I may st
ub my toe over it—the whatever-it-is—some day while I'm rushing madly along. Or I may never find it, but not because I didn't try. Or—quien sabe? —I've come to the end of my poor imagination."

  "You are one of the interesting ones," said Evelyn musingly.

  CHAPTER XIX

  HOPE wrinkled her nose.

  "That's what one says of a woman who is neither rich nor beautiful," she said. "But it's better than calling me clever. Thanks. But I warn you, to-morrow I may bore you to death. I do myself, quite often."

  "No," insisted Evelyn, laughing, "you are. I can read other people's fortunes because I have none of my own. Now you, you'll marry again. I hope your husband is dead..." She paused, rather overcome by her gaucherie.

  "So do I," said Hope piously, "but you're talking nonsense. Why should I marry again? Enough is sufficient, but too much is plenty. It sounds posé, but I am tired of men. I have met millions of them. Since I left home I have walked a long, long road, like a Devonshire lane, between solid hedges and banks of men. Making one's own living means entering a world of men. It was my sad mistake to take them seriously. Just as if I were a girl in her own home, where all the men I met were carefully sifted down to a sentimental residuum. But we others ought to be different. Since we've followed the men to their lairs, we ought to be good sports and let 'em alone. I intend to. I am an adventuress— no, I am not contradicting myself. I belong to the new order of honourable adventuresses. Unknown continents in life—Madam Columbus looking for the New World... Gold, and treasure, and much fame, you know, like the Raleighs and the Drakes went after; not a blackbirder out for slaves. There. I'm out of breath. But don't talk husbands to me; I intend to cultivate women only. Tell me, instead, that I am a great genius and will be hung by the Academy and bought by the Metropolitan Museum."