"Office, dear, not shop.... Is he-- Does he get a big salary?"

"Why, mums, I'm sure I haven't the slightest idea! How should I know?"

"Well, I just asked.... Will you put on your pink-and-white crepe?"

"Don't you think the brown silk would be better?"

"Why, Una, I want you to look your prettiest! You must make all the impression you can."

"Well, perhaps I'd better," Una said, demurely.

Despite her provincial training, Mrs. Golden had a much better instinct for dress than her st.u.r.dy daughter. So long as she was not left at home alone, her mild selfishness did not make her want to interfere with Una's interests. She ah'd and oh'd over the torn border of Una's crepe dress, and mended it with quick, p.u.s.s.y-like movements of her fingers.

She tried to arrange Una's hair so that its pale golden texture would shine in broad, loose undulations, and she was as excited as Una when they heard Walter's bouncing steps in the hall, his nervous tap at the door, his fumbling for a push-b.u.t.ton.

Una dashed wildly to the bedroom for a last nose-powdering, a last glance at her hair and nails, and slowly paraded to the door to let him in, while Mrs. Golden stood primly, with folded hands, like a cabinet photograph of 1885.

So the irregular Walter came into a decidedly regular atmosphere and had to act like a pure-minded young editor.

They conversed--Lord! how they conversed! Mrs. Golden respectably desired to know Mr. Babson's opinions on the weather, New-Yorkers, her little girl Una's work, fashionable city ministers, the practical value of motor-cars, and the dietetic value of beans--the large, white beans, not the small, brown ones--she had grown both varieties in her garden at home (Panama, Pennsylvania, when Mr. Golden, Captain Golden he was usually called, was alive)--and had Mr. Babson ever had a garden, or seen Panama? And was Una _really_ attending to her duties?

All the while Mrs. Golden's canary trilled approval of the conversation.

Una listened, numbed, while Walter kept doing absurd things with his face--pinched his lips and tapped his teeth and rubbed his jaw as though he needed a shave. He took off his eye-gla.s.ses to wipe them and tied his thin legs in a knot, and all the while said, "Yes, there's certainly a great deal to that."

At a quarter to ten Mrs. Golden rose, indulged in a little kitten yawn behind her silvery hand, and said: "Well, I think I must be off to bed.... I find these May days so languid. Don't you, Mr. Babson? Spring fever. I just can't seem to get enough sleep.... Now you mustn't stay up _too_ late, Una dear."

The bedroom door had not closed before Walter had darted from his chair, picked Una up, his hands pressing tight about her knees and shoulders, kissed her, and set her down beside him on the couch.

"Wasn't I good, huh? Wasn't I good, huh? Wasn't I? Now who says Wally Babson ain't a good parlor-pup, huh? Oh, you old darling, you were twice as agonized as me!"

And that was all he said--in words. Between them was a secret, a greater feeling of unfettered intimacy, because together they had been polite to mother--tragic, pitiful mother, who had been enjoying herself so much without knowing that she was in the way. That intimacy needed no words to express it; hands and cheeks and lips spoke more truly. They were children of emotion, young and crude and ignorant, groping for life and love, all the world new to them, despite their sorrows and waiting. They were clerklings, not lords of love and life, but all the more easily did they yield to longing for happiness. Between them was the battle of desire and timidity--and not all the desire was his, not hers all the timidity. She fancied sometimes that he was as much afraid as was she of debasing their shy seeking into unveiled pa.s.sion. Yet his was the initiative; always she panted and wondered what he would do next, feared and wondered and rebuked--and desired.

He abruptly drew her head to his shoulder, smoothed her hair. She felt his fingers again communicate to her every nerve a tingling electric force. She felt his lips quest along her cheek and discover the soft little spot just behind her ear. She followed the restless course of his hands across her shoulders, down her arm, lingeringly over her hand. His hand seemed to her to have an existence quite apart from him, to have a mysterious existence of its own. In silence they rested there. She kept wondering if his shoulder had not been made just for her cheek. With little shivers she realized that this was his shoulder, Walter's, a man's, as the rough cloth p.r.i.c.kled her skin. Silent they were, and for a time secure, but she kept speculating as to what he would dare to do next--and she fancied that he was speculating about precisely the same thing.

He drew a catching breath, and suddenly her lips were opening to his.

"Oh, you mustn't--you promised--" she moaned, when she was able to draw back her head.

Again he kissed her, quickly, then released her and began to talk rapidly of--nothing. Apropos of offices and theaters and the tides of spring, he was really telling her that, powerful though his restless curiosity was, greatly though their poor little city bodies craved each other, yet he did respect her. She scarce listened, for at first she was bemused by two thoughts. She was inquiring sorrowfully whether it was only her body that stirred him--whether he found any spark in her honest little mind. And, for her second thought, she was considering in an injured way that this was not love as she had read of it in novels. "I didn't know just what it would be--but I didn't think it would be like this," she declared.

Love, as depicted in such American novels by literary pastors and matrons of perfect purity as had sifted into the Panama public library, was an affair of astounding rescues from extreme peril, of highly proper walks in lanes, of laudable industry on the part of the hero, and of not more than three kisses--one on the brow, one on the cheek, and, in the very last paragraph of the book, one daringly but reverently deposited upon the lips. These young heroes and heroines never thought about bodies at all, except when they had been deceived in a field of asterisks. So to Una there was the world-old shock at the earthiness of love--and the penetrating joy of that earthiness. If real love was so much more vulgar than she had supposed, yet also it was so much more overwhelming that she was glad to be a flesh-and-blood lover, bruised and bewildered and estranged from herself, instead of a polite murmurer.

Gradually she was drawn back into a real communion with him when he d.a.m.ned the human race for serfs fighting in a dungeon, warring for land, for flags, for t.i.tles, and calling themselves kings. Walter took the same theories of socialism, single-tax, unionism, which J. J. Todd, of Chatham, had hacked out in commercial-college days, and he made them bleed and yawp and be hotly human. For the first time--Walter was giving her so many of those First Times of life!--Una realized how strong is the demand of the undermen for a conscious and scientific justice. She denied that stenographers could ever form a union, but she could not answer his acerb, "Why not?"

It was not in the patiently marching Una to be a creative thinker, yet she did hunger for self-mastery, and ardently was she following the erratic gibes at civilization with which young Walter showed his delight in having an audience, when the brown, homely Golden family clock struck eleven.

"Heavens!" she cried. "You must run home at once. Good-night, dear."

He rose obediently, nor did their lips demand each other again.

Her mother awoke to yawn. "He is a very polite young man, but I don't think he is solid enough for you, dearie. If he comes again, do remind me to show him the kodaks of your father, like I promised."

Then Una began to ponder the problem which is so weighty to girls of the city--where she could see her lover, since the parks were impolite and her own home obtrusively dull to him.

Whether Walter was a peril or not, whether or not his love was angry and red and full of hurts, yet she knew that it was more to her than her mother or her conventions or her ambitious little job. Thus gladly confessing, she fell asleep, and a new office day began, for always the office claims one again the moment that the evening's freedom is over.

CHAPTER VII

These children of the city, where there is no place for love-making, for discovering and testing each other's hidden beings, ran off together in the scanted parties of the ambitious poor. Walter was extravagant financially as he was mentally, but he had many debts, some conscience, and a smallness of salary. She was pleased by the smallest diversions, however, and found luxury in a bowl of chop-suey. He took her to an Italian restaurant and pointed out supposit.i.tious artists. They had gallery seats for a Maude Adams play, at which she cried and laughed whole-heartedly and held his hand all through. Her first real tea was with him--in Panama one spoke of "ladies' afternoon tea," not of "tea."

She was awed by his new walking-stick and the new knowledge of cinnamon toast which he displayed for her. She admired, too, the bored way he swung his stick as they sauntered into and out of the lobbies of the great hotels.

The first flowers from a real florist's which she had ever received, except for a bunch of carnations from Henry Carson at Panama high-school commencement, came from Walter--long-stemmed roses in damp paper and a florist's box, with Walter's card inside.

And perhaps the first time that she had ever really seen spring, felt the intense light of sky and cloud and fresh greenery as her own, was on a Sunday just before the fragrant first of June, when Walter and she slipped away from her mother and walked in Central Park, shabby but unconscious.

She explored with him, too; felt adventurous in quite respectable j.a.panese and Greek and Syrian restaurants.

But her mother waited for her at home, and the job, the office, the desk, demanded all her energy.

Had they seen each other less frequently, perhaps Walter would have let dreams serve for real kisses, and have been satisfied. But he saw her a hundred times a day--and yet their love progressed so little. The propinquity of the office tantalized them. And Mrs. Golden kept them apart.

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The woman who had aspired and been idle while Captain Golden had toiled for her, who had mourned and been idle while Una had planned for her, and who had always been a compound of selfishness and love, was more and more accustomed to taking her daughter's youth to feed her comfort and her canary--a bird of atrophied voice and uncleanly habit.

If this were the history of the people who wait at home, instead of the history of the warriors, rich credit would be given to Mrs. Golden for enduring the long, lonely days, listening for Una's step. A proud, patient woman with nothing to do all day but pick at a little housework, and read her eyes out, and wish that she could run in and be neighborly with the indifferent urbanites who formed about her a wall of ice. Yet so confused are human purposes that this good woman who adored her daughter also sapped her daughter's vigor. As the office loomed behind all of Una's desires, so behind the office, in turn, was ever the shadowy thought of the appealing figure there at home; and toward her mother Una was very compa.s.sionate.

Yes, and so was her mother!

Mrs. Golden liked to sit soft and read stories of young love. Partly by nature and partly because she had learned that thus she could best obtain her wishes, she was gentle as a well-filled cat and delicate as a tulle scarf. She was admiringly adhesive to Una as she had been to Captain Golden, and she managed the new master of the house just as she had managed the former one. She listened to dictates pleasantly, was perfectly charmed at suggestions that she do anything, and then gracefully forgot.

Mrs. Golden was a mistress of graceful forgetting. Almost never did she remember to do anything she didn't want to do. She did not lie about it; she really and quite beautifully did forget.

Una, hurrying off to the office every morning, agonized with the effort to be on time, always had to stop and prepare a written list of the things her mother was to do. Otherwise, bespelled by the magazine stories which she kept forgetting and innocently rereading, Mrs. Golden would forget the marketing, forget to put the potatoes on to boil, forget to scrub the bathroom.... And she often contrived to lose the written list, and searched for it, with trembling lips but no vast persistence.

Una, bringing home the palsying weariness of the day's drudgery, would find a cheery welcome--and the work not done; no vegetables for dinner, no fresh boric-acid solution prepared for washing her stinging eyes.

Nor could Una herself get the work immediately out of the way, because her mother was sure to be lonely, to need comforting before Una could devote herself to anything else or even wash away the sticky office grime.... Mrs. Golden would have been shocked into a stroke could she have known that while Una was greeting her, she was muttering within herself, "I do wish I could brush my teeth first!"

If Una was distraught, desirous of disappearing in order to get hold of herself, Mrs. Golden would sigh, "Dear, have I done something to make you angry?" In any case, whether Una was silent or vexed with her, the mother would manage to be hurt but brave; sweetly distressed, but never quite tearful. And Una would have to kiss her, pat her hair, before she could escape and begin to get dinner (with her mother helping, always ready to do anything that Una's doggedly tired mind might suggest, but never suggesting novelties herself).

After dinner, Mrs. Golden was always ready to do whatever Una wished--to play cribbage, or read aloud, or go for a walk--not a _long_ walk; she was so delicate, you know, but a nice _little_ walk with her dear, dear daughter.... For such amus.e.m.e.nts she was ready to give up all her own favorite evening diversions--namely, playing solitaire, and reading and taking nice little walks.... But she did not like to have Una go out and leave her, nor have naughty, naughty men like Walter take Una to the theater, as though they wanted to steal the dear daughter away. And she wore Una's few good frocks, and forgot to freshen them in time for Una to wear them. Otherwise, Mrs. Golden had the unselfishness of a saint on a marble pillar.

Una, it is true, sometimes voiced her irritation over her mother's forgetfulness and her subsequent pathos, but for that bitterness she always blamed herself, with horror remembered each cutting word she had said to the Little Mother Saint (as, in still hours when they sat clasped like lovers, she tremblingly called her).