Babson was less jocular with Una than with the bouncing girls who were natives of Harlem. But he smiled at her, as though they were understanding friends, and once he said, but quietly, rather respectfully, "You have nice hair--soft." She lay awake to croon that to herself, though she denied that she was in love with this eccentric waster.

Always Babson kept up his e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns and fidgeting. He often accused himself of shiftlessness and begged her to make sure that he dictated certain matter before he escaped for the evening. "Come in and bother the life out of me. Come in every half-hour," he would say. When she did come in he would crow and chuckle, "Nope. I refuse to be tempted yet; I am a busy man. But maybe I'll give you those verbal jewels of great price on your next visitation, oh thou in the vocative--some Latin scholar, eh? Keep it up, kid; good work. Maybe you'll keep me from being fired."

Usually he gave her the dictation before he went. But not always. And once he disappeared for four days--on a drunk, everybody said, in excited office gossip.

During Babson's desertion the managing editor called Una in and demanded, "Did Mr. Babson give you some copy about the Manning Wind Shield? No? Will you take a look in his desk for his notes about it?"

While Una was fumbling for the notes she did not expect to find, she went through all the agony of the little shawled foreign wife for the husband who has been arrested.

"I've got to help you!" she said to _his_ desk, to his bag of Bull Durham, to his alarm-clock--even to a rather shocking collection of pictures of chorus-girls and diaphanously-clad dancers which was pasted inside the double drawer on the right side of the desk. In her great surge of emotion, she noticed these posturing hussies far less than she did a little volume of Rosetti, or the overshoes whose worn toes suddenly revealed to her that Walter Babson, the editor, was not rich--was not, perhaps, so very much better paid than herself.

She did not find the notes. She had to go to the managing editor, trembling, all her good little heart wild with pain. The editor's brows made a V at her report, and he grunted, "Well--"

For two days, till Walter Babson returned, she never failed to look up when the outer door of the office opened.

She found herself immensely interested in trying to discover, from her low plane as copyist, just what sort of a position Walter Babson occupied up among the select souls. Nor was it very difficult. The editor's stenographer may not appreciate all the subtleties of his wit, and the refinements of his manner may leave her cold, but she does hear things, she hears the Big Chief's complaints.

Una discovered that the owner and the managing editor did not regard Walter Babson as a permanent prop of the inst.i.tution; that they would keep him, at his present salary of twenty-five dollars a week, only till some one happened in who would do the same work for less money. His prose was clever but irregular; he wasn't always to be depended upon for grammar; in everything he was unstable; yet the owner's secretary reported the owner as saying that some day, if Babson married the right woman, he would "settle down and make good."

Una did not dare to make private reservations regarding what "the right woman" ought to mean in this case, but she burned at the thought of Walter Babson's marrying, and for an instant she saw quite clearly the film of soft dark hair that grew just below his sharp cheek-bone. But she forgot the sweetness of the vision in scorn of herself for even thinking of marriage with a weakling; scorn of herself for aspiring to marry a man who regarded her as only a dull stenographer; and a maternal anxiety over him that was untouched by pa.s.sion.

Babson returned to the office, immaculate, a thin, fiery soul. But he was closeted with the secretary of the company for an hour, and when he came out his step was slow. He called for Una and dictated articles in a quiet voice, with no jesting. His hand was unsteady, he smoked cigarettes constantly, and his eye was an unwholesome yellow.

She said to him suddenly, a few days later, "Mr. Babson, I'd be glad if I could take care of any papers or anything for you."

"Thanks. You might stick these cha.s.sis sketches away some place right now."

So she was given the chance to keep his desk straight. He turned to her for everything.

He said to her, abruptly, one dreary late afternoon of April when she felt immensely languid and unambitious: "You're going to succeed--unless you marry some dub. But there's one rule for success--mind you, I don't follow it myself, I _can't_, but it's a grand old hunch: 'If you want to get on, always be ready to occupy the job just ahead of you.' Only--what the devil _is_ the job just ahead of a stenog.? I've been thinking of you and wondering. What is it?"

"Honestly, Mr. Babson, I don't know. Here, anyway. Unless it's lieutenant of the girls."

"Well--oh, that's just miffle-business, that kind of a job. Well, you'd better learn to express yourself, anyway. Some time you women folks will come into your own with both feet. Whenever you get the chance, take my notes and try to write a better spiel from them than I do.... That won't be hard, I guess!"

"I don't know why you are so modest, Mr. Babson. Every girl in the office thinks you write better than any of the other editors."

"Yuh--but they don't know. They think that just because I chuck 'em under the chin. I can't do this technical stuff.... Oh, _Lord_! what an evening it'll be!... I suppose I'll go to a show. Nice, lonely city, what?... You come from here?"

"From Pennsylvania."

"Got any folks?"

"My mother is here with me."

"That's nice. I'll take her and you to some b.u.m two-bit vaudeville show some night, if you'd like.... Got to show my grat.i.tude to you for standing my general slovenliness.... Lord! nice evening--dine at a rotisserie with a newspaper for companion. Well--g' night and g' luck."

Una surprised her mother, when they were vivisecting the weather after dinner, by suddenly crying all over the sofa cushions.

She knew all of Walter Babson's life from those two or three sentences of his.

- 3

Francois Villons America has a-plenty. An astonishing number of Americans with the literary itch do contrive to make a living out of that affliction. They write motion-picture scenarios and fiction for the magazines that still regard detective stories as the zenith of original art. They gather in woman-scented flats to discuss s.e.x, or in hard-voiced groups to play poker. They seem to find in the creation of literature very little besides a way of evading regular office hours.

Below this stratum of people so successful that one sometimes sees their names in print is the yearning band of young men who want to write. Just to write--not to write anything in particular; not to express any definite thought, but to be literary, to be Bohemian, to dance with slim young auth.o.r.esses of easy morals, and be jolly dogs and free souls.

Some of them are dramatists with unacted dramas; some of them do free verse which is just as free as the productions of regular licensed poets. Some of them do short stories--striking, rather biological, very destructive of conventions. Some of them are ever so handy at all forms; they are perennial candidates for any job as book-reviewer, dramatic critic, or ma.n.u.script-reader, since they have the nave belief that these occupations require neither toil nor training, and enable one to "write on the side." Meanwhile they make their livings as sub-editors on trade journals, as charity-workers, or as a.s.sistants to illiterate literary agents.

To this slum of literature Walter Babson belonged. He felt that he was an author, though none of his poetry had ever been accepted, and though he had never got beyond the first chapter of any of his novels, nor the first act of any of his plays (which concerned authors who roughly resembled Walter Babson).

He was distinguished from his fellows by the fact that each year he grew more aware that he hadn't even a dim candle of talent; that he was ill-planned and unpurposed; that he would have to settle down to the ordinary gray limbo of jobs and offices--as soon as he could get control of his chaotic desires. Literally, he hated himself at times; hated his own egotism, his treacherous appet.i.te for drink and women and sloth, his imitative attempts at literature. But no one knew how bitterly he despised himself, in lonely walks in the rain, in savage pacing about his furnished room. To others he seemed vigorously conceited, c.o.c.k-sure, noisily ready to blame the world for his own failures.

Walter Babson was born in Kansas. His father was a farmer and horse-doctor, a heavy drinker, an eccentric who joined every radical political movement. In a country school, just such a one as Una had taught, then in high school in a near-by town, Walter had won all the prizes for essays and debating, and had learned a good deal about Shakespeare and Caesar and George Washington. Also he had learned a good deal about drinking beer, smoking manfully, and tempting the giggling girls who hung about the "deepot." He ran away from high school, and in the most glorious years of his life worked his way down the Mississippi and up the Rio Grande, up to Alaska and down to Costa Rica, a b.u.t.t and jester for hoboes, sailors, longsh.o.r.emen, miners, cow-punchers, lunch-room owners, and proprietors of small newspapers. He learned to stick type and run a press. He returned to Kansas and worked on a country newspaper, studying poetry and college-entrance requirements in the evening. He had, at this time, the not entirely novel idea that "he ought to be able to make a lot of good fiction out of all his experiences." Actually, he had no experiences, because he had no instinct for beauty. The proof is that he read quite solemnly and reverently a vile little periodical for would-be authors, which reduced authorship to a way of earning one's living by supplying editors with cheap but ingenious items to fill s.p.a.ce. It put literature on a level with keeping a five-and-ten-cent store. But Walter conned its pompous trade journal discussions as to whether the name and address of the author should be typed on the left or the right side of the first page of a ma.n.u.script; its lively little symposia, by such successful market-gardeners of literature as Mamie Stuyvesant Blupp and Bill Brown and Dr. J. F. Fitzneff, on the inspiring subject of whether it paid better to do filler verse for cheap magazines, or long verse for the big magazines. At the end, this almost madly idealistic journal gave a list of wants of editors; the editor of _Lingerie and Laughter_ wanted "short, snappy stuff with a kick in it; especially good yarns about models, grisettes, etc." _Wanderl.u.s.t_ was in the market for "stories with a punch that appealed to every red-blooded American; nothing about psychology, problems, Europe, or love wanted." _The Plymouth Rock Fancier_ announced that it could use "a good, lively rural poem every week; must be clean and original."

Pathos there was in all of this; the infinitely little men and women daring to buy and sell "short, snappy stuff" in this somber and terribly beautiful world of Balzac and Wells and Turgenieff. And pathos there was in that wasted year when Walter Babson sought to climb from the gossiping little prairie town to the grandeur of great capitals by learning to be an efficient manufacturer of "good, lively rural poems."

He neglected even his college-entrance books, the Ruskin whose clots of gilt might have trained him to look for real gold, and the stilted Burke who might have given him a vision of empires and races and social destinies. And for his pathetic treachery he wasn't even rewarded. His club-footed verses were always returned with printed rejection slips.

When at last he barely slid into Jonathan Edwards College, Iowa, Walter was already becoming discouraged; already getting the habit of blaming the G.o.ds, capitalists, editors, his father, the owner of the country newspaper on which he had been working, for everything that went wrong.

He yammered destructive theories which would have been as obnoxious to a genuine fighting revolutionist as they were sacrilegious to his hard-fisted, earnest, rustic cla.s.smates in Jonathan Edwards. For Walter was not protesting against social injustice. The slavery of rubber-gatherers in the Putumayo and of sweatshop-workers in New York did not exist for him. He was protesting because, at the age of twenty, his name was not appearing in large flattering capitals on the covers of magazines.

Yet he was rather amusing; he helped plodding cla.s.smates with their a.s.signments, and he was an active partic.i.p.ant in all worthy movements to raise h.e.l.l--as they admirably described it. By the end of his Freshman year he had given up all attempts to be a poet and to extract nourishment from the college cla.s.ses, which were as hard and unpalatable as dried codfish. He got drunk, he vented his energy in noisy meetings with itinerant _filles de joie_, who were as provincial and rustic, as bewildered and unfortunate as the wild country boys, who in them found their only outlet for youth's madness. Walter was abruptly expelled from college by the one man in the college whom he respected--the saintly president, who had dreams of a new Harvard on the prairies.

So Walter Babson found himself at twenty-one an outcast. He declaimed--though no one would believe him--that all the gentle souls he had ever encountered were weak; all the virile souls vicious or suspicious.

He drifted. He doubted himself, and all the more noisily a.s.serted his talent and the injustice of the world. He looked clean and energetic and desirous, but he had nothing on which to focus. He became an active but careless reporter on newspapers in Wichita, Des Moines, Kansas City, St.

Louis, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Between times he sold real-estate and insurance and sets of travel books, for he had no pride of journalism; he wanted to keep going and keep interested and make money and spend it; he wanted to express himself without trying to find out what his self was.

It must be understood that, for all his vices, Walter was essentially clean and kindly. He rushed into everything, the bad with the good. He was not rotten with heavy hopelessness; though he was an outcast from his home, he was never a pariah. Not Walter, but the smug, devilish cities which took their revenues from saloon-keeping were to blame when he turned from the intolerable dullness of their streets to the excitement of alcohol in the saloons and brothels which they made so much more amusing than their churches and parlors.

Everywhere in the Western newspaper circles Walter heard stories of Californians who had gone East and become geniuses the minute they crossed the Hudson.... Walter also went East and crossed the Hudson, but he did not become a genius. If there had been an attic to starve in, he would have starved in one, but as New York has nothing so picturesque, he starved in furnished rooms instead, while he wrote "special stories"

for Sunday newspapers, and collected jokes for a syndicated humorous column. He was glad to become managing editor (though he himself was the only editor he had to manage) of a magazine for stamp-collectors. He wrote some advertis.e.m.e.nts for a Broadway dealer in automobile accessories, read half a dozen books on motors, and brazenly demanded his present position on the _Motor and Gas Gazette_.

He was as far from the rarified air of Bohemia (he really believed that sort of thing) as he had been in Kansas, except that he knew one man who made five thousand dollars a year by writing stories about lumberjacks, miners, cow-punchers, and young ladies of quite astounding courage. He was twenty-seven years old when he met Una Golden. He still read Omar Khayyam. He had a vague plan of going into real estate. There ought, he felt, to be money in writing real-estate advertis.e.m.e.nts.

He kept falling in love with stenographers and waitresses, with actresses whom he never met. He was never satisfied. He didn't at all know what he wanted, but he wanted something stronger than himself.

He was desperately lonely--a humorous figure who had dared to aspire beyond the manure-piles of his father's farm; therefore a young man to be ridiculed. And in his tragic loneliness he waited for the day when he should find any love, any labor, that should want him enough to seek him and demand that he sacrifice himself.

- 4

It was Una's first city spring.

Save in the squares, where the bourgeoning trees made green-lighted s.p.a.ces for noon-time lovers, there was no change; no blossomy stir in asphalt and cement and brick and steel. Yet everything was changed.

Between the cornices twenty stories above the pavement you could see a slit of softer sky, and there was a peculiar radiance in just the light itself, whether it lay along the park turf or made its way down an air-well to rest on a stolid wall of yellow brick. The river breeze, flowing so persuasively through streets which had been stormed by dusty gales, bore happiness. Grind-organs made music for ragged, dancing children, and old brick buildings smelled warm. Peanut-wagons came out with a long, shrill whine, locusts of the spring.

In the office even the most hustling of the great ones became human.

They talked of suburban gardens and of motoring out to country clubs for tennis. They smiled more readily, and shamelessly said, "I certainly got the spring fever for fair to-day"; and twice did S. Herbert Ross go off to play golf all afternoon. The stenographer who commuted--always there is one girl in the office who commutes--brought spring in the form of p.u.s.s.y-willows and apple-blossoms, and was noisily envied.