Martie, the Unconquered Part 58

"After a while we'll be too rich to come here, Ted!" she said as they went out.

"Wull we?" Teddy asked regretfully. They went into the pushing and crowding of the streets; heard the shrill trill of the crossing policeman's whistle again; caught a glimpse of Broadway's lights, fanning lower and higher, and as the big signs rippled up and down.

Martie drank it in eagerly, no faintest shadow of apprehension fell upon this evening. She and Teddy walked to their little hotel; to-morrow she would see her editor, and they would search for cheaper quarters. She would get the half-promised position or another; it mattered not which. She would board economically, or find diminutive quarters for housekeeping; be comfortable either way. If they kept house, some kindly old woman would be found to give Teddy bread and b.u.t.ter when he came in from school. And on hot summer Sundays she and Teddy would pack their lunch, and make an early start for the beach; theoretically, it would be an odd life for the child, but actually--how much richer and more sympathetic she would make it than her own had been! Children are natural gypsies, and Teddy would never complain because his mother kept him up later than was quite conventional in the evening, and sometimes took him to her office, to draw pictures or look at books for a quiet hour.

And she would have friends: women who were working like herself, and men, too. She was as little afraid of the other as of the one now.

There would be visits to country cottages; there would be winter dinners, down on the Square. And some day, perhaps, she would have the studio with the bare floors and the dark rugs. Over and over again she said the words to herself: she was free; she was free.

Dependence on Pa's whim, on Wallace's whim, was over. She stood alone, now; she could make for herself that life that every man was always free to make; that every woman should be offered, too. She had suffered bitterly; she might live to be an old, old woman, but she knew that the sight of a fluffy-headed girl baby must always stab her with unendurable pain. She had been shabby, hungry, ashamed, penniless, humiliated. She had been ill, physically handicapped for weary weeks upon weeks.

And she had emerged, armed for the fight. The world needed her now, Cliff and Pa needed her, even Dr. Ben and Sally and Len would have been proud to offer her a home. Miss f.a.n.n.y was missing her now; a dozen persons idling into the Library in sleepy little Monroe's summer fog, to-morrow morning, would wish that Miss David was not so slow, would wish that Mrs. Bannister was back.

The editor himself was out of town; but his a.s.sistant was as encouraging as a somewhat dazzled young man could be.

"She's a corker," said the a.s.sistant later. "She's pretty and she talks fast and she's full of fun; but it's not that. She's got a sort of PUSH to her; you'll like her. I bet she'll be just the person. I told her that you'd be here this morning, and she said she'd call again."

"I hope she does!" the editor said. Her card was handed him a moment later.

In came the tall, severely gowned woman with the flashing smile and blue eyes, and magnificent bronze hair. She radiated confidence and power. He had hoped for something like this from her letters; she was better than his hopes. She wanted a position. She hoped, she said innocently, that it was a good time for positions.

It was always a good time for certain people, the editor reflected.

They talked for half an hour, irrelevant talk, Martie thought it, for it was princ.i.p.ally of her personal history and his own. Then a stenographer interrupted; the little boy was afraid that his mother had gone away through some other door!

The little boy came in, and shook hands with Mr. Trowbridge, and subsided into his mother's lap. Then the three had another half-hour's talk. Mr. Trowbridge had boys, too, but they were up in the country now.

He himself escorted them over the office, through large s.p.a.ces filled with desks, past closed doors, through a lunch-room and a library.

Respectful greetings met them on all sides. Martie was glad she had on her wedding suit, and the new hat that had been in a department store on Sixth Avenue yesterday afternoon. Mr. Trowbridge called Mrs.

Bannister's attention to a certain desk. When they went back to the privacy of his own office, he asked her if she would like to come to use that desk, say on Monday?

"There's a bunch of confidential letters there now, for you to answer,"

he said. "Then there are always articles to change, or cut, or adapt.

Also our Miss Briggs, in the 'My Own Money Club,' needs help. We may ask you sometimes to take home a bunch of stories to read; we may ask you to do something else!"

"I'll address envelopes or stoke the furnace!" said Martie, bright tears in her smiling eyes. "I don't know whether I'm worth all that money," she added, "for it doesn't seem to me that anybody in the world really EARNS as much as twenty dollars a week, but I'll try to be! I'm twenty-eight years old, and I've been waiting all my life for this chance!"

"Well, even at that age, you may have a year or two of usefulness left, if your health is spared you." the editor said. They parted laughing, and Martie went out into the wonderful, sunny, hospitable city as gay as Teddy was. Oh, how she would work, how she would work! She would get down to the office first of all; she would wear the trimmest suits; she would never be cross, never be tired, never rebel at the most flagrant imposition! She would take the cold baths and wear the winter underwear that kept tonsilitis at bay; she would hire a typewriter, and keep on with her articles. If ever a woman in the world kept a position, then Martie would keep hers!

And, of course, women did. There was that pretty, capable woman who came into Mr. Trowbridge's office, and was introduced as the a.s.sistant editor. Coolly dressed, dainty and calm, she had not suggested that the struggle was too hard. She had smilingly greeted Martie, offered a low-voiced suggestion, and vanished unruffled and at peace.

"Why, that's what this world IS," Martie reflected. "Workers needing jobs, and jobs needing workers." And suddenly she hit upon the keynote to her new philosophy. "MEN don't worry and fidget about keeping their jobs, and _I_'M not going to. I'm just as necessary and just as capable as if I were--say, Len. If Len came on here for a job I wouldn't worry myself sick about his ever getting it!"

What honeymoon would have been half so thrilling, she reflected, as this business of getting herself and Teddy suitably established? Her choice, not made until Sunday afternoon, fell upon a quiet boarding-house on West Sixty-first Street. It was kept by a kindly Irishwoman who had children younger and older than Teddy, and well-disposed toward Teddy, and it was only half a block from the Park.

At first Mrs. Gilfogle said she would charge nothing at all for the child; a final price for the two was placed at fifteen dollars a week.

Martie suspected that the young Gilfogles would accompany Teddy and herself on their jaunts occasionally, and would help him scatter his stone blocks all over her floor on winter nights. But the luncheon for which they stayed was exceptionally good, and she was delighted with her big back room.

"I'm alone wid the two of thim to raise," said Mrs. Gilfogle. "I know what it is. He died on me just as I got three hundred dollars' worth of furniture in, G.o.d rest him. I didn't know would I ever pay for it at all, with Joe here at the breast, and Annie only walking. But I've had good luck these seven years! You'll not find elegance, but at that you'll never go hungry here. And you lost the child, too?--that was hard."

"My girl would be three," Martie said wistfully. And suddenly reminded, she thought that she would take Teddy and go to see the old Doctor and Mrs. Converse.

That they welcomed her almost with tears of joy, and that her improved appearance and spirits gave them genuine parental delight was only a part of her new experience. Mrs. Converse wanted her to settle down with Teddy in her old room. Martie would not do that; she must be near the subway, she said, but she promised them many a Sunday dinner-hour.

"And that Mrs. Dryden got divorced, but she never married again,"

marvelled the old lady mildly.

"Oh, she didn't marry her doctor, then?"

"No, I think somebody told Doctor that she couldn't. Wasn't she just the kind of woman who could spoil the lives of two good men? Somebody told Doctor that the doctor was reconciled to his wife, and they went away from New York, but I don't know."

Martie wondered. She thought that she would look up the doctor's name in the telephone book, anyway, and perhaps chance an anonymous telephone call. Suppose she asked for Mrs. Cooper, and Adele answered?

But before she did so, she met Adele. She had held her new position for six weeks then, and Indian Summer was giving way to the delicious coolness of the fall. Martie was in a department store, Teddy beside her, when a woman came smiling up to her, and laid a hand on her arm.

She recognized a changed Adele. The beauty was not gone, but it seemed to have faded and shrunk upon itself; Adele's bright eyes were ringed with lead, the old coquetry of manner was almost shocking.

"Martie," said Adele, "this is my sister, Mrs. Baker."

Mrs. Baker, a big wholesome woman, who looked, Martie thought, as if she might have a delicate daughter, married young, and a husband prominent in the Eastern Star, and be herself a clever bridge player, and a most successful hostess and guest at women's hilarious lunch-eons, looked at the stranger truculently. She was a tightly corseted woman, with prominent teeth, and a good-natured smile. Martie felt sure that she always had good clothes, and wore white shoes in summer, and could be generous without any glimmering of a sense of justice. She was close to fifty.

"How do, Mrs. Bannister," she said heartily. "I've heard Adele mention your name. How do you think she looks? I think she looks like death.

How do, dear?" she added to Teddy. "Are you mama's boy? I don't live in New York like you do; I live in Browning, Indiana. Don't you think that's a funny place to live? But it's a real pretty place just the same."

"Have you had your lunch?" Adele was asking. "We haven't. I was kept by the girl at the milliner's--"

It was one o'clock on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon. Martie was free to lunch where she pleased. She was free even to sit down with a woman whose name was under a cloud. They all crowded into an express elevator, and sat down at a table in the restaurant on the twelfth floor.

Presently the unreality of it faded from Martie's uppermost consciousness and she began to enjoy herself. To sit with the wife of a Mystic Shriner, and the woman who had done what Adele had done, and whose husband incidentally was deeply devoted to herself, was not according to Monroe. But she was in New York!

"I guess I was a silly girl, misled by a man of the world," Adele was saying in her old, complaining, complacent voice. "I know I was a fool, Martie, but don't men do that sort of thing all the time, and get over it? Why should us women pay all the time? You know as well as I do that John Dryden was just as queer as d.i.c.k's hatband; I was hungering, as a girl will, for pleasure and excitement--"

"It was a dirty crime, the way that doctor acted," Mrs. Baker contributed, her tone much pleasanter than her words. "He must have been a skunk, if you ask me. Adele here was wrong, Mrs. Bannister; you and I won't quarrel about that. But Adele wasn't nothing but a child at heart--"

"I believed anything he told me!" Adele drawled, playing with her knife and fork, her lashes dropped.

"Dryden," the loyal sister continued majestically, "threw her over the second he got a chance; that's what she got for putting up with HIM for all those years! And then, if you please, this other feller discovers that he can't get rid of his wife. I came on then," she said warmly as Martie murmured her sympathy, "and I says to Adele, throw the whole crowd of them down. Billy Baker and I have plenty, and my daughter--Ruby, she's a lovely girl and she's married an elegant feller whose people own about all the lumber interests in our part of the country--she doesn't need anything from us. But if you ask me, it's just about killed Adele," she went on frankly, glancing at her sister, "she looks like a sick girl to me. We came on two or three days ago, to see a specialist about her, and I declare I'll be glad to get her back."

"What has become of Dr. Cooper?" Martie felt justified in asking.

"He lost all the practice he ever had, they say," Mrs. Baker said viciously. "And good enough for him, too! His wife won't even see him, and he lives at some boarding-house; and serve him right!"

"And Jack's book such a success!" Adele said, widening her eyes at Martie. "Do you ever see him?"

"He's got a great friend in Dean Silver, the novelist," Martie answered composedly. "I believe they're abroad."

"The idea!" Adele said lifelessly. She was playing with her bracelets now, and looked about her in an aimless way.

"Well, if this little girl has any sense she'll let the past be the past," remarked the optimistic Mrs. Baker. "There's a fellow out our way, Joe Chase; he's got a cattle ranch. You never heard of him? He's a di'mond in the rough, if you ask me, but he's been crazy about Adele ever since she first visited me. He'd give her anything in G.o.d's world."

"But I think I'd die of loneliness winters!" Adele said, with the smile of a petted child.

So there was a third man eager to sacrifice his life to her, Martie marvelled. Adele would consider herself a martyr if she succ.u.mbed to the wiles of the rough diamond; she would puzzle and distress him in his ranch-house; she would Fret and exact and complain. Probably one of the Swedish farmers thereabout could give him a daughter who would make him an infinitely better wife, and bear him children, and worship him blindly. But no; he must yearn for this neurotic, abnormal little creature, with her ugly history and her barren brain and body.