May Iverson's Career Part 8

We drifted out into the street, toward a row of waiting taxi-cabs.

There Mrs. Hoppen and Mollie Merk bade us good night, and Mr. Morris put Maudie and Kittie and me into a taxi-cab and got in after us. His manner was beautiful--serious, sympathetic, and deeply respectful. On the way to the hotel he told them what good work I was doing, and about the "model story" I had written two weeks before. I was glad he spoke of those things. I was afraid they had discovered that, after all, there were still many lessons in life I had not learned.

After I had gone up to my room I went to one of the windows facing Madison Square and looked out. It was not late--hardly eleven o'clock, and the big city below was wide awake and hard at play. Many sad and terrible things were happening in it, but I knew that many kind and beautiful things were happening, too. I felt sure that hereafter I would always be able to tell them apart.

Later, when I closed my eyes, all sorts of pictures crowded upon me. I saw the mulatto dancer pursuing the Harlem cook. I heard again Fritz's wild gipsy music and saw him wandering among the tables. I saw the stout man and the girl in white, and felt my face burn as I recalled what I had thought of them. But the thing I saw most clearly, the thing that followed me into the land of dreams and drifted about there till morning, was the face of G.o.dfrey Morris, with a look of sympathy and understanding in his gray eyes.

V

THE CASE OF HELEN BRANDOW

"'S Iverson," barked Nestor Hurd, over the low part.i.tion which divided his office from that of his staff, "c'm' here!"

I responded to his call with sympathetic haste. It had been a hard day for Mr. Hurd. Everything had gone wrong. Every reporter he had sent out seemed to be "falling down" on his a.s.signment and telephoning in to explain why. Next to failures, our chief disliked explanations. "A dead man doesn't care a hang what killed him," was his terse summing up of their futility.

He was shouting an impa.s.sioned monologue into the telephone when I reached his side, and as a final exclamation-point he hurled the receiver down on his desk, upsetting a bottle of ink. I waited in silence while he exhausted the richest treasures of his vocabulary and soaked up the ink with blotters. It was a moment for feminine tact, and I exercised it, though I was no longer in awe of Mr. Hurd. I had been on the _Searchlight_ a year, and the temperamental storms of my editors now disturbed me no more than the whirling and buzzing of mechanical tops. Even Mollie Merk had ceased to call me the "convent kid." I had made many friends, learned many lessons, suffered many disappointments, lost many illusions, and taken on some new ones. I had slowly developed a sense of humor--to my own abysmal surprise. The memory of my convent had become as the sound of a vesper-bell, heard occasionally above the bugle-calls of a strenuous life. Also, I had learned to avoid "fine writing," which is why my pen faltered just now over the "bugle-calls." I knew my men a.s.sociates very well, and admired most of them, though they often filled me with a maternal desire to stand them in a corner with their faces to the wall. I frequently explained to them what their wives or sweethearts really meant by certain things they had said. I was the recognized office authority on good form, Catholicism, and feminine psychology.

Therefore I presented to Mr. Hurd's embittered glance the serene brow of an equal--even on occasions such as this, when the peace of the office lay in fragments around us.

At last he ceased to address s.p.a.ce, threw the blotters into his waste-paper basket, and turned resentful eyes on me.

"Gibson's fallen down on the Brandow case," he snapped.

I uttered a coo of sympathy.

"The woman won't talk," continued Hurd, gloomily. "Don't believe she'll talk to any one if she won't to Gibson. But we'll give her 'nother chance. Go 'n' see her."

I remained silent.

"You've followed the trial, haven't you?" Mr. Hurd demanded. "What d'you think of the case?"

I murmured apologetically that I thought Mrs. Brandow was innocent, and the remark produced exactly the effect I had expected. My chief gave me one look of unutterable scorn and settled back in his chair.

"Great Scott!" he groaned. "So you've joined the sobbing sisterhood at last! I wouldn't have believed it. 'S Iverson"--his voice changed, he brought his hand down on the desk with a force that made the ink-bottle rock--"that woman's as guilty as--as--"

I reminded him that the evidence against Mrs. Brandow was purely circ.u.mstantial.

"Circ.u.mstantial? 'Course it's circ.u.mstantial!" yelped Hurd. "She's too clever to let it be anything else. She has hidden every track. She's the slickest proposition we've had up for murder in this state, and she's young, pretty, of good family--so she'll probably get off. But she killed her husband as surely as you stand there, and the fact that he was a brute and deserved what he got doesn't make her any less guilty of his murder."

It was a long speech for Mr. Hurd. He seemed surprised by it himself, and stopped to glare at me as if I were to blame for the effort it had caused him.

"You know Davies, her lawyer, don't you?" he asked, more quietly.

I did.

"Think he'll give you a letter to her?"

I thought he would.

"'L right," snapped Mr. Hurd. "Go 'n' see her. If she'll talk, get an interview. If she won't, describe her and her cell. Tell how she looks and what she wears--from the amount of hair over her ears to the kind of polish on her shoes. Leave mawkish sympathy out of it. See her as she is--a murderess whose trial is going to make American justice look like a hole in a doughnut."

I went back to my desk thinking of his words. While I was pinning on my hat the door of Mr. Hurd's room opened and shut, and his a.s.sistant, G.o.dfrey Morris, came and stood beside me.

"I don't want to b.u.t.t in," he began, "but--I hope you're going on this a.s.signment with an open mind, Miss Iverson."

That hurt me. For some reason it always hurt me surprisingly to have G.o.dfrey Morris show any lack of faith in me in any way.

"I told Mr. Hurd," I answered, with dignity, "that I think Mrs.

Brandow is innocent. But my opinion won't--"

"I know." Mr. Morris's ability to interrupt a speaker without seeming rude was one of his special gifts. "Hurd thinks she's guilty," he went on. "I think she's innocent. What I hope you'll do is to forget what any one thinks. Go to the woman without prejudice one way or the other. Write of her as you find her."

"That," I said, "is precisely what I intend to do."

"Good!" exclaimed Morris. "I was afraid that what Hurd said might send you out with the wrong notion."

He strolled with me toward the elevator. "I never knew a case where the evidence for and against a prisoner was so evenly balanced," he mused. "I'm for her simply because I can't believe that a woman with her brains and courage would commit such a crime. She's too good a sport! By Jove, the way she went through that seven-hour session on the witness-stand the other day ..." He checked himself. "Oh, well,"

he ended, easily, "I'm not her advocate. She may be fooling us all.

Good-by. Get a good story."

"I'll make her confess to me," I remarked, cheerfully, at the elevator door. "Then we'll suppress the confession!"

"We'll give her a square deal, anyway," he called, as the elevator began to descend.

It was easy to run out to Fairview, the scene of the trial, easy to get the letter from Mr. Davies, and easiest of all to interview the friendly warden of the big prison and send the note to Mrs. Brandow in her cell when she had returned from court. After that the broad highway of duty was no longer oiled. Very courteously, but very firmly, too, Mrs. Brandow declined to see me. Many messages pa.s.sed between us before I was admitted to her presence on the distinct understanding that I was not to ask her questions, that I was not to quote anything she might say; that, in short, I was to confine the drippings of my gifted pen to a description of her environment and of herself. This was not a heartening task. Yet when the iron door of Number 46 on the women's tier of the prison had swung back to admit me my first glance at the prisoner and her background showed me that Mr.

Hurd would have at least one "feature" for the _Searchlight_ the next morning.

On either side of Number 46 were typical white-painted and carbolic-scented cells--one occupied by an intoxicated woman who snored raucously on her narrow cot, the other by a wretched hag who clung to the bars of her door with filthy fingers and leered at me as I pa.s.sed. Between the two was a spot as out of place in those surroundings as a flower-bed would seem on the stern brow of an Alpine glacier.

Mrs. Brandow, the newspapers had told the world, was not only a beautiful woman, but a woman who loved beauty. She had spent six months in Fairview awaiting her trial. All the members of the "good family" Mr. Hurd had mentioned had died young--probably as a reward of their excellence. She had no intimate friends--her husband, it was said, had made friendships impossible for her. Nevertheless, first with one trifle, then with another, brought to her by the devoted maid who had been with her for years, she had made herself a home in her prison.

Tacked on the wall, facing her small, white-painted iron bed, was a large piece of old Java print, its colors dimmed by time to dull browns and blues. On the bed itself was a cover of blue linen, and the cement floor was partly concealed by a Chinese rug whose rich tones harmonized with those of the print. Over the bed hung a fine copy of a Hobbema, in which two lines of trees stretched on and on toward a vague, far-distant horizon. Near this a large framed print showed a great stretch of Scotch moors and wide, empty skies. A few silver-backed toilet articles lay on a small gla.s.s-covered hospital table. Against this unlooked-for background the suspected murderess, immaculate in white linen tailor-made garments, sat on a white-enameled stool, peacefully sewing a b.u.t.ton on a canvas shoe.

The whole effect was so unprecedented, even to me after a year of the varied experiences which come to a New York reporter, that my sense of the woman's situation was wiped out by the tableau she made. Without intending to smile at all, I smiled widely as I entered and held out my hand; and Mrs. Brandow, who had risen to receive me, sent back an answering smile, cool, worldly, and understanding.

"It _is_ a cozy domestic scene, isn't it?" she asked, lightly, reading my thoughts, "but on too small a scale. We're a trifle cramped. Take the stool. I will sit on the bed."

She moved the stool an inch, with a hospitable gesture which almost created an effect of s.p.a.ce, and sat down opposite me, taking me in from head to foot with one straight look from black eyes in whose depths lurked an odd sparkle.

"You won't mind if I finish this?" she asked, as she picked up her needle. "I have only two more b.u.t.tons."

I rea.s.sured her, and she bit off a piece of cotton and rethreaded her needle expertly.

"They won't let me have a pair of scissors," she explained, as she began to sew. "It's a wonder they lend me a needle. They tell me it's a special privilege. Once a week the guard brings it to me at this hour, and the same evening he retrieves it with a long sigh of relief.

He is afraid I will swallow it and cheat the electric chair. He needn't be. It isn't the method I should choose."

Her voice was a soft and warm contralto, whose vibrations seemed to linger in the air when she had ceased to speak. Her manner was indescribably matter-of-fact. She gave a vigorous pull to the b.u.t.ton she had sewed on and satisfied herself of its strength. Then she bit the thread again and began to secure the last b.u.t.ton, incidentally chatting on, as she might have chatted to a friend over a cup of tea.