The Grain Of Dust

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[Illustration: "'I will teach you to love me,' he cried."]





THE GRAIN OF DUST


_A NOVEL_


BY DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS


ILLUSTRATED BY A.B. WENZELL

1911




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


"'I will teach you to love he,' he cried"

"'You won't make an out-and-out idiot of yourself, will you Ursula?'"

"'Would you like to think I was marrying you for what you have?--or for
any other reason whatever but for what you are?'"

"'It has killed me,' he groaned."

"She glanced complacently down at her softly glistening shoulders."

"'Father . . . I have asked you not to interfere between Fred and me.'"

"Evidently she had been crying."

"At Josephine's right sat a handsome young foreigner."




THE GRAIN OF DUST




I


Into the offices of Lockyer, Sanders, Benchley, Lockyer & Norman,
corporation lawyers, there drifted on a December afternoon a girl in
search of work at stenography and typewriting. The firm was about the
most important and most famous--radical orators often said infamous--in
New York. The girl seemed, at a glance, about as unimportant and obscure
an atom as the city hid in its vast ferment. She was blonde--tawny hair,
fair skin, blue eyes. Aside from this hardly conclusive mark of identity
there was nothing positive, nothing definite, about her. She was neither
tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, neither grave nor gay. She gave
the impression of a young person of the feminine gender--that, and
nothing more. She was plainly dressed, like thousands of other girls,
in darkish blue jacket and skirt and white shirt waist. Her boots and
gloves were neat, her hair simply and well arranged. Perhaps in these
respects--in neatness and taste--she did excel the average, which is
depressingly low. But in a city where more or less strikingly pretty
women, bent upon being seen, are as plentiful as the blackberries of
Kentucky's July--in New York no one would have given her a second look,
this quiet young woman screened in an atmosphere of self-effacement.

She applied to the head clerk. It so happened that need for another
typewriter had just arisen. She got a trial, showed enough skill to
warrant the modest wage of ten dollars a week; she became part of the
office force of twenty or twenty-five young men and women similarly
employed. As her lack of skill was compensated by industry and
regularity, she would have a job so long as business did not slacken.
When it did, she would be among the first to be let go. She shrank into
her obscure niche in the great firm, came and went in mouse-like
fashion, said little, obtruded herself never, was all but forgotten.

Nothing could have been more commonplace, more trivial than the whole
incident. The name of the girl was Hallowell--Miss Hallowell. On the
chief clerk's pay roll appeared the additional information that her
first name was Dorothea. The head office boy, in one of his occasional
spells of "freshness," addressed her as Miss Dottie. She looked at him
with a puzzled expression; it presently changed to a slight, sweet
smile, and she went about her business. There was no rebuke in her
manner, she was far too self-effacing for anything so positive as the
mildest rebuke. But the head office boy blushed awkwardly--why he did
not know and could not discover, though he often cogitated upon it. She
remained Miss Hallowell.

Opposites suggest each other. The dimmest personality in those offices
was the girl whose name imaged to everyone little more than a pencil,
notebook, and typewriting machine. The vividest personality was
Frederick Norman. In the list of names upon the outer doors of the
firm's vast labyrinthine suite, on the seventeenth floor of the
Syndicate Building, his name came last--and, in the newest lettering,
suggesting recentness of partnership. In age he was the youngest of the
partners. Lockyer was archaic, Sanders an antique; Benchley, actually
only about fifty-five, had the air of one born in the grandfather class.
Lockyer the son dyed his hair and affected jauntiness, but was in fact
not many years younger than Benchley and had the stiffening jerky legs
of one paying for a lively youth. Norman was thirty-seven--at the age
the Greeks extolled as divine because it means all the best of youth
combined with all the best of manhood. Some people thought Norman
younger, almost boyish. Those knew him uptown only, where he hid the man
of affairs beneath the man of the world-that-amuses-itself. Some people
thought he looked, and was, older than the age with which the
biographical notices credited him. They knew him down town only--where
he dominated by sheer force of intellect and will.

As has been said, the firm ranked among the greatest in New York.
It was a trusted counselor in large affairs--commercial, financial,
political--in all parts of America, in all parts of the globe, for many
of its clients were international traffickers. Yet this young man, this
youngest and most recent of the partners, had within the month forced a
reorganization of the firm--or, rather, of its profits--on a basis that
gave him no less than one half of the whole.

His demand threw his four associates into paroxysms of rage and
fear--the fear serving as a wholesome antidote to the rage.

It certainly was infuriating that a youth, admitted to partnership
barely three years ago, should thus maltreat his associates. Ingrate
was precisely the epithet for him. At least, so they honestly thought,
after the quaint human fashion; for, because they had given him the
partnership, they looked on themselves as his benefactors, and neglected
as unimportant detail the sole and entirely selfish reason for their
graciousness. But enraged though these worthy gentlemen were, and
eagerly though they longed to treat the "conceited and grasping upstart"
as he richly deserved, they accepted his ultimatum. Even the venerable
and venerated Lockyer--than whom a more convinced self-deceiver on the
subject of his own virtues never wore white whiskers, black garments,
and the other badges of eminent respectability--even old Joseph Lockyer
could not twist the acceptance into another manifestation of the
benevolence of himself and his associates. They had to stare the
grimacing truth straight in the face; they were yielding because they
dared not refuse. To refuse would mean the departure of Norman with the
firm's most profitable business. It costs heavily to live in New York;
the families of successful men are extravagant; so conduct unbecoming a
gentleman may not there be resented if to resent is to cut down one's
income. The time was, as the dignified and nicely honorable Sanders
observed, when these and many similar low standards did not prevail in
the legal profession. But such is the frailty of human nature--or so
savage the pressure of the need of the material necessities of civilized
life, let a profession become profitable or develop possibilities of
profit--even the profession of statesman, even that of lawyer--or
doctor--or priest--or wife--and straightway it begins to tumble down
toward the brawl and stew of the market place.

In a last effort to rouse the gentleman in Norman or to shame him into
pretense of gentlemanliness, Lockyer expostulated with him like a
prophet priest in full panoply of saintly virtue. And Lockyer was
passing good at that exalted gesture. He was a Websterian figure,
with the venality of the great Daniel in all its pompous dignity
modernized--and correspondingly expanded. He abounded in those idealist
sonorosities that are the stock-in-trade of all solemn old-fashioned
frauds. The young man listened with his wonted attentive courtesy until
the dolorous appeal disguised as fatherly counsel came to an end. Then
in his blue-gray eyes appeared the gleam that revealed the tenacity and
the penetration of his mind. He said:

"Mr. Lockyer, you have been absent six years--except an occasional two
or three weeks--absent as American Ambassador to France. You have done
nothing for the firm in that time. Yet you have not scorned to take
profits you did not earn. Why should I scorn to take profits I do earn?"

Mr. Lockyer shook his picturesque head in sad remonstrance at this
vulgar, coarse, but latterly frequent retort of insurgent democracy upon
indignant aristocracy. But he answered nothing.

"Also," proceeded the graceless youth in the clear and concise way that
won the instant attention of juries and Judges, "also, our profession
is no longer a profession but a business." His humorous eyes twinkled
merrily. "It divides into two parts--teaching capitalists how to loot
without being caught, and teaching them how to get off if by chance
they have been caught. There are other branches of the profession, but
they're not lucrative, so we do not practice them. Do I make myself
clear?"

Mr. Lockyer again shook his head and sighed.

"I am not an Utopian," continued young Norman. "Law and custom
permit--not to say sanctify--our sort of business. So--I do my best. But
I shall not conceal from you that it's distasteful to me. I wish to get
out of it. I shall get out as soon as I've made enough capital to assure
me the income I have and need. Naturally, I wish to gather in the
necessary amount as speedily as possible."

"Fred, my boy, I regret that you take such low views of our noble
profession."

"Yes--as a profession it is noble. But not as a practice. _My_ regret is
that it invites and compels such low views."

"You will look at these things more--more mellowly when you are older."

"I doubt if I'll ever rise very high in the art of self-deception,"
replied Norman. "If I'd had any bent that way I'd not have got so far so
quickly."

It was a boastful remark--of a kind he, and other similar young men,
have the habit of making. But from him it did not sound boastful--simply
a frank and timely expression of an indisputable truth, which indeed it
was. Once more Mr. Lockyer sighed. "I see you are incorrigible," said
he.

"I have not acted without reflection," said Norman.

And Lockyer knew that to persist was simply to endanger his dignity.
"I am getting old," said he. "Indeed, I am old. I have gotten into the
habit of leaning on you, my boy. I can't consent to your going, hard
though you make it for us to keep you. I shall try to persuade our
colleagues to accept your terms."

Norman showed neither appreciation nor triumph. He merely bowed
slightly. And so the matter was settled. Instead of moving into the
suite of offices in the Mills Building on which he had taken an option,
young Norman remained where he had been toiling for twelve years.

After this specimen of Norman's quality, no one will be surprised to
learn that in figure he was one of those solidly built men of medium
height who look as if they were made to sustain and to deliver shocks,
to bear up easily under heavy burdens; or that his head thickly covered
with fairish hair, was hatchet-shaped with the helve or face suggesting
that while it could and would cleave any obstacle, it would wear a merry
if somewhat sardonic smile the while. No one had ever seen Norman angry,
though a few persevering offenders against what he regarded as his
rights had felt the results of swift and powerful action of the same
sort that is usually accompanied--and weakened--by outward show of
anger. Invariably good-humored, he was soon seen to be more dangerous
than the men of flaring temper. In most instances good humor of
thus unbreakable species issues from weakness, from a desire to
conciliate--usually with a view to plucking the more easily. Norman's
good humor arose from a sense of absolute security which in turn was the
product of confidence in himself and amiable disdain for his fellow men.
The masses he held in derision for permitting the classes to rule and
rob and spit upon them. The classes he scorned for caring to occupy
themselves with so cheap and sordid a game as the ruling, robbing, and
spitting aforesaid. Coming down to the specific, he despised men as
individuals because he had always found in each and everyone of them a
weakness that made it easy for him to use them as he pleased.

Not an altogether pleasant character, this. But not so unpleasant as it
may seem to those unable impartially to analyze human character, even
their own--especially their own. And let anyone who is disposed to
condemn Norman first look within himself--in some less hypocritical and
self-deceiving moment, if he have such moments--and let him note what
are the qualities he relies upon and uses in his own struggle to save
himself from being submerged and sunk. Further, there were in Norman
many agreeable qualities, important, but less fundamental, therefore
less deep-hidden--therefore generally regarded as the real man and as
the cause of his success in which they in fact had almost no part. He
was, for example, of striking physical appearance, was attractively
dressed and mannered, was prodigally generous. Neither as lawyer nor as
man did he practice justice. But while as lawyer he practiced injustice,
as man he practiced mercy. Whenever a weakling appealed to him for
protection, he gave it--at times with splendid recklessness as to the
cost to himself in antagonisms and enmities. Indeed, so great were
the generosities of his character that, had he not been arrogant,
disdainful, self-confident, resolutely and single-heartedly ambitious,
he must inevitably have ruined himself--if he had ever been able to rise
high enough to be worthy the dignity of catastrophe.

Successful men are usually trying persons to know well. Lambs, asses,
and chickens do not associate happily with lions, wolves, and hawks--nor
do birds and beasts of prey get on well with one another. Norman was
regarded as "difficult" by his friends--by those of them who happened to
get into the path of his ambition, in front of instead of behind him,
and by those who fell into the not unnatural error of misunderstanding
his good nature and presuming upon it. His clients regarded him as
insolent. The big businesses, seeking the rich spoils of commerce,
frequent highly perilous waters. They need skillful pilots. Usually
these lawyer-pilots "know their place" and put on no airs upon the
quarter-deck while they are temporarily in command. Not so Norman. He
took the full rank, authority--and emoluments--of commander. And as his
power, fame, and income were swiftly growing, it is fair to assume that
he knew what he was about.

He was admired--extravagantly admired--by young men with not too broad a
vein of envy. He was no woman hater--anything but that. Indeed, those
who wished him ill had from time to time hoped to see him tumble down,
through miscalculation in some of his audacities with women. No--he did
not hate women. But there were several women who hated him--or tried to;
and if wounded vanity and baffled machination be admitted as just causes
for hatred, they had cause. He liked--but he did not wholly trust. When
he went to sleep, it was not where Delilah could wield the shears. A
most irritating prudence--irritating to friends and intimates of all
degrees and kinds, in a race of beings with a mania for being trusted
implicitly but with no balancing mania for deserving trust of the
implicit variety.

And he ate hugely--and whatever he pleased. He could drink beyond
belief, all sorts of things, with no apparent ill effect upon either
body or brain. He had all the appetites developed abnormally, and
abnormal capacity for gratifying them. Where there was one man who
envied him his eminence, there were a dozen who envied him his physical
capacities. We cannot live and act without doing mischief, as well as
that which most of us would rather do, provided that in the doing we are
not ourselves undone. Probably in no direction did Norman do so much
mischief as in unconsciously leading men of his sets down town and up to
imitate his colossal dissipations--which were not dissipation for him
who was abnormal.

Withal, he was a monster for work. There is not much truth in men's
unending talk of how hard they work or are worked. The ravages from
their indulgences in smoking, drinking, gallantry, eating too much and
too fast and too often, have to be explained away creditably, to
themselves and to others--notably to the wives or mothers who nurse them
and suffer from their diminishing incomes. Hence the wailing about work.
But once in a while a real worker appears--a man with enormous ingenuity
at devising difficult tasks for himself and with enormous persistence in
doing them. Frederick Norman was one of these blue-moon prodigies.

Obviously, such a man could not but be observed and talked about.
Endless stories, some of them more or less true, most of them
apocryphal, were told of him--stories of his shrewd, unexpected moves in
big cases, of his witty retorts, of his generosities, of his
peculiarities of dress, of eating and drinking; stories of his
adventures with women. Whatever he did, however trivial, took color and
charm from his personality, so easy yet so difficult, so simple yet so
complex, so baffling. Was he wholly selfish? Was he a friend to almost
anybody or to nobody? Did he ever love? No one knew, not even himself,
for life interested him too intensely and too incessantly to leave him
time for self-analysis. One thing he was certain of; he hated nobody,
envied nobody. He was too successful for that.

He did as he pleased. And, on the whole, he pleased to do far less
inconsiderately than his desires, his abilities, and his opportunities
tempted. Have not men been acclaimed good for less?

In the offices, where he was canvased daily by partners, clerks,
everyone down to the cleaners whose labors he so often delayed, opinion
varied from day to day. They worshiped him; they hated him. They loved
him; they feared him. They regarded him as more than human, as less than
human; but never as just human--though always as endowed with fine human
virtues and even finer human weaknesses. Miss Tillotson, next to the
head clerk in rank and pay--and a pretty and pushing young
person--dreamed of getting acquainted with him--really well acquainted.
It was a vain dream. For him, between up town and down town a great gulf
was fixed. Also, he had no interest in or ammunition for sparrows.

It was in December that Miss Hallowell--Miss Dorothea Hallowell--got her
temporary place at ten dollars a week--that obscure event, somewhat like
a field mouse taking quarters in a horizon-bounded grain field. It was
not until mid-February that she, the palest of personalities, came into
direct contact with Norman, about the most refulgent. This is how it
happened.

Late in that February afternoon, an hour or more after the last of the
office force should have left, Norman threw open the door of his private
office and glanced round at the rows on rows of desks. The lights in the
big room were on, apparently only because he was still within. With an
exclamation of disappointment he turned to re-enter his office. He heard
the click of typewriter keys. Again he looked round, but could see no
one.

"Isn't there some one here?" he cried. "Don't I hear a typewriter?"

The noise stopped. There was a slight rustling from a far corner, beyond
his view, and presently he saw advancing a slim and shrinking slip of a
girl with a face that impressed him only as small and insignificant. In
a quiet little voice she said, "Yes, sir. Do you wish anything?"

"Why, what are you doing here?" he asked. "I don't think I've ever seen
you before."

"Yes. I took dictation from you several times," replied she.

He was instantly afraid he might have hurt her feelings, and he, who in
the days when he was far, far less than now, had often suffered from
that commonplace form of brutality, was most careful not to commit it.
"I never know what's going on round me when I'm thinking," explained he,
though he was saying to himself that the next time he would probably
again be unable to remember one with nothing distinctive to fix
identity. "You are--Miss----?"

"Miss Hallowell."

"How do you happen to be here? I've given particular instructions that
no one is ever to be detained after hours."

A little color appeared in the pale, small face--and now he saw that she
had a singularly fair and smooth skin, singularly beautiful--and he
wondered why he had not noticed it before. Being a close observer, he
had long ago noted and learned to appreciate the wonders of that most
amazing of tissues, the human skin; and he had come to be a connoisseur.
"I'm staying of my own accord," said she.

"They ought not to give you so much work," said he. "I'll speak about
it."

Into the small face came the look of the frightened child--a fascinating
look. And suddenly he saw that she had lovely eyes, clear, expressive,
innocent. "Please don't," she pleaded, in the gentle quiet voice. "It
isn't overwork. I did a brief so badly that I was ashamed to hand it in.
I'm doing it again."

He laughed, and a fine frank laugh he had when he was in the mood.
At once a smile lighted up her face, danced in her eyes, hovered
bewitchingly about her lips--and he wondered why he had not at first
glance noted how sweet and charmingly fresh her mouth was. "Why, she's
beautiful," he said to himself, the manly man's inevitable interest
in feminine charm wide awake. "Really beautiful. If she had a
figure--and were tall--" As he thought thus, he glanced at her figure.
A figure? Tall? She certainly was tall--no, she wasn't--yes, she
was. No, not tall from head to foot, but with the most captivating
long lines--long throat, long bust, long arms, long in body and in
legs--long and slender--yet somehow not tall. He--all this took but an
instant--returned his glance to her face. He was startled. The beauty
had fled, leaving not a trace behind. Before him wavered once more a
small insignificance. Even her skin now seemed commonplace.

She was saying, "Did you wish me to do something?"

"Yes--a letter. Come in," he said abruptly.

Once more the business in hand took possession of his mind. He became
unconscious of her presence. He dictated slowly, carefully choosing his
words, for perhaps a quarter of an hour. Then he stopped and paced up
and down, revolving a new idea, a new phase of the business, that had
flashed upon him. When he had his thoughts once more in form he turned
toward the girl, the mere machine. He gazed at her in amazement. When he
had last looked, he had seen an uninteresting nonentity. But that was
not this person, seated before him in the same garments and with the
same general blondness. That person had been a girl. This time the
transformation was not into the sweet innocence of lovely childhood, but
into something incredibly different. He was gazing now at a woman, a
beautiful world-weary woman, one who had known the joys and then the
sorrows of life and love. Heavy were the lids of the large eyes gazing
mournfully into infinity--gazing upon the graves of a life, the long,
long vista of buried joys. Never had he seen anything so sad or so
lovely as her mouth. The soft, smooth skin was not merely pale; its
pallor was that of wakeful nights, of weeping until there were no more
tears to drain away.

"Miss Hallowell--" he began.

She startled; and like the flight of an interrupted dream, the woman he
had been seeing vanished. There sat the commonplace young person he had
first seen. He said to himself: "I must be a little off my base
to-night," and went on with the dictation. When he finished she withdrew
to transcribe the letter on the typewriter. He seated himself at his
desk and plunged into the masses of documents. He lost the sense of his
surroundings until she stood beside him holding the typewritten pages.
He did not glance up, but seized the sheets to read and sign.

"You may go," said he. "I am very much obliged to you." And he
contrived, as always, to put a suggestion of genuineness into the
customary phrase.

"I'm afraid it's not good work," said she. "I'll wait to see if I am to
do any of it over."

"No, thank you," said he. And he looked up--to find himself gazing at
still another person, wholly different from any he had seen before. The
others had all been women--womanly women, full of the weakness, the
delicateness rather, that distinguishes the feminine. This woman he was
looking at now had a look of strength. He had thought her frail. He was
seeing a strong woman--a splendidly healthy body, with sinews of steel
most gracefully covered by that fair smooth skin of hers. And her
features, too--why, this girl was a person of character, of will.

He glanced through the pages. "All right--thank you," he said hastily.
"Please don't stay any longer. Leave the other thing till to-morrow."

"No--it has to be done to-night."

"But I insist upon your going."

She hesitated, said quietly, "Very well," and turned to go.

"And you mustn't do it at home, either."

She made no reply, but waited respectfully until it was evident he
wished to say no more, then went out. He bundled together his papers,
sealed and stamped and addressed his letter, put on his overcoat and hat
and crossed the outer office on his way to the door. It was empty; she
was gone. He descended in the elevator to the street, remembered that he
had not locked one of his private cases, returned. As he opened the
outer door he heard the sound of typewriter keys. In the corner, the
obscure, sheltered corner, sat the girl, bent with childlike gravity
over her typewriter. It was an amusing and a touching sight--she looked
so young and so solemnly in earnest.