The Grain Of Dust

D >> David Graham Phillips >> The Grain Of Dust


"Didn't I tell you to go home?" he called out, with mock sternness.

Up she sprang, her hand upon her heart. And once more she was beautiful,
but once more it was in a way startlingly, unbelievably different from
any expression he had seen before.

"Now, really. Miss--" He had forgotten her name. "You must not stay on
here. We aren't such slave drivers as all that. Go home, please. I'll
take the responsibility."

She had recovered her equanimity. In her quiet, gentle voice--but it no
longer sounded weak or insignificant--she said, "You are very kind, Mr.
Norman. But I must finish my work."

"Haven't I said I'd take the blame?"

"But you can't," replied she. "I work badly. I seem to learn slowly. If
I fall behind, I shall lose my place--sooner or later. It was that way
with the last place I had. If you interfered, you'd only injure me. I've
had experience. And--I must not lose my place."

One of the scrub women thrust her mussy head and ragged, shapeless body
in at the door. With a start Norman awoke to the absurdity of his
situation--and to the fact that he was placing the girl in a
compromising position. He shrugged his shoulders, went in and locked the
cabinet, departed.

"What a queer little insignificance she is!" thought he, and dismissed
her from mind.




II


Many and fantastic are the illusions the human animal, in its ignorance
and its optimism, devises to change life from a pleasant journey along a
plain road into a fumbling and stumbling and struggling about in a fog.
Of these hallucinations the most grotesque is that the weak can come
together, can pass a law to curb the strong, can set one of their number
to enforce it, may then disperse with no occasion further to trouble
about the strong. Every line of every page of history tells how the
strong--the nimble-witted, the farsighted, the ambitious--have worked
their will upon their feebler and less purposeful fellow men, regardless
of any and all precautions to the contrary. Conditions have improved
only because the number of the strong has increased. With so many lions
at war with each other not a few rabbits contrive to avoid perishing in
the nest.

Norman's genius lay in ability to take away from an adversary the legal
weapons implicitly relied upon and to arm his client with them. No man
understood better than he the abysmal distinction between law and
justice; no man knew better than he how to compel--or to assist--courts
to apply the law, so just in the general, to promoting injustice in the
particular. And whenever he permitted conscience a voice in his internal
debates--it was not often--he heard from it its usual servile
approbation: How can the reign of justice be more speedily brought about
than by making the reign of law--lawyer law--intolerable?

About a fortnight after the trifling incident related in the previous
chapter, Norman had to devise a secret agreement among several of the
most eminent of his clients. They wished to band together, to do a thing
expressly forbidden by the law; they wished to conspire to lower wages
and raise prices in several railway systems under their control. But
none would trust the others; so there must be something in writing, laid
away in a secret safety deposit box along with sundry bundles of
securities put up as forfeit, all in the custody of Norman. When he had
worked out in his mind and in fragmentary notes the details of their
agreement, he was ready for some one to do the clerical work. The some
one must be absolutely trustworthy, as the plain language of the
agreement would make clear to the dullest mind dazzling opportunities
for profit--not only in stock jobbing but also in blackmail. He rang for
Tetlow, the head clerk. Tetlow--smooth and sly and smug, lacking only
courageous initiative to make him a great lawyer, but, lacking that,
lacking all--Tetlow entered and closed the door behind him.

Norman leaned back in his desk chair and laced his fingers behind his
head. "One of your typewriters is a slight blonde girl--sits in the
corner to the far left--if she's still here."

"Miss Hallowell," said Tetlow. "We are letting her go at the end of this
week. She's nice and ladylike, and willing--in fact, most anxious to
please. But the work's too difficult for her. She's rather--rather--well,
not exactly stupid, but slow."

"Um," said Norman reflectively. "There's Miss Bostwick--perhaps she'll
do."

"Miss Bostwick got married last week."

Norman smiled. He remembered the girl because she was the oldest and
homeliest in the office. "There's somebody for everybody--eh, Tetlow?"

"He was a lighthouse keeper," said Tetlow. "There's a story that he
advertised for a wife. But that may be a joke."

"Why not that Miss--Miss Halloway?" mused Norman.

"Miss Hallowell," corrected Tetlow.

"Hallowell--yes. Is she--_very_ incompetent?

"Not exactly that. But business is slackening--and she's been only
temporary--and----"

Norman cut him off with, "Send her in."

"You don't wish her dismissed? I haven't told her yet."

"Oh, I'm not interfering in your department. Do as you like. . . .
No--in this case--let her stay on for the present."

"I can use her," said Tetlow. "And she gets only ten a week."

Norman frowned. He did not like to _hear_ that an establishment in which
he had control paid less than decent living wages--even if the market
price did excuse--yes, compel it. "Send her in," he repeated. Then, as
Tetlow was about to leave, "She is trustworthy?"

"All our force is. I see to that, Mr. Norman."

"Has she a young man--steady company, I think they call it?"

"She has no friends at all. She's extremely shy--at least, reserved.
Lives with her father, an old crank of an analytical chemist over in
Jersey City. She hasn't even a lady friend."

"Well, send her in."

A moment later Norman, looking up from his work, saw the dim slim
nonentity before him. Again he leaned back and, as he talked with her,
studied her face to make sure that his first judgment was correct. "Do
you stay late every night?" asked he smilingly.

She colored a little, but enough to bring out the exquisite fineness of
her white skin. "Oh, I don't mind," said she, and there was no
embarrassment in her manner. "I've got to learn--and doing things over
helps."

"Nothing equal to it," declared Norman. "You've been to school?"

"Only six weeks," confessed she. "I couldn't afford to stay longer."

"I mean the other sort of school--not the typewriting."

"Oh! Yes," said she. And once more he saw that extraordinary
transformation. She became all in an instant delicately, deliciously
lovely, with the moving, in a way pathetic loveliness of sweet children
and sweet flowers. Her look was mystery; but not a mystery of guile. She
evidently did not wish to have her past brought to view; but it was
equally apparent that behind it lay hid nothing shameful, only the sad,
perhaps the painful. Of all the periods of life youth is the best fitted
to bear deep sorrows, for then the spirit has its full measure of
elasticity. Yet a shadow upon youth is always more moving than the
shadows of maturer years--those shadows that do not lie upon the surface
but are heavy and corroding stains. When Norman saw this shadow upon her
youth, so immature-looking, so helpless-looking, he felt the first
impulse of genuine interest in her. Perhaps, had that shadow happened to
fall when he was seeing her as the commonplace and colorless little
struggler for bread, and seeming doomed speedily to be worsted in the
struggle--perhaps, he would have felt no interest, but only the brief
qualm of pity that we dare not encourage in ourselves, on a journey so
beset with hopeless pitiful things as is the journey through life.

But he had no impulse to question her. And with some surprise he noted
that his reason for refraining was not the usual reason--unwillingness
uselessly to add to one's own burdens by inviting the mournful
confidences of another. No, he checked himself because in the manner of
this frail and mouselike creature, dim though she once more was, there
appeared a dignity, a reserve, that made intrusion curiously impossible.
With an apologetic note in his voice--a kind and friendly voice--he
said:

"Please have your typewriter brought in here. I want you to do some work
for me--work that isn't to be spoken of--not even to Mr. Tetlow." He
looked at her with grave penetrating eyes. "You will not speak of it?"

"No," replied she, and nothing more. But she accompanied the simple
negative with a clear and honest sincerity of the eyes that set his mind
completely at rest. He felt that this girl had never in her life told a
real lie.

One of the office boys installed the typewriter, and presently Norman
and the quiet nebulous girl at whom no one would trouble to look a
second time were seated opposite each other with the broad table desk
between, he leaning far back in his desk chair, fingers interlocked
behind his proud, strong-looking head, she holding sharpened pencil
suspended over the stenographic notebook. Long before she seated herself
he had forgotten her except as machine. There followed a troubled hour,
as he dictated, ordered erasure, redictated, ordered re-readings,
skipped back and forth, in the effort to frame the secret agreement in
the fewest and simplest, and least startlingly unlawful, words. At last
he leaned forward with the shine of triumph in his eyes.

"Read straight through," he commanded.

She read, interrupted occasionally by a sharp order from him to correct
some mistake in her notes.

"Again," he commanded, when she translated the last of her notes.

This time she was not interrupted once. When she ended, he exclaimed:
"Good! I don't see how you did it so well."

"Nor do I," said she.

"You say you are only a beginner."

"I couldn't have done it so well for anyone else," said she. "You
are--different."

The remark was worded most flatteringly, but it did not sound so. He saw
that she did not herself understand what she meant by "different." _He_
understood, for he knew the difference between the confused and
confusing ordinary minds and such an intelligence as his own--simple,
luminous, enlightening all minds, however dark, so long as they were in
the light-flooded region around it.

"Have I made the meaning clear?" he asked.

He hoped she would reply that he had not, though this would have
indicated a partial defeat in the object he had--to put the complex
thing so plainly that no one could fail to understand. But she answered,
"Yes."

He congratulated himself that his overestimate of her ignorance of
affairs had not lured him into giving her the names of the parties at
interest to transcribe. But did she really understand? To test her, he
said:

"What do you think of it?"

"That it's wicked," replied she, without hesitation and in her small,
quiet voice.

He laughed. In a way this girl, sitting there--this inconsequential and
negligible atom--typefied the masses of mankind against whom that secret
agreement was directed. They, the feeble and powerless ones, with their
necks ever bent under the yoke of the mighty and their feet ever
stumbling into the traps of the crafty--they, too, would utter an
impotent "Wicked!" if they knew. His voice had the note of gentle
raillery in it as he said:

"No--not wicked. Just business."

She was looking down at her book, her face expressionless. A few moments
before he would have said it was an empty face. Now it seemed to him
sphynxlike.

"Just business," he repeated. "It is going to take money from those who
don't know how to keep or to spend it and give it to those who do know
how. The money will go for building up civilization, instead of for beer
and for bargain-trough finery to make working men's wives and daughters
look cheap and nasty."

She was silent.

"Now, do you understand?"

"I understand what you said." She looked at him as she spoke. He
wondered how he could have fancied those lack-luster eyes beautiful or
capable of expression.

"You don't believe it?" he asked.

"No," said she. And suddenly in those eyes, gazing now into space, there
came the unutterably melancholy look--heavy-lidded from heartache,
weary-wise from long, long and bitter, experiences. Yet she still looked
young--girlishly young--but it was the youthful look the classic Greek
sculptors tried to give their young goddesses--the youth without
beginning or end--younger than a baby's, older than the oldest of the
sons of men. He mocked himself for the fancies this queer creature
inspired in him; but she none the less made him uneasy.

"You don't believe it?" he repeated.

"No," she answered again. "My father has taught me--some things."

He drummed impatiently on the table. He resented her impertinence--for,
like all men of clear and positive mind, he regarded contradiction as in
one aspect impudent, in another aspect evidence of the folly of his
contradictor. Then he gave a short laugh--the confessing laugh of the
clever man who has tried to believe his own sophistries and has failed.
"Well--neither do I believe it," said he. "Now, to get the thing
typewritten."

She seated herself at the machine and set to work. As his mind was full
of the agreement he could not concentrate on anything else. From time to
time he glanced at her. Then he gave up trying to work and sat furtively
observing her. What a quaint little mystery it was! There was in
it--that is, in her--not the least charm for him. But, in all his
experience with women, he could recall no woman with a comparable
development of this curious quality of multiple personalities, showing
and vanishing in swift succession.

There had been a time when woman had interested him as a puzzle to be
worked out, a maze to be explored, a temple to be penetrated--until one
reached the place where the priests manipulated the machinery for the
wonders and miracles to fool the devotees into awe. Some men never get
to this stage, never realize that their own passions, working upon the
universal human love of the mysterious, are wholly responsible for the
cult of woman the sphynx and the sibyl. But Norman, beloved of women,
had been let by them into their ultimate secret--the simple humanness of
woman; the clap-trappery of the oracles, miracles, and wonders. He had
discovered that her "divine intuitions" were mere shrewd guesses, where
they had any meaning at all; that her eloquent silences were screens for
ignorance or boredom--and so on through the list of legends that prop
the feminist cult.

But this girl--this Miss Hallowell--here was a tangible mystery--a
mystery of physics, of chemistry. He sat watching her--watching the
changes as she bent to her work, or relaxed, or puzzled over the meaning
of one of her own hesitating stenographic hieroglyphics--watched her as
the waning light of the afternoon varied its intensity upon her skin.
Why, her very hair partook of this magical quality and altered its tint,
its degree of vitality even, in harmony with the other changes. . . . What
was the explanation? By means of what rare mechanism did her nerve force
ebb and flow from moment to moment, bringing about these fascinating
surface changes in her body? Could anything, even any skin, be better
made than that superb skin of hers--that master work of delicacy and
strength, of smoothness and color? How had it been possible for him to
fail to notice it, when he was always looking for signs of a good skin
down town--and up town, too--in these days of the ravages of pastry and
candy? . . . What long graceful fingers she had--yet what small hands!
Certainly here was a peculiarity that persisted. No--absurd though it
seemed, no! One way he looked at those hands, they were broad and
strong, another way narrow and gracefully weak.

He said to himself: "The man who gets that girl will have Solomon's
wives rolled into one. A harem at the price of a wife--or a--" He left
the thought unfinished. It seemed an insult to this helpless little
creature, the more rather than the less cowardly for being unspoken;
for, no doubt her ideas of propriety were firmly conventional.

"About done?" he asked impatiently.

She glanced up. "In a moment. I'm sorry to be so slow."

"You're not," he assured her truthfully. "It's my impatience. Let me see
the pages you've finished."

With them he was able to concentrate his mind. When she laid the last
page beside his arm he was absorbed, did not look at her, did not think
of her. "Take the machine away," said he abruptly.

He was leaving for the day when he remembered her again. He sent for
her. "I forgot to thank you. It was good work. You will do well. All you
need is practice--and confidence. Especially confidence." He looked at
her. She seemed frail--touchingly frail. "You are not strong?"

She smiled, and in an instant the frailty seemed to have been mere
delicacy of build--the delicacy that goes with the strength of steel
wires, or rather of the spider's weaving thread which sustains weights
and shocks out of all proportion to its appearance. "I've never been ill
in my life," said she. "Not a day."

Again, because she was standing before him in full view, he noted the
peculiar construction of her frame--the beautiful lines of length so
dextrously combined that her figure as a whole was not tall. He said, "A
working woman--or man--needs health above all. Thank you again." And he
nodded a somewhat curt dismissal. When she glided away and he was alone
behind the closed door, he reflected for a moment upon the extraordinary
amount of thinking--and the extraordinary kind of thinking--into which
this poor little typewriter girl had beguiled him. He soon found the
explanation for this vagary into a realm so foreign to a man of his high
tastes and ambitions. "It's because I'm so in love with Josephine," he
decided. "I've fallen into the sentimental state of all lovers. The
whole sex becomes novel and interesting and worth while."

As he left the office, unusually late, he saw her still at work--no
doubt doing over again some bungled piece of copying. She had her normal
and natural look and air--the atomic little typewriter, unattractive and
uninteresting. With another smile for his romantic imaginings, he forgot
her. But when he reached the street he remembered her again. The
threatened blizzard had changed into a heavy rain. The swift and sudden
currents of air, that have made of New York a cave of the winds since
the coming of the skyscrapers, were darting round corners, turning
umbrellas inside out, tossing women's skirts about their heads, reducing
all who were abroad to the same level of drenched and sullen
wretchedness. Norman's limousine was waiting at the curb. He, pausing in
the doorway, glanced up and down the street, had an impulse to return
and take the girl home. Then he smiled satirically at himself. Her lot
condemned her to be out in all weathers. It would not be a kindness but
an exhibition of smug vanity to shelter her this one night; also, there
was the question of her reputation--and the possibility of turning her
head, perhaps just enough to cause her ruin. He sprang across the
wind-swept, rain-swept sidewalk and into the limousine whose door was
being held open by an obsequious attendant. "Home," he said, and the
door slammed.

Usually these journeys between office and home or club in the evening
gave Norman a chance for ten or fifteen minutes of sleep. He had
discovered that this brief dropping of the thread of consciousness gave
him a wonderful fresh grip upon the day, enabled him to work or play
until late into the night without fatigue. But that evening his mind was
wide awake. Nor could he fix it upon business. It would interest itself
only in the hurrying throngs of foot passengers and the ideas they
suggested: Here am I--so ran his thoughts--here am I, tucked away
comfortably while all those poor creatures have to plod along in the
storm. I could afford to be sick. They can't. And what have I done to
deserve this good fortune? Nothing. Worse than nothing. If I had made my
career along the lines of what is honest and right and beneficial to my
fellow men, I'd probably be plugging home under an umbrella--and to a
pretty poor excuse for a home. But I was too wise to do that. I've spent
this day, as I spend all my days, in helping the powerful rich to add to
their wealth and power, to add to the burdens those poor devils out
there in the rain must bear. And I'm rewarded with a limousine, and all
the rest of it.

These thoughts neither came from nor produced a mood of penitence, or of
regret even. Norman was simply indulging in his favorite
pastime--following without prejudice the leading of a chain of pure
logic. He despised self-deceivers. He always kept himself free from
prejudice and all its wiles. He took life as he found it; but he did not
excuse it and himself with the familiar hypocrisies that make the
comfortable classes preen themselves on being the guardians and saviours
of the ignorant, incapable masses. When old Lockyer said one day that
this was the function of the "upper classes," Norman retorted: "Perhaps.
But, if so, how do they perform it? Like the brutal old-fashioned farm
family that takes care of its insane member by keeping him chained in
filth in the cellar." And once at the Federal Club--By the way, Norman
had joined it, had compelled it to receive him just to show his
associates how a strong man could break even such a firmly established
tradition as that no one who amounted to anything could be elected to a
fashionable club in New York. Once at the Federal Club old Galloway
quoted with approval some essayist's remark that every clever human
being was looking after and holding above the waves at least fifteen of
his weaker fellows. Norman smiled satirically round at the complacently
nodding circle of gray heads and white heads. "My observation has been,"
said he, "that every clever chap is shrewd enough to compel at least
fifteen of his fellows to wait on him, to take care of him--do his
chores--and his dirty work." The nodding stopped. Scowls appeared,
except on the face of old Galloway. He grinned. He was one of the few
examples of a very rich man with a sense of humor. Norman always thought
it was this slight incident that led to his getting the extremely
profitable--and shady--Galloway business.

No, Norman's mood, as he watched the miserable crowds afoot and
reflected upon them, was neither remorseful nor triumphant. He simply
noted an interesting fact--a commonplace fact--of the methods of that
sardonic practical joker, Life. Because the scheme of things was unjust
and stupid, because others, most others, were uncomfortable or
worse--why should he make himself uncomfortable? It would be an
absurdity to get out of his limousine and trudge along in the wet and
the wind. It would be equally absurd to sit in his limousine and be
unhappy about the misery of the world. "I didn't create it, and I can't
recreate it. And if I'm helping to make it worse, I'm also hastening the
time when it'll be better. The Great Ass must have brains and spirit
kicked and cudgeled into it."

At his house in Madison Avenue, just at the crest of Murray Hill, there
was an awning from front door to curb and a carpet beneath it. He
passed, dry and comfortable, up the steps. A footman in quiet rich
livery was waiting to receive him. From rising until bedtime, up town
and down town, wherever he went and whatever he was about, every
possible menial detail of his life was done for him. He had nothing to
do but think about his own work and keep himself in health. Rarely did
he have even to open or to close a door. He used a pen only in signing
his name or marking a passage in a law book for some secretary to make a
typewritten copy.

Upon most human beings this sort of luxury, carried beyond the ordinary
and familiar uses of menial service, has a speedily enervating effect.
Thinking being the most onerous of all, they have it done, also. They
sink into silliness and moral and mental sloth. They pass the time at
foolish purposeless games indoors and out; or they wander aimlessly
about the earth chattering with similar mental decrepits, much like
monkeys adrift in the boughs of a tropical forest. But Norman had the
tenacity and strength to concentrate upon achievement all the powers
emancipated by the use of menials wherever menials could be used. He
employed to advantage the time saved in putting in shirt buttons and
lacing shoes and carrying books to and from shelves. In this lay one of
the important secrets of his success. "Never do for yourself what you
can get some one else to do for you as well. Save yourself for the
things only _you_ can do."

In his household there were three persons, and sixteen servants to wait
upon them. His sister--she and her husband, Clayton Fitzhugh, were the
other two persons--his sister was always complaining that there were not
enough servants, and Frederick, the most indulgent of brothers, was
always letting her add to the number. It seemed to him that the more
help there was, the less smoothly the household ran. But that did not
concern him; his mind was saved for more important matters. There was no
reason why it should concern him; could he not compel the dollars to
flood in faster than she could bail them out?