Chapter VII

The _Journal_ was making money. It was February and the hopes based on the election had already been fulfilled. Circulation had increased and with it had come modest advertisers. Two extra rooms across the hall, one boldly labelled Circulation Department and one Advertising, were in charge of efficient looking young men, and the original editorial rooms were crowded by desks for two new reporters. Bob Brotherton talked boastingly of soon doing their own printing, and though _The Journal_ was still an undersized little sheet, comparing queerly in size with the other dailies, its editorials were more often quoted in other cities than were those of other local papers.

Langley was trying his skill as a writer to its utmost in those editorials. There were no serious political issues in the city and he turned his comment with a great pleasure to national affairs and the larger political and industrial situation. What he said, being actuated by no partisanship, was really the product of deep thought and experience and keen and true. Men began to read his comments and finding good thinking and conclusive evidence kept on reading them. At first they did it warily, expecting at any moment to be plunged into Bolshevism, but though Langley refused to fear that current bogie he recognized it in such a way that the potency and sting went out of it. He began to reassure his public by the method of assuring them that issues were not too terrible to be faced. There was a new note in his writing which took him out of the rank of merely caviling radical and put him with the constructionists.

Horatia thrilled at the new vigor in the paper. They regarded her as a mascot in the office. With her luck had come, as Bob said, and the old reporters and the new competed for chances to help her and to do things for her. Unless Langley was with her, when they withdrew before her absorption in him.

They had not announced an engagement, although the office force saw that the chief was as devoted to Horatia as they were, and perhaps drew its own conclusions. But Jim and Horatia gave them nothing definite to go upon. That decision had been reached after Maud and Langley had met and Maud with instinctive wisdom had pressed home to him Horatia’s youth and inexperience and impetuosity.

“I’m sure that you might be very happy,” said Maud, trying to be tactful. “But surely she can wait a little. Till she knows her own mind. It’s for life.” Maud looked sweetly sentimental. “You tell her how unwise it is to rush into such serious matters, Mr. Langley.”

Poor Langley saw through Maud perfectly, in spite of all her sweetness. But he had to admit that Maud had a case. He smoked a perfunctory cigar with Harvey and went home. Maud became much more sympathetic with Horatia after that visit. Her own antagonism to Langley personally had vanished or been metamorphosed into excitement at her daring in braving such a very irregular, fine-looking and interesting person as Jim. She had lost all animosity at the end of his call and Horatia, who had consented to bring Langley there only after much begging from Maud, had great fun in seeing her sister thaw and finally in watching Langley try to avoid Maud’s persistent invitations. But she had even more amusement when her sister heard that Mrs. Hubbell had reappeared in the city. She broke the news to Horatia with a great air of imparting necessary scandal and was completely filled with horror when Horatia confessed not only to previous knowledge of Maud’s information but also to an acquaintanceship with Mrs. Hubbell.

She offered to take Maud to call but Maud was at the point where she could bear no more shocking.

“It’s dreadful and dangerous,” she told Horatia. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re getting into. What does the creature look like?”

Horatia told her with some enthusiasm. She had somehow come to see a good deal of Rose Hubbell. It was not that she particularly wanted to and Langley had once or twice rather gravely protested. But there was a timeliness, a psychological correctness about Mrs. Hubbell’s invitations that made them very hard to refuse. She destroyed your alibis, too, before she asked you to do something. And then it was good fun for Horatia and really did provide varied amusement for her. Mrs. Hubbell’s settled occupation was having a good time and being modern. Like so many other women she had preëmpted the right to call her kind of living perfectly modern. Grace did the same thing--Horatia did the same thing. And each of them was using the phrase modernism to express satisfaction with the plan of her own existence. Mrs. Hubbell so justified her deviations from the paths orderly people travel, Grace for the same reason as well as to excuse her fashion of intellectualizing all enthusiasms and apparently all emotions out of her life, and Horatia to define the spirit of adventure and desire to explore the depths of life which animated her. Each of them had a different mold which she called modernism and each of them poured her actions into her own mold, delighted to see that they hardened into the shape of the vessel.

Horatia was less conscious than the other two. She was trying their ways, learning their precepts of life and ways of living. She liked things about each of them--Grace’s absorption in her work and Mrs. Hubbell’s more decorative social skill. Mrs. Hubbell knew how to arrange, start off and keep up a dinner party, and she danced with amazing grace and beauty. Horatia danced too, of course, vigorously, healthily, accurately--but the dancing of Rose Hubbell was a gift. “She is not a partner but an inspiration,” said one of the enthusiasts, and Horatia agreed. She guided a bad partner and brought out the best in a mediocre one, but with Jim Langley she moved as if they were strung to one rhythm. There were many opportunities for Horatia to see them together. Mrs. Hubbell arranged parties at country inns and hotels, at all kinds of public places which Horatia had never dreamed of attending, and which she had always regarded as somewhat dubious. But she found them, on the surface at least, innocuous enough places where people spent an enormous amount for eating and drinking, and committed many sins of gluttony and bad taste, but no other serious ones. They danced unpleasantly sometimes and they might be noisy, but on the whole they were passable people, as full of the lesser virtues as were Maud’s friends. They had a fascination about them, too. They were an unanchored lot, with no regularity even in their social intercourse. Extremely well-dressed, often beautiful, the women gave no impression of having antecedents or backgrounds. They emerged from obscurity into the dazzling glare of a hotel ballroom. They were seemingly respectable, extravagant, careless, picking at the surface of life and to some extent they typified a phase of the era--its brilliant, shop-window phase.

Maud’s friends were residents and taxpayers. They had a proper scorn of the transient and held aloof. Yet, to a certain extent, they dovetailed with the other group. The men of Maud’s group were to be seen in hotels as well as at private dinner parties, mostly without their wives in the hotels, if they were married. And once Horatia saw Anthony Wentworth at the Orient.

He was with a party of men and girls at the next table. The party had come in late and Horatia had not seen Anthony until she was conscious of his bow. Then she remembered who he was and as she smiled at him she had a feeling of meeting someone of her own kind;--a sudden thought and one she indignantly refused to harbor, as, blaming him as if he had suggested it, she turned from her smile to him to plunge into conversation with a thin little man who was at her right--a thin, awkward, rich little man.

The little man danced badly. It irritated Horatia to feel ashamed of him in front of Wentworth, but she hoped that Anthony knew enough about dancing to realize that it was not her fault that she looked absurd. Why did the little man jump about so? She pressed her hand on his shoulder to steady him and then jumped away in disgust as she felt her hand squeezed in misunderstanding. They bumped into another couple and stopped. It was Anthony. He smiled and stopped too.

The girl with whom he was dancing was of Horatia’s kind too.

“So you do play sometimes, Miss Grant?” asked Wentworth.

“Of course.”

His partner put her hand on Anthony’s arm, acknowledging a hurried introduction to Horatia.

“Weird place, isn’t it?” she said. “Here, Anthony, we’re holding up traffic. We’d all better be moving.”

He put a deft arm about the girl’s shoulders, glancing back at Horatia.

“May I have the next fox-trot?”

Horatia nodded and steered her little man away in a series of contortions to that oasis of safety--their table.

“Tired--already?” he inquired fatuously.

She sat surveying the members of her group as they came back to the table and was struck by the fact that the women looked very stupid. And the men. The men were “out for a good time,” and that meant an individual reason in each case.

Langley was drawing out Rose Hubbell’s chair. She was wearing a black dinner-dress that fitted her suppleness like a glove and her long black earrings set off that perfect paleness and blondness. Horatia felt that she was the redeeming feature of the party. But she didn’t like Jim’s closeness to Rose. She didn’t like the way he was arranging the scarf about her shoulders. She reminded herself that Jim had begged her not to come tonight but to spend the evening alone with him and that she herself had insisted that they had no right to spoil Mrs. Hubbell’s party after they half agreed to come. Perhaps, after all, this had allured her--this glare and noise and excitement.

“You’re so solemn, Horatia dear.”

Mrs. Hubbell had slipped into the use of her Christian name, a slip that once made it was impossible to correct.

“Am I?”

“You looked like a fifteenth century saint--a Renaissance saint frowning on worldliness, but secretly indulging in it.”

Jim’s glance was on Horatia too. She turned the conversation a little impatiently and Anthony Wentworth came to claim his dance and be extravagantly greeted by those at the table who knew him, except Langley.

They swept into the dance and silences. It was not until the encore that they spoke. He danced simply and easily and Horatia followed him well, although it was her first dance with him.

“So this is what you do for amusement.”

“Sometimes,” she answered, “and sometimes it really is amusing. Not tonight. Tonight the enchantment has vanished. I see only an overlighted room with horrible garish decorations and a lot of noisy women, too many of whom are fat.”

He chuckled.

“I did want to see you again. And I did my best to work it. But short of making myself a public nuisance I couldn’t get a glimpse.”

“I didn’t know you were staying in the city.”

“I’m spending the winter with my sister. The family is gone--by family, I mean mother and father--gone South--and I live partly at home in the empty house and partly at my sister’s, playing with her children.”

The music stopped definitely, deaf to the entreaties of clapping hands.

“Can I take you for a ride one of these days? I suggest that because you said you’d like it.”

“I can’t tell when I can get off.”

“Let me telephone and re-telephone--this proves that you get off sometimes.”

She liked his half-laughing persistence.

“I’d like to ride with you in that car of yours,” she told him.

He smiled down at her in healthy young friendliness and suddenly the people to whom she was returning seemed very unreal and pretentious. He did not ask any of the others for dances but went back to his table.

“You made a very handsome couple,” said Rose Hubbell, sweetly. “Didn’t they, Jim?”

Langley looked tired. He said merely that it was Horatia’s dance with him. As before, they danced without a word.

“You were a handsome couple,” he said at last.

“Please don’t be silly, Jim.”

“I’m such an old man and such an ass, my dear. He is a nice boy and you must play with him a lot.”

“I’d sooner work with you.”

“Let’s not go back to the table. Let’s collect our coats and get out.”

He waltzed her to the door and they went home. Such petty informalities “went” with the Hubbell crowd. It was considered bad form in that _milieu_ to be too conventional. Modern people went and came as they pleased. That was the idea. But Horatia had a vague feeling that, none the less, Mrs. Hubbell might not approve of their going.

* * * * *

Wentworth was as good as his word.

“He is parked below,” said Jim whimsically, two days later. “Better go and get your ride or he’ll sit there and freeze to death.”

He closed the office door.

“But you might let me kiss you before you go out to be admired by dashing young men,” he finished.

“I’d lots sooner stay and be kissed,” complained Horatia.

“You won’t, after you feel the wind in your face.”

He was right. Horatia had not done much motoring and the knowledge she had of it was largely confined to being “picked up” and taken from one place to another. Maud had an electric and Rose Hubbell travelled in a hired sedan, and she had been with them often. But this was different. In this low, open car she was unprotected except for a single fur rug over her knees. Anthony drove along easily until they struck the city limits and then was off in a burst of speed, cut-out throbbing. The state highways were almost clear of snow and they sped along through the barren country with its skeletons of trees sticking up through the snow and the little villages closed tight for the winter. Already evening lights showed in their windows.

“They’re like Christmas postcards,” exclaimed Horatia.

“They look funny from the top when you are flying over them. You don’t want to go back, do you?”

“Never less. I want to plunge into the country farther and farther.”

“Maybe we can find a road that is fair driving. There is one near here which leads to a summer place of mine. And if we cut through from there to the high-road, there’s a hotel where we can get supper. If you aren’t afraid of country driving in the winter, let’s try it.”

“Of course, I’m not afraid. Plunge.”

They were soon on a road which twisted among tall pine trees, gravely holding great burdens of snow. They lost all sound except the chug of the motor--all sense of distance as the car broke its way and left deep furrows of snow along the road. It slipped, skidded, growled forward--striking the ground unevenly and lurching about. Then it chugged a slow disapproval and stopped. Anthony put it unto first gear and started his motor. Again it chugged, slipped, stopped; he turned to Horatia and laughed.

“I’ll get out and see what this hole is like.”

She clambered out, too, and watched him inspect the hollows into which the car had run. Then he climbed in again and started with all his power on. The back wheels spun around without traction. They could not grip the smooth snow and each movement plowed their trap deeper. He shut off the power again.

“You can’t get out,” said Horatia interestedly.

“Oh, yes, I can.”

Anthony stripped off his coat and went off into the woods. He came back with a great bundle of fir boughs that he strewed under the wheels, making a pathway forward and backward. Then from somewhere in the car he produced a shovel and dug the snow away from the wheels.

“Let me help,” begged Horatia.

“Climb into the car and keep warm.”

“I will not be a parasite.”

“Then push those branches under the wheels while I dig.”

They worked together quietly for a while. Again he started and again the wheels were impotent.

“At it again,” cried Anthony.

He was exhilarated by the problem of getting out and this time he succeeded. The car, roaring with power, pulled itself over the branches and out of the hollow. Then, with all their power on, they shot ahead and drove down the dusky road. It was growing quite dark.

“This is our cottage. Think I’ll stop and give the car a drink.”

They climbed out and over a drifted path into the veranda.

“Jolly place in summer,” said Wentworth, finding the right key on his ring and pushing the door open. “You can get a little warmer in here if you’re cold.”

There were electric lights and he switched them on quickly. The bright chintzes of the living-room looked warm and Horatia’s sense of well-being increased. What a nice place and how pleasant to be rich! He made her sit down and put her feet for fear of chill on a cushioned hassock. Then he brought her a glass of water.

“With apologies. Next time we’ll have food and a real party. If I’d thought we would have had one tonight.”

“Is this your cottage?”

“Father gave it to me when I was twenty-one. We had lots of house parties here while I was in college and he liked it. I suppose he thought it kept us straight--a place like this. My sister uses it now every summer. It’s a great place for kids. And now to fill the radiator and be off again to civilization.”

Civilization was a small table in a hotel dining-room and a hot supper, ordered for her by Anthony without a question. Horatia was very hungry, hungry as she seldom was, healthy though she was. And it was a pleasant hotel, like everything else in this excursion. A hotel with no music and no place for dancing--with oldish waitresses instead of waiters in dinner-coats, and with red wall-paper and gas-lights--and somewhere an inimitable chef--no, a woman cook, who put onions frankly in her soup and let the pudding confess to a cornstarch origin and made biscuits that were light as air. They talked about many things over the soup. It warmed them into immense friendliness. Horatia told how she had always loved weather--loved all kinds of it, rains and storms and winds, how it excited her; and how she loved all things that stimulated her energies and made her work--and how she loved her work for the same reasons; because on a newspaper one day was up and the next down so that you were always on the alert; and how you lived in touch with the raw material of events before they’d been softened or hardened or molded by public opinion. He listened and nodded and the friendly old waitress had to push a platter of fried chicken before them to hush them.

Then somehow they were talking of what they had done when they were children, and little tales of West Park popped up in Horatia’s mind, tales which she had almost forgotten--of the time when Uncle George had fled before Aunt Caroline’s dictum that he should spank Maud and Horatia for dancing on a broken spring on the leather sofa in the living-room. It was all irrelevant and friendly. Anthony had his own tales. He had been a nice little boy, Horatia decided, a little boy fond of dogs and swimming. She liked his saying that the old veterinary surgeon had been his best friend when he was a boy. He told her about his mother and his sister and the brother who had looked like his father and who had died at sixteen, which saddened them momentarily. Then over the bones of the fried chicken they talked of futures--hers and his. Of the places on the earth which they would like to see. He had much more background than Horatia, having been to Germany and England before the war, and he had seen England and France again while he was flying abroad. The Europe of before the war was what he liked to talk about.

“For during the war it wasn’t real. It was like a house with all the rugs up and chairs out, and arranged to accommodate a lot of strangers--that is, the cities were like that. And the country where they were fighting was no longer France or Belgium or Germany any more than the slaughter-houses of Chicago are Chicago. I want to give it time to get back and then see it again.”

Not only Europe. He wanted to see South America, China, and to get acquainted with the East.

“What is the use of living if you live in a little suburb all your life?”

“But aren’t you going to do any work?” asked Horatia.

“Yes--later I mean to go into business with father. I shall like exporting. It makes me proud of my own country and keeps me in touch with the others. But I need background. Then, when I ship my wheat, I’ll know where I am shipping it.”

She regarded him gravely.

“There’s no loafer in you,” she admitted.

“No--I hope not. I want to work and to live in America, of course. First of all that. I’ve small patience with these globe-trotters. And I want an American wife and to help stabilize the country. All this discontent is the result of trying to bring in a vicious element which we don’t know how to handle because we’re ignorant of the nations from which these people come.”

“Don’t you think we treat them badly?”

“We treat them altogether too well. We overpay them--we excite them--we give them standards of living which make them discontented.”

“I think you need to see some of the budgets of laborers’ expenditures,” said Horatia; “they don’t show any great extravagances. They must have food and clothes and----”

He broke in impatiently.

“That’s beside the point. A working man and his family don’t starve or freeze unless there’s something wrong with them. What we ought to do is to pay wages which represent what a man earns, and not what he demands. Otherwise it’s pauperization. We will have to stop all this catering to labor. We ought to stop being afraid of it, and then it would come down to earth.”

“Suppose labor quits.”

“It won’t, and if it did, what about it? Face it down. Why should employers all be cowards? Why are they temporizing, giving way inch by inch? Mind, I wouldn’t care if----”

Horatia was fascinated. Strength of aristocracy shot from his eyes. He was amazingly handsome and if his point of view was wrong, it was at least vigorous, thought Horatia. Mistaken, anti-social, probably--but she couldn’t think of a way to convince him. She didn’t want to seem theoretic and sentimental----

But he had calmed down. He was laughing.

“I don’t see why I should spoil our evening with all this stuff. But I feel that the world’s on an awfully wrong track. All this dominance by strikes. It’s highwayman stuff. It’s bullying. I know these social work fellows and they are a white-livered lot. And the men they try to deal with respect and understand only one thing--strength.”

“But labor doesn’t work through social workers. It’s a force by itself.” There were a few points in his illogic that Horatia could not let pass.

“It’s becoming a very ugly force--you’re right. But these social workers foment a lot of discontent. And the workers get surly and commence to bully. No man worthy of the name is ever threatened successfully, but these cowards keep making concessions and concessions----”

How she liked the sheer mannishness of it! And she wondered what Langley would have answered and tried to interpret what he might have said. But Anthony hardly listened. He wanted to drop the argument or the tirade and to be personal now. He wanted to talk about her and how much he would like to do things with her. Over their large cups of coffee and cream their acquaintanceship ripened into friendship.

“I don’t approve of half the things you say,” laughed Horatia. “But I like you anyhow.”

“Of course you must.”

“We’ll have to go,” she sighed. “It must be eight o’clock.”

“It’s half-past nine,” said Wentworth triumphantly. “Have you always an hour at which you must fly away?”

“And no glass slippers. Isn’t it bad luck?”

He wrapped her closely in the fur robe, tucking it in with never a sentimental gesture and then they were off, skimming through the white night. At her door he said good-night.

“We must have lots of good times,” he said.

She wanted to tell him about Jim, but it seemed like assuming that his interest was unduly sentimental. After all there hadn’t been a touch of that in his manner. And Jim had insisted that it be a secret. Next time it might be more natural to tell Anthony about her love.

She slept hard and dreamed of Anthony Wentworth attacking a laborer who was throwing bombs at his head. She was all for Anthony in the dream.