VI
"You should have waited," Kidder said irritably. "You should have waited till you had him outside. This sort of thing hurts me a whole lot with the managers, you understand. They've been raking me on the 'phone for it this morning, and I don't like it. I can't afford to send up supers that scrap behind the scenes. You ought 've known better."
"I did it without thinking."
"You oughtn't to do things without thinking. The stage 's no place for anybody that does things without thinking. And it's no place for a girl that can't take care of herself without starting a row like that. This sort of thing makes a lot of trouble for me. They jump on me. They take it out of me. I don't like it."
It was evident that he did not like it. It was evident also that he intended to make Don suffer for the criticisms which he himself had borne. "I'm sorry," Don said miserably.
"You shouldn't have done it. I had a lot of confidence in you. I gave you one of the best things I had. I made a place for this Miss What's-her-name too. Shoved her in over another girl. And that's a thing stage managers don't like, either—having their company broken up that way. It leaves me open to a lot of hot roasting—the whole business."
"I'm sorry. If you'll give me another chance"
"I can't give you another chance like that. I haven't got it."
"Haven't you anything?"
Kidder hesitated, swung around in his swivel chair, and began to look over his typewritten lists. Don waited, as shamefacedly as a schoolboy who has been lectured before a whole classroom—for Kidder's nonchalant stenographer had been rustling papers at the other side of the office. The telephone rang, and Kidder left Don's fate in the scales while he busied himself with more important affairs. When he had hung up the "receiver," he took another glance at his lists, and said, without turning around: "No. I haven't anything. I'm filled up. I may have an opening next week, in 'Appomattox'—I don't know. It'll only be fifty cents a night, anyhow. I can get lots of hobos for these war plays. That's all I've got."
He returned to the opening of his letters and left Don to take himself out of the office.
Fifty cents a night! That would be, with two matinées, four dollars a week. He was paying two dollars and fifty cents for his room. The dollar and a half remaining would scarcely pay his car fares!
He did not ring for the elevator. He walked down the four flights of stairs in some sort of confused notion that he could not afford to ride. He faced the street, appalled. It was as busy as Kidder with his mail.
When he remembered Miss Morris, he set out again in frantic haste, almost running, his single glove rolled into a ball in his hand, his hat tilted down over his eyes by the bruise on the back of his head, swallowing dryly. He came, breathless, to the steps of Mrs. Kahrle's boarding-house. The door opened a grudging crack to him. "She ain't here," the woman said, and shut him out.
He found himself, instantaneously, calm. He was like a man in quicksand, who finds that his panic is plunging him deeper, and who stiffens into rigidity, motionless, to wait for the arrival of help. "This is all right," he told himself. "These things happen, of course. We must wait. When I see Kidder again, he'll not be so bad-tempered. It's a matter of waiting a few days. I can write to Miss Morris. I can write to Walter Pittsey and get his advice. I have plenty of time. I don't have to see Margaret for two or three hours yet. I must think of something to tell her."
He was as tired as if he had been running a race; and the worry and excitement had given him a dragging ache in the small of his back. He found himself shaking with cold. He buttoned his light overcoat, sank his hands in his pockets, and went down Broadway huddled in on himself against the wind. He thought of the aid he had once received from his aunt—and he remembered her last letter. He knew that his uncle, appealed to, would advise him to return home. He had no longer the companionship—such as it had been—of Conroy and Bert Pittsey to help him. Miss Morris was, after all, a doubtful ally who might turn against him because of Margaret. He was alone—as he had so desired to be—in the face of a calamity that made him feel the want of friends. He was alone, unable to help himself. And Margaret was depending on him!
An apathy of despair began to mute his thoughts, and he struggled against it, with an instinct of self-preservation, as if it were a suicidal impulse. "See now," he told himself. "At this time yesterday, everything was going as well as possible. She was on the stage with you. You were both lodging in the one house. You were looking forward to a winter with her, to promotions, to gradual increases of salary, to a future that should grow from day to day into the greatest happiness. Well, twenty-four hours can't have changed it all. It's impossible! Or if one day has made all the difference, another day can restore it. What are you afraid of? Nonsense! You have come through narrower squeaks than this. Look where you were the day you were starting for New York—or the day you met Pittsey on Sixth Avenue. You hadn't even four dollars a week, then. And she was in Europe!"
But the situation was not to be talked down. There remained the facts that he had used up all his savings, that his work for Kidder would not pay his expenses, that he knew of nothing which Margaret could do. He came on the forlorn hope that there might be an important letter of some sort waiting him at his old rooms; and in another rush of panic-stricken activity he hurried towards that improbability as if it had been the most certain aid. He saw the streets cold, unfriendly, crowded, as busy as machinery, and as remorseless. He was always to remember them in that aspect—as an exhausted swimmer, struggling to reach shore, will remember the horrible composure of level water that engulfed his feeble agonies without so much as showing a shudder on its vast blank of cruelty.
Conroy opened the door to him, blocking it with a challenging scowl.
"Are there any letters for me here?"
"No."
"Is Bert in?"
"No."
Don saw a woman's hat and veil on the dining-room table. He looked inquiringly at his cousin; and Conroy shut the door on that look as if he considered it an impertinence.
Don turned towards his lodgings, too weak to drag himself any further. He was conscious only of the physical need of rest. At thought of the shelter of his room, he ached, body and mind, for the closed door and the bed that awaited him.
Margaret, at midday, knocked to discover whether he had returned; and he put on cheerfulness like a mask to meet her. "Are you ready for luncheon?" he asked.
"When did you come in? There's been a man here looking for you. He left word that he'd be back at two."
"For me?"
"Yes, for you. Mrs. McGahn said she thought he said his name was 'Pitty.'"
"Oh." His voice went flat. "It must 've been Bert Pittsey."
"What did Mr. Kidder say?"
"He'll have a place for me next week, all right. There's no difficulty about that. We must find something for you, now. We'll talk it over at luncheon."
"We'll do no such thing," she said. "I'm not going to have you worried about me. I have a plan of my own. I'm going to see someone this afternoon."
"What is it?"
"I'll not tell you. If you ask me another word about it, I'll have my lunch alone."
"Then I'll not tell you about Kidder," he said, with a desperate affectation of gaiety.
He felt like a man who has just learned that he is incurably ill of a fatal disease, and who returns home to deceive his family so that they may be spared at least a few weeks of useless grief. He knew that such luncheons as this were numbered; and with the recklessness of the condemned he coaxed her to have a table d'hôte dinner with him at his French restaurant. "You'll feel the need of it before the afternoon's done," he said.
"We ought to economize."
"Well, let us have one last splurge."
It was, after all, a rather dismal "splurge," for they were both playing their parts with an effort, and their lack of appetite betrayed them. "You're not eating anything," he accused her. She replied: "I'm doing as well as you." A moment later, he came out of a staring abstraction to find her studying him. She blushed and looked down at her plate. He had a guilty feeling that she had read his thoughts. They received their dessert in silence.
"Have you heard from your mother?" he asked suddenly.
She admitted, with reluctance, that she had.
"What does she say?"
"Now, I'm not going to tell you," she answered. "I've told you I'm not going home—and that's all. You've had worry enough about me. I'll tell you about it when the proper time comes." She glanced at her watch. "It's time you were meeting Mr. Pittsey, now."
"Where are you May I take you to the car?"
"Yes." They rose together. "And you're not to worry about me, will you?"
He shook his head, without meeting the tender anxiety of her scrutiny. And he parted from her at the steps of an elevated station still guiltily averting his eyes.
To pay for their dinner, he had "broken" his last ten-dollar bill. He wondered whether he might borrow a little money from Bert Pittsey. He supposed that Pittsey was coming to see him about some new difficulty with Conroy; and he returned to his lodgings in an empty despondence.
As he mounted the steps to Mrs. McGahn's door, he saw that someone was watching him through one of the front windows. As he stepped into the hall, he saw Walter Pittsey standing in the doorway of the parlour, waiting for him. He stopped, incredulous.
"Well, Don Quixote," Walter said, with his usual mild amusement, "I hear you've been slaughtering supers."
"Why, where did you come from?" Don cried. "I thought it was Bert! When did you arrive?"
He coughed. "Come in here." He took Don by the elbow and led him into the parlour. It was Miss Morris who rose from a chair beside the window and came to greet him with her slow smile.
Don took her hand in silence, looking from her conspiring eyes to Pittsey's and back again. "What is it?" he asked, beginning to tremble at the expectation of he did not know what.
She said teasingiy: "Didn't I tell you to wait until you heard from me?"
He stared at the promise which her words implied, and her face slowly retreated from him as if he had looked at her through the wrong end of a telescope. He was dizzily aware that the floor and ceiling of the room were working up and down like the top and bottom of a bellows. He clung to her hand. "I think . . . I'd better sit down," he said. "The floor's" Pittsey's arm was around him. He stumbled towards a chair. "The floor's"
They helped him to one of Mrs. McGahn's horse-hair sofas. Someone chafed his hands. Someone unbuttoned his collar. He heard tense and anxious voices, in the faint distance. "I'm all right," he said. "I was walking. I'm tired. I" His voice faded away above him as he rocked down slowly into darkness.
He came back to consciousness at the chill touch of a wet handkerchief on his forehead and the prickle of ammonia fumes in his nostrils; and he opened his eyes on a splitting headache that seemed to tear his brain. "Thanks," he said, looking up at Miss Morris, who was bending over him. "I'm better, thanks." She put back the wet hair from his forehead and drew the palm of her hand caressingly down his cheek. There were tears in her eyes, but before he could be sure that he had seen them, she had risen, and Mrs. McGahn stood in her place, holding a pocket flask of liquor, from which Pittsey poured a little into a glass.
"Swallow this."
It ran down his throat like fire. He coughed and sputtered, laughing almost hysterically. In a few moments he was sitting up again, trying to smile rather wanly at his collapse. Then they told him what they had come to tell.
Mr. Polk's treasurer had written to Pittsey in Boston asking him to take charge of the "ticket office end" of the new theatre. "We used to work together at the old Academy," Pittsey explained in an aside. And Pittsey's influence with the treasurer had joined Miss Morris's applications to Polk to procure for Don a position in the ticket office at $25 a week. "I saw Kidder this morning, just after you were there," Pittsey hurried on, and he told me what you'd been doing, "I've been trying to connect with you ever since. Kidder said I must have passed you in the elevator as I came up."
Don shook his head, worried by the pain behind his eyes and by Pittsey's evasive explanations. "I didn't come down in the elevator. I walked. I've been walking ever since." He straightened up, shining-eyed. "How am I ever going to—to thank you two? I"
"Don't thank me," Pittsey interrupted. "It was Miss Morris."
"What a story!" she said. "I hadn't thought of the office. I was trying to get you into the company."
In the light of gratitude in which he saw her, she seemed even more beautiful than she had ever been before; and he looked at her with an expression of face which made Pittsey put in hastily: "The first thing you do, you buy a new overcoat and a new suit of clothes. Kuffman goes by exteriors. Get your hair cut à la Manhattan—and never let him see you smoking a pipe."
"I need shoes, too," Don acknowledged simply.
Pittsey rose. "I'll call for you to-morrow morning and see you outfitted. Then I'll introduce you to your new 'job.'"
"Wait a moment," Don pleaded. "I want to"
"No; you must go to your room now and have a sleep," Miss Morris said, bidding him good-bye. "I'll see you to-morrow, too." And disengaging themselves from Don's confused thanks, they went away together, waving to him gaily as they turned on the sidewalk and saw him watching them from the open door.