FROM THE LIFE
FROM THE LIFE
OWEN CAREY
CAREY, Owen, author; 6. July 16, 1867; ed. pub. schools; m. Mary Fleming, August 23, 1903; newspaper work in New York City, 1897-1900. Author: Fair Anne Hathaway, 1900; The Queen's Quest, 1901; Sweet Rosalind, 1902; With Crash of Shield, 1903; In Cloth of Gold, 1903; The King's Enemies, 1904; The Forest of Arden, 1905; Men at Arms, 1905; Lady Jane Grey, 1906; The Swan's Inn, 1908; Friends at Court, 1909; Robin's Roundelay, 1911; The Gage of Battle, 1912; Miles Poyndexter, 1913; Millicent Lamar, 1914; The King's Evil, 1916; Mistress Page, 1917. Address: Authors' League, New York City.—Who's Who.
1
OF course you know Owen Carey. That is to say, you know his name. And you know his books. And you know the plays that have been made from his books, and the moving-picture films that have been made from the plays that have been made from his books. And you know the syndicate portrait of him that has been going the rounds of literary supplements and publishers' announcements for the last fifteen years. And if you have looked him up in Who's Who and the biographical dictionaries you know enough about him to be able to write the dates on his tombstone. But of the man himself it is safe to say that you know nothing.
Or suppose that you happened to know him in the flesh. Suppose that you had studied him in the days when he used to attend the meetings of the Executive Committee of the Authors' League at its weekly luncheon in the City Club. Well? You saw a ponderous bulk of male middle age, that looked like Thomas Edison somewhat, and somewhat like a Buddha, and a great deal like a human mushroom. You observed him listening, in massive silence, to arguments and motions, and you heard him grunt, "Aye." You noted the deftness with which he made a cigarette in his blunted, fat fingers, and you saw him light it gloomily, consume it in three or four puffs and an enormous final inhalation, wash the taste of it down with a gulp of whisky-and-water, and roll another cigarette with the melancholy air of an elephant that is being fed shelled peanuts one by one. Or you watched him signing his famous name to the circular letters of the League, with a silver-mounted fountain-pen as big as a bath-tap, and as fluent—bestowing his signature on the paper with a few large passes of his indifferent hand, like an archbishop bestowing a benediction, pontifically. And you could not help thinking of the stupendous trade value of that name, of the fabulous stream of income that had flowed from that fountain-pen, of the magic of his puffy hand that could transmute a word into a dollar, at his current price, and add the dollar to the disorderly roll of bills in his bulging vest pocket. . . . But of the man himself, it is safe to say, you learned nothing.
What business of thought was being carried on under that thatch of gray hair? What was the mind that sat concealed behind those eyes—slow-lidded eyes, as impenetrable in their gaze as if they were clear glass frosted on the inner side? Why did he always wear shabby gray clothes? What did he do with his money? Why did he belong to no clubs and go nowhere?—not even to the annual banquet of the Authors' League. Why, with all this unceasing advertisement of his work, was there no advertisement whatever of his personality? Why was there not even any curiosity about him? Why did his books arouse none? Why were they, for all their circulation, so without significance to their day and age, so without concern about its problems, so without influence upon its struggle? Why was he, in short, what he was?—as personally inaccessible as O. Henry, as withdrawn from the modern world in all his works as Maurice Hewlett in his early novels, as shy as Barrie, as fat as Chesterton, as impersonal as if his busy manufactory of fiction were some sort of flour-mill over which he presided in his dusty miller's gray, mechanically grinding out a grist that meant nothing to him as an honest, artistic output, or as the intellectual food of millions, or even as the equivalent of comforts and social joys to himself.
2
It has been said often enough that there are moments in life when the shock of some trifling incident seems suddenly to precipitate and crystallize a man's character—to combine the elements of his past and set the form of his future out of a clear solution of his hidden qualities of temperament and absorbed incidents of experience and wholly invisible fermentations of thought. Certainly there was such an incident in Carey's life on a rainy October night in 1899—and I believe that Carey may be better explained by a laboratory study of him in the chemical processes of that crystallizing event than by any character analysis and empirical formula of him as he was afterward.
In October, 1899, then.
3
And even so short a time ago as that is Owen Carey was unknown; he was poor and he was thin—although these are now unbelievable facts, all of them. He was trying to break into the monthly magazines with short stories; and the short story was a form for which he never had any aptitude. Meantime, he was writing specials for the Saturday and Sunday papers—chiefly for The Commercial Advertiser and The Sun—and his literary life was made up of such considerations as this: if The Commercial Advertiser paid only four dollars a column and The Sun paid eight, but The Sun printed 2,200 words in a column and The Commercial Advertiser had a column of 1,100, which was the more profitable to write for?
He was earning, on an average, about six dollars a week.
On this particular night he had been up Fifth Avenue as far as the Park and down Broadway to Madison Square, looking for a descriptive article of any sort, in the windows of the new Waldorf-Astoria, in the hansom cabs, in the theater crowds, in whatever he could see of the night life of the Tenderloin without paying for admittance. And he was on his way home, brooding over an article that he hoped to hatch out in his room and mail to an editor if it came to life.
He never went to the editorial offices with his contributions any more. He had never been able to pass the office-boy. He was too obviously a threadbare and eccentric literary aspirant; and literary aspirants are the bane of the newspaper editor, who does not understand why a man interested only in news should be persecuted by people who are interested only in literature.
It was raining on Carey—a cold October rain that rattled on the roof of his straw hat and squashed about in his broken summer shoes. And he was not merely indifferent to the rain—he felt affectionate toward it. The men and women whom he passed were protected against the wet with umbrellas and waterproofs, as if against an enemy. They were apparently as afraid of the rain as they were of poverty. And to Carey poverty was an old familiar, and the rain, as the poets say, caressed his face with a pleasant coolness. He was footsore, and the water in his shoes was even refreshing. He had fought against poverty once with a desperate fear of it, like a man drowning. And now he had sunk to the depths, he was one of "the submerged tenth," and it was as if he had touched bottom and found that he could live and breathe there, peacefully. Poverty!—what fools people were about it. And the rain!—the world had refused him a shelter from either, and neither had proved to be a hardship.
He had a room on the top floor of an old house on the south side of Washington Square. It was a house that had been sold to make way for a new building, and some hitch in finances had halted the project after all the tenants had been moved out and the gas-pipes had been disconnected. Carey had hung on, alone, with a kerosene-lamp and an oil-stove on which he did his cooking. He expected any day to come home and find the house- wreckers at work and his staircase gone. As he rounded the Washington Arch he looked up, mechanically, to see whether his roof was still whole. It was. He heard a dog give a sort of shivering whine somewhere, and he stopped at once and stood looking about for it.
4
If I tell you this, you'll believe that Carey was not quite normal—morbid, a bit mad—but it is true that the sound of suffering from an animal went through him more piercingly than a human appeal. When he walked in the country his gait was erratic because he was always stepping aside to avoid treading on ants. In one of his early stories—so unanimously rejected by the magazines—his heroine went out strolling with her lover; she saw him pick up a stone and throw it at a bird which, by some miracle, he hit; she promptly turned home, in silence, and refused ever to speak to him again; and it was impossible for Carey to understand that this was not a "sufficient motive" for his plot. Most striking of all, perhaps: his mother, a religious zealot, had intended her son to be "a minister of the gospel"; she had planned to send him to a theological college and, being too poor to carry out the plan, she went to her pastor for aid and advice. He replied that the boy should first familiarize himself with the testaments, and Carey set to work to study them ambitiously—with an unexpected result! The cruelties of the Old Testament horrified him. Without any intention of blasphemy, in the most obvious sincerity, he appealed to his mother to explain the murders and massacres ordered by Jehovah and carried out by the Chosen People. She took him to the pastor. The pastor examined him and decided that he lacked the necessary firmness of faith. They prayed for him—all three on their knees in the pastor's study, Carey praying as fervently as the others—and when he rose he was surprised to find that he was "no better." Those terrible barbarisms of the early Hebrews still revolted him. He made a list of them, filled a note-book with them, and went back to the pastor. He and the reverend gentleman quarreled. Carey shook the pages of his indictment in the face of the horrified minister, and cried: "It wasn't a god! It was a devil!" He was put out on the pious door-step, sobbing, defiantly: "A devil! A devil!" The minister preached a sermon about him, in which no names were mentioned, but all his friends understood who was referred to, and they spread the secret. He was marked as an atheist. His home life became unbearable. He ran away, was brought back, ran away again, changed his name, and was not traced. He never returned. His mother developed religious hallucinations and went to an asylum for the insane. And that is why Who's Who gives no birthplace for him, and names no parents. The story that he was a foundling is not true.
As a matter of fact, his real name was John Aloysius McGillicuddy, the son of Patrick McGillicuddy, the driver of a brewery wagon, Irish, and a Catholic. His unfortunate mother was Annie Kirke, a servant, Scotch, and a Presbyterian. After her marriage she kept a boarding-house. The father had his son christened in the Catholic faith; the mother was determined that he should be a Presbyterian; and she had her way—after her husband tired of quarrels and deserted her—until the son followed in the father's footsteps. And young Jack McGillicuddy, under an assumed name that became "Owen Carey" finally, worked as an errand boy, as a shoe clerk, in a printer's office, in a press-room—in Toledo, in Chicago, in Boston—tramping, beating his way on freight-trains, working at anything temporary, even begging when he had—to an absurd, sensitive, eccentric young victim of his own intenseness, whose one consistent impression of mankind was its good-natured inhumanity.
That was why the whine of an animal affected him more than a human appeal. He had a fellow-feeling for the animal. So, to return to his October night in 1899—
5
He looked around for the dog, but he did not see any. He saw a woman sitting on one of the wet benches of the Square, and the whine seemed to come from her. He supposed that she had the dog on her lap.
As he neared her he saw that it was her hat she was nursing. She had taken it off and covered it with a handkerchief to protect it from the rain, and her hair was soaked and glistening in the light of the electric lamp above her. He supposed that she was a woman of the streets.
At his approach she looked up, and he had just time to appreciate that she was young and rather pretty, when she shivered and whined up at him; and, opening her mouth, with her tongue protruding over her lower teeth, she panted at him, ingratiatingly, like a dog.
For a moment Carey thought he had gone crazy. Then, "It's hydrophobia!" he thought. "She's been bitten by a mad dog!"
He looked around for a policeman, frightened.
His future was determined by the fact that there was no policeman in sight and he had time to recollect that it was one of his many grievances against mankind that dogs with minor ailments were always being shot as mad when, as he was convinced, rabies was a disease as rare as leprosy.
He approached her much as he would have approached the dog in the same circumstances. He asked, "What's the matter?"
She did not answer.
He bent down to her, putting his hand on her shoulder. "What is it?"
She shivered under his touch.
"Aren't you well?"
Her face suddenly changed and cleared. She stared at him blankly. An expression of frightened bewilderment came into her eyes, as if she had been wakened from a nightmare.
He sat down beside her. "What's the matter?" he asked. "You're soaked through. Why don't you go home?"
She did not reply.
He put his hand on her arm. "Tell me," he said. "Aren't you well? What's wrong? Can I help you?"
And she answered, in a breathy, hoarse gasp of exhaustion, "I'm hungry."
"Come along with me," he said. "Can you walk?" And, taking her by the elbow, he helped her to her feet. Her hat dropped to the sidewalk as she rose. He picked it up, put the handkerchief in his pocket, tucked the hat under his arm, and started across the Square with her.
She staggered as if her feet were numb.
It was apparent that he could not take her to a restaurant in that condition, even if there had been a cheap restaurant near. But he had no thought of going to a restaurant. He had not money enough to pay restaurant prices. He had food in his room, and he was taking her there, to give it to her.
He had already concluded that her doglike whining and panting had been an illusion; that he had seen something like it, but not that! And he was going over the contents of his larder in his mind as he helped her across the Square. He did not speak. And she was obviously too weak to speak.
6
There was a characteristic reason why he did not consider taking her to a restaurant.
He had made a study of foods and their prices—a study as careful as any that he made subsequently into the details of life and local color for his romances of Elizabethan and medieval times. And he understood how grossly the restaurants overcharged. He knew, for example, that rolled oats, in bulk, cost him two and one-half cents a pound; that there were six teacupfuls in a pound, and that half a teacupful made a portion for one meal. Cornmeal, at two cents a pound, gave only four cups to the pound; oatmeal, at two and a half cents a pound, ran five cups to the pound; and hominy, at five cents a pound, four cups to the pound. (These, of course, were the prices of 1899.) He paid 30 cents a pound for coffee; there were 96 teaspoonfuls in a pound; and he used a teaspoonful to a cup of coffee—stingily. He paid 50 cents for a pound of tea, of 128 teaspoonfuls. He had figured out that granulated sugar cost him one- eighth of a cent for a spoonful. There were, usually. 240 potatoes in a bushel, and a cent's worth made a portion. He had learned where to get meat enough for one meal for 10 cents—remnants, rather, but edible. He made a two-cent package of salt last him about three months, and he sprinkled 8 cents' worth of pepper over as long a period. On an average his meals cost him $2.03 a week. And, naturally, a restaurant looked like a robber's cave to him.
He had covered pages of his note-books with these calculations. It was not only impossible to overcharge him. It was equally impossible to give him underweight, because he knew the number of spoonfuls that ought to be in any pound of staple groceries, and he measured every pound when he got alone with it.
Having a mind of that quality, it is strange—isn't it?—that he ever became a romanticist.
7
He took the girl as far as his street door without much difficulty, but he had to support her up the steps, and it was plain that her legs were too weak to climb three flights of stairs. Her knees gave under her. He brought her to the first landing with an arm about her, practically carrying her, swaying and stumbling in the dark. There he dropped her hat in a corner and picked her up bodily. She made no sound. Although she was tall, she weighed little more than a toggle-jointed skeleton wrapped in soaked clothing. He judged that she had fainted.
He laid her on the floor of his landing until he got his door open and his lamp lit. Then he carried her in and put her on his bed—a camp cot, without a mattress, for which he had paid fifty cents in a second-hand shop of the tenement quarter. It was covered with nothing but a pair of gray blankets, and he was not afraid of soiling them. Her head lay, dripping, on a pillow that had no pillow-case, and she looked as if she had been drowned. Her lips were white, but her face was a yellowish green. For a moment he was afraid that she had died in his arms. A faint breath reassured him. He hastened to light his oil-stove and warm up the remains of his day's coffee, which he had drawn off the grounds to save it.
While the coffee was heating he unbuttoned her worn shoes and drew them off. Her stockings were just as wet as her shoes, so he removed her stockings, too, tugging at them gingerly at the heels and ankles, and bringing off, with them, a pair of exhausted-looking round garters. Her feet were as chilled as if they had been on ice, and he had a queer idea that they had shrunken with the cold—they were so small. He rubbed them dry with his only towel, and bandaged the towel around them to get them warm.
When the coffee was ready he poured it into his tin cup and took it to her, clear. "Here," he said, raising her to a sitting posture, "this will brace you."
She whined, with her eyes closed.
He put the cup to her lips. "Try a mouthful."
She stuck out her tongue as if to lap it.
"No, no," he said. "Drink it. Open your mouth and drink it."
She laid her hand on his, pressed the cup away from her, and stared down at it. Then she sighed and drank a mouthful. It was a rank draught.
"It m-makes me sick," she faltered, nauseated, turning away from it.
"All right," he said. "I'll warm some milk."
She fell back on the pillow and closed her eyes again. But the coffee had evidently done something to revive her, for when he brought her the milk—with his last spoonful of whisky in it—she drank it greedily. He followed it with a hard-boiled egg, chopped fine, and a slice of scorched bread, flavored with kerosene, from the top of his oil-stove. He fed the egg to her in a spoon, encouraging her; and she ate the toast without his help. "Now," he said, "you'll have to take off some of these wet clothes. You can put on my overcoat."
It was his winter's coat, from a nail behind the door. She let him unbutton her dress down the back, get her arms and shoulders out of it, wrap her in the overcoat, and draw the dripping gown off over her feet. The thinness of her girlish arms, and the hollows in her neck and shoulders, were no more pathetic than the poverty of the Canton-flannel petticoat that she wore. He buttoned the coat on her; and she lay on her back, gazing at the sloping ceiling, in a weak stupor.
He hung up her dress—a faded blue-serge gown that had been darned on the elbows—and he placed the oil-stove under it, to dry it. He proceeded to make her a cup of tea, and to fry, in slices, some cornmeal mush that remained from breakfast. This he served with syrup. She ate it in hungry silence, with her bloodshot eyes fixed on nothing. He got the impression that speech and tears had both been exhausted for her.
When her plate was clean and her cup empty he took them from her, and she lay down again, on her side, and seemed to go to sleep. He stood a moment, considering her. She was, surely, not more than twenty years old; he was thirty-two; and there was nothing in his thought but fraternal pity for her. She was apparently a young street-walker, but he had lived on the streets himself for the greater part of fifteen years; and if she was an outcast—well, so was he. She looked desperately frail; the bones protruded in her cheeks and her temples; her eyes were sunken and dark in their sockets; her teeth showed between pinched lips. It was merely a girlish face, but suffering had marked it with ascetic lines of character and intelligence.
He decided that what she needed most was food. He counted the silver in his pocket, did a problem in mental arithmetic with his eyes on the calendar, and went out noiselessly to buy her something to eat. She was still sleeping when he returned—with her hat, and a bottle of milk, and some slices of boiled ham from a delicatessen shop, and a loaf of bread, and a greasy paper bag of potato chips. He moved an empty box to the side of the bed and arranged the food on it, but he did not waken her. It would be better to let her rest.
He took off his wet coat, removed the cooking-dishes from his pine table to the floor, and sat down in his kitchen-chair to write.
8
You see, he was already a professional. No amateur would have been able to write under the circumstances. The girl in the room, her misery, her uncanny trick of whining—not to mention his own discomforts of damp shoulders and soaked feet—these things would have distracted any one for whom work had not become a professional habit, any one to whom writing was not the essential activity of his life and the justification of his existence, as necessary to him as food, as consoling as tobacco, his refuge from every worry—from the struggle with reality, the obstinacy of circumstance, the intractable enmity of events that always contradicted imagination and falsified hope—the refuge to which he went to escape all the impotences of mortality as the religious go to prayer.
He began to shape up his newspaper article, with his hand in his hair, tugging at it thoughtfully as he wrote. (And it was this continual scalp-massage, probably, that preserved for him the characteristic disorderly gray shock of his later years.) There was nothing particularly characteristic about his room. He had piled a number of empty soap- boxes on their sides to make book-shelves and a dresser. An old steamer-trunk held all his clothes. He had hung a blanket over his window, as a blind; and he left it over the window even in daytime, and lit his lamp, because he had become so accustomed to writing at night that the daylight seemed to blanch his inspiration. The lamp was shaded by a sheet of copy-paper, with a circular hole in the center of it, that slowly settled down on the chimney as the heat scorched it. A little bust of Shakespeare, from which the pedestal had been broken, hung above the table by a shoe-lace that had been noosed around the neck of the sainted dramatist. Carey had always been mad about Shakespeare. Whatever other books came and went, on his travels, his volume of Shakespeare persisted. He had read everything about Shakespeare that he could find—about his works, about his life, about his times. He was already, unconsciously, an Elizabethan expert, but the only fruits of his study, as yet, were several blank-verse tragedies that were useless imitations of the sound of Shakespeare with the sense omitted.
So, with his hand in his hair, frowning and biting his lips, he continued to scribble at his newspaper article, glancing over his shoulder at the girl, now and then, absent-mindedly. It was after midnight when he turned to give her such a glance and found her staring at him, wide awake.
9
He put down his pencil at once. "Would you like me to warm your milk?" he asked.
She rose on her elbow, evidently frightened, and looked down at the towel on her feet.
He said, to reassure her, "I'll see that you get back safely, as soon as you feel better."
She asked, hoarsely, "How did I get in here?"
"Don't you remember? You told me you were hungry," he said. "You couldn't walk to a restaurant, so I brought you here. I guess you fainted."
She blinked at him in a bewildered daze. She demanded, "Why did you tie my feet?"
"Your feet?" he asked. "Oh! They aren't tied. I took off your shoes and stockings because they were wet, and wrapped your feet in a towel to warm them. Try some of this ham. It's generally pretty good."
He poured her a cup of milk and made her a sandwich of the ham and two slices of bread while he talked. "Don't you remember drinking a cup of milk and eating something?"
She shook her head, watching his hands in silence, sitting up against the wall with her feet drawn up under the overcoat.
"Don't you remember me helping you out of your wet things?"
She did not answer.
He gave her the sandwich and she took it in trembling, numb-red fingers eagerly. He began to make her another.
She swallowed the food in gulps, half masticated, because she was either too weak or too hungry to chew it. "Where am I?" she asked, in a thick whisper.
He told her. "You're all right," he said. "Now don't worry. I'll see that you get back safely, as soon as you feel able to walk. Is it far to your—to where you live?"
She did not reply. He gave her the cup of milk, and she looked up at him briefly, but her eyes told him nothing. She drank the milk as if her mouth demanded it but her mind was not interested in the matter.
"I don't live anywhere," she said, at last.
He accepted that as an evasion. "Where do you—work?"
She took the second sandwich, raised it to her lips, and stopped with her head drooped. "I don't work. I can't get work." Her voice broke. "That's what's the matter." The sandwich fell to her lap. She fumbled at it blindly, trying to pick it up again. He saw that it was tears that had blinded her. She was crying.
"Oh," he said.
And, to tell the truth, he was suddenly impatient with her—as impatient as an old convict when the quiet of his cell is disturbed by the inevitable tragedy and useless despair of a new-comer. He had received her as a girl of the streets, a fellow life-timer in that underworld to which he had resigned himself, working and writing with no ambition to escape, but merely to obtain food and a bed. He had helped her, in the expectation that as soon as she had been fed and warmed she would go off to serve her own sentence without troubling him further. But this weeping helplessness!
He began to question her, sitting in his chair, his hands thrust into his trousers pockets, his legs stretched out before him, his eyes on his wet feet. Where had she come from? Why didn't she go back? What had she been working at? Hadn't she any relatives to help her?
And the girl, aware of his change of voice, began to defend herself, to explain her willingness to do anything—anything—and, finally, to uncover, abjectly, the whole lacerating story of her misfortunes, her struggles, the injustices that had been done her, the ignominy, the misery, the suffering, the shame. It was a common enough story. There was nothing new in it to Carey. He listened as wearily as a physician hearing of pain. And the girl kept sobbing, at the end of each successive chapter of her degradation: "It was worse than the life of a dog." And, "If I'd been a dog he'd have treated me better!" And, "If I'd been a dog on the streets, some one—some one would have helped me—fed me—"
Life had taken her—young, pretty, proud, sensitive, ignorant—and it had betrayed her ignorance, sold her prettiness, cheated her youth, beaten down her pride, and stripped and tortured the raw nerves of her sensitiveness. She told him of it, as if it were being wrung out of her on a rack, in paroxysms of sobbing, in hoarse and shamed whispers, in dull, exhausted tones of desperation. He hunched forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. What was the use? He knew it. He knew it all. The world was full of it. It only sickened the heart to hear it. He couldn't live and think of these things.
She was silent at last. He heard her moving, as if she were preparing to go. "Well," he said, frowning at the floor, "I don't know what I can do." And then he heard her near him. She whined. And, dropping his hands, he saw that she was on all-fours at his side, panting up at him ingratiatingly, with her tongue out.
He sprang up. "Don't!" he cried. "Don't do that!" He tried to raise her to her feet. She licked his hand.
"Listen," he pleaded. "You'll be all right. I'll help you. I can make enough for two until you get something. You'll be—"
Her eyes were the dumb, devoted, appealing eyes of an eager and willing animal that could not understand a word he said.
He carried her back to the bed, but he could not make her lie on the pillow. She curled up on her side, her knees drawn up, her hands closed like paws, her head down, blinking at him, shivering, and whining gratefully when he touched her.
He began to walk up and down the room.
10
He was not ignorant enough to suppose that she had merely gone insane. He was sufficiently acquainted with the theories of morbid psychology to understand that in her hysterical state she had, so to speak, hypnotized herself with the recurring thought, "If I had been a dog!" until she imagined that she had become one. Or, to use the fashionable idiom of our Freudian day, in her need to escape from the killing worries of her shame and destitution she had taken refuge in a loss of identity and become a dog subconsciously.
All of that did not help Carey. What was he to do? He could call a policeman and send her on her way to the psychopathic ward in Bellevue and thence to the lunatic-asylum. But if she had really been a dog would he turn her out? He had let his mother die in an asylum. (Or so he put it to himself. He had not known of it till after she was dead.) And the thought had been, for years, a horror and a remorse to him. He could not do it again.
He sat down on the side of the bed and began to talk to her. He assured her that he would help her; that he would take care of her; that he would fix the room, some way, so that they might both live in it; or he would rent two rooms somewhere, and she could work for him, or pass as his sister, or whatever else she pleased.
She listened, watching his lips, smiling with that open-mouthed panting, and evidently hearing nothing. He gave it up at last and made her comfortable between the blankets, and went back to his seat at his table to think it over. He rolled a misered cigarette and lit it, but it did not help him. He allowed himself, in these days, ten cents a week for tobacco. He fell asleep, with his head on his arms, and when he awoke, hours later, he found her curled up on the floor at his feet.
He took her back to the bed and made a sort of sleeping-bag of the blankets by pinning them together with safety-pins; and he pinned her into this, and tied her down with the line on which he dried his washing. There was a bathroom opening from the hall, and he shut himself in there, with his pillow, intending to sleep on the floor, but she whined so—like a dog locked in alone—that he came back and lay on the floor above her bed, with his feet to the oil-heater.
His problem, as he saw it, was this: The girl's mind had divided against itself under the stress of revolting ill usage; if he sheltered her and protected her for a while she would probably return to a normal condition. What he needed was two or three rooms in which she could have privacy, and quiet, and housework to occupy her. It would not cost much. He could earn more if he worked harder. He had done it before.
He had done it when he first learned that his mother was dead. In a fit of repentance he had begun to work and save, so that he might be able to take her from whatever pauper's grave she had been buried in and put up some sort of tombstone for her in a decent cemetery. He had saved a hundred dollars, and then he had been balked by the difficulty of writing, as a stranger, or anonymously, to the asylum—or where else?—to have the thing done for him. And, being the sort of person whom practical difficulties appal, he had continued living with the intention of doing what he never made any attempt to do. The money was still in a Chicago bank, untouched, waiting. Well, he could make a vicarious reparation to his mother by using the hundred dollars to rescue this girl from his mother's fate. A hundred dollars, with what he could earn, would carry them for a year at least. He fell asleep, easy in his mind.
11
And he awoke, next morning, to the responsibilities and the way of life that made him and his novels what they are.
She seemed, at first, almost rational when she opened her eyes to find him cooking their breakfast of oatmeal and coffee; and she went, at his direction, to wash and dress herself in the bathroom, sanely enough. But her silence when he talked to her was not normal; and whenever he caught her eye it was frightened and wavering, as if she were always on the edge of her obsession; and once, when he touched her hand, in passing her a second cup of coffee, her lips trembled, her teeth chattered, and she began to pant. He pretended not to notice, and the attack passed; but that was the first indication of what afterward became sufficiently plain to him, namely, that her delusion was partly due to what the psychologists would call her "subconscious desire" to have her relations with him the relations of a dog to its master. It was not only the world that she feared; she feared him, too. And he was peculiar enough to be relieved, at last, to find it so. He did not want a woman on his hands. He would have much preferred a dog.
He told her what he was going to do, about renting a small flat; and he set about doing it. He got his money from Chicago without any difficulty, and he found two rooms in a house on One Hundred and Tenth Street (going as far up-town as possible in order to take her away from the scene of her sufferings), and he was able to rent the two rooms for fifteen dollars a month because they were almost uninhabitable. They were in the basement of a private house that had been converted into "studio apartments" by the owner, an eccentric woman of artistic tastes who proved, on nearer acquaintance, to be a "Peruna fiend." And the rooms were almost uninhabitable not only because they were damp, but because the landlady was a pest. The important thing about them was this: They had been made into a sort of Dutch cellar with a red-tiled floor, half-timbered walls, beamed ceilings, burnt-umber woodwork, an open fireplace, and semi-opaque windows of leaded panes, sunken below the street level. They had evidently been a basement dining-room and kitchen when the house was private. Carey took them for a reason of which he was, I think, unaware; they did not look like modern rooms in New York City, and they would be a complete change of background for the girl.
He moved his belongings himself, making a half-dozen trips on the Elevated railroad with his suitcase full, and abandoning his cot and his table because it would be cheaper to buy new ones than to pay cartage on the old. The rear room—the kitchen, with a gas-stove and a sink—he furnished for the girl, since it was heated by the house furnace, which intruded its warm back through the side wall. He bought second-hand furniture and helped install it himself; and he avoided the curiosity of the landlady by refusing to answer her when she knocked on his door.
He brought the girl up after midnight. They settled down in comfortable secrecy, as remote as if they had been cloistered in a crypt. And thus began what was surely the oddest romance in the history of American, letters.
13
She seemed quietly contented, cooking and washing and sweeping and sewing for him. She never ventured out; she bolted the door on the inside when he left, and she opened it to no voice but his. The landlady, baffled, waylaid him in the hall with questions. He replied: "We're peculiar. We write, you understand. As long as we pay our rent you'll kindly leave us alone. We're busy and we don't want to be disturbed. For the future, as far as you're concerned, we're deaf and dumb." And when she found that they did pay their rent, and did not complain of the rain that came in under the windows and gathered in pools on the tiled floor, she left them to their privacy undisturbed. She would not have cared if they had been a pair of outlaws in hiding; she was out of sympathy with the police and the city government; her life was an endless quarrel with the authorities about the fire laws, the building laws, the tenement-house laws, and the regulations of the Board of Health—all of which her house violated.
For the first month Carey and the girl lived in an atmosphere of accepted silence. He talked to her no more than he might have talked to a servant in similar circumstances. He brought in food for her to cook. He bought her a dress, which she made over. He got her sewing materials when she asked for them, and she made herself underclothes and mended his. He did not ask her any questions about herself. He accepted her dumb and doglike fidelity without comment. She ate her food in the kitchen—which he never entered, although the door was never closed between them. She served him his meals on his work-table, and he took them absent-mindedly, reading or even writing between bites. He noticed a gradual improvement in her appearance, but he did not remark it.
One evening, as he worked, he heard her humming an air to herself, over her ironing, in the kitchen, and he listened, smiling, but he did not speak. He discovered that she was reading his books in his absence, and he began to buy novels for her—Scott and Dumas and historical fiction, chiefly, because he was afraid that modern literature might affect her adversely. He worked very late, one night, on a story that he had picked up from a derelict in the Mills House; and when he returned, next day, from an afternoon in the Astor Library he found that she had copied out his manuscript for him in a clear, girlish handwriting. He thanked her for it, as matter-of-fact as possible, but he was worried. The story was not cheerful; it was taken from the low life on which it was not good for her mind to dwell. He had not the heart to tell her not to touch his manuscripts, since she had copied this one to help him. So he undertook to write something that it should not depress her to read.
Hence Fair Anne Hathaway.
He began it as a short story, in the intervals of his newspaper work, but it grew into a novelette, and then into a "three-decker," designed to carry her, as its sole passenger, to "the Islands of the Blest." When she had copied out the first three chapters, bit by bit, as he wrote them, she asked him, timorously, "What happened then?" And thereafter he talked it over with her in advance, inventing it for her, and making it meet her expectations when she voiced any.
It was, for her, a complete escape from reality. And that, no doubt, was the secret of its success with the public—the great public who read in order to get away from themselves and their lives. When Francis Hackett, in The New Republic, lately ridiculed Fair Anne Hathaway and its successors in an article on "The Literature of Escape" he hit the secret nail on the head, blindfold, and in the dark. And in pointing out the connection between the success of such books and Jung's theory of mankind's "escape into the dream" he was not only analyzing a tendency of the American public; he was psychoanalyzing the disorder of Carey's first reader.
Carey wrote for her with a simplicity of expression that was sweetly reasonable and altogether charming—a style that conveyed romance to the public taste, without effort, through a soda-fountain straw. He found that she had identified herself with his heroine; so he fed her up, curatively, in the person of that heroine, with the loyalty and devotion of adoring heroes; and never had the feminine reader found a happier appeal to her pride of sex. And yet the heroine was a Shakespearian woman—a true masculine ideal—brave, wise, witty, self-sacrificing, chaste, and proudly faithful to her lord; and love's young dreamers fairly drooled over her. The girl was interested in every detail of the Elizabethan life in Stratford-on-Avon, and Carey made it vivid, with the help of the Astor Library, if he did not try to make it real. It glowed with the light that never was. The whole story had the "uplift" that is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen. It was a school-girl's dream. It came to the publishers in her handwriting, and started the first report that "Owen Carey" was a woman. And when Carey called at the publishers' office, in response to a letter of acceptance, they were as astonished as if Marie Corelli had turned out to be G. K. Chesterton.
He had grown plump on the girl's cooking. She kept his clothes pressed and brushed and mended. She had made him buy a new gray suit for the occasion. He asked, "Why gray?" She replied, furtively, "He—he always wore black." And Carey never wore anything but gray afterward.
He had the gruff manner with which so many men of diffidence protect themselves in strange approaches. He was much more keen for money in advance and steep royalties than was seemly in the author of Fair Anne Hathaway. He drove a good bargain, because the publishers were certain that they had found a best-seller. And they were right.
The book was an immediate success. Carey took thirty thousand dollars out of it in the first year, and he put the money by for her, in case anything should happen to him. They rented the apartment above their cellar and built an inner staircase to connect the two floors. It was not until after the popularity of The Queen's Quest that they bought the whole house to get rid of the landlady. He furnished the rooms in antiques and surrounded the girl with the interior setting of a Shakespearian comedy mounted by a stage realist. He named her "Rosalind," partly in play, but also in order to disconnect her from her past. Her real name he did not know. He had never asked it. He began to collect the library of Elizabethan and medieval literature upon which he drew so copiously for his later novels. She learned to use the typewriter; and she was, at once, his secretary, his housekeeper, his valet, and his cook.
Their relations remained what they had been in the beginning. Carey made the mistake of being demonstrative toward her only once—when he bought her an old amber necklace with his first check from Fair Anne Hathaway—and she recoiled from his attempted caress into a morbid seizure of half-idiotic animal abjectness. He could not reach the source of this morbidity. He did not know how. He had to wait. And he waited nearly two years before he found his solution.
13
Then, one summer night, when they were returning from a walk in Central Park for by this time he had persuaded her to come out with him occasionally, for a little exercise, after dark—a furtive-looking man passed and stared at her, as they crossed Columbus Avenue on the way home; and she clutched at Carey's arm, making a noise in her throat as if she were strangling.
Carey caught her. "What's the matter? What is it?"
She gasped, "It's him!" and tried to run.
Carey held her back. "Wait a minute. Go slow. Who is it?"
But she could only whisper: "It's him! It's him!"
The man had stopped in the street and stood watching them.
"Good!" Carey said. "I've been hoping he'd turn up. Go slow. If it's he—he'll follow us."
He took her arm, and she stumbled along with him, trembling against him, breathing heavily. The man, as Carey had hoped, came sneaking after them at a distance.
Carey took her up their steps to the front door, and descended with her, inside, to the basement, switching on all the lights. He left her in the kitchen and went out noiselessly to the basement door. The man was standing on the steps, looking up at the street number. Carey came quietly behind him. "She wants to see you," he said.
The man wheeled, startled. Carey was blocking his escape. "Who?" he asked, temporizing. "Mary?"
"Yes," Carey answered. "Mary. Go right in." (So her name was Mary!)
"Well," the fellow said, in a wheezy voice, "this 's a su'prise. I wasn't sure it was her."
"It's her," Carey waved him on. "She wants to see you—inside."
The man looked him over, hesitated, said, "Well, tha's all right, too," and entered, slouching.
Carey pointed him the way down to the basement, directed him to the Dutch dining-room, and followed in.
"Mary!" he called. "Come here."
She came from the kitchen. And standing in the doorway, supporting herself with one hand on the door-jamb, she looked across the room at the man with an insane and helpless horror.
"Is it?" Carey demanded. "Is it he?"
She made a fumbling gesture as if either pleadingly or defensively.
The man put back his rakish derby from his forehead. He had a prison hair-cut and a prison pallor. He bared his yellow teeth in an evil grin and said: "Sure, it's me. Eh, Mary? You're lookin' swell!"
Carey slammed the door and shot the bolt.
The man turned instantly, crouching, his hand at his hip pocket. Before he could draw his weapon, Carey had sprung at him, open-handed, from the door-step; and they fell, grappling.
Carey was no featherweight. He was still tough from the hardships of his youth. He was blind with hatred. And the touch of the struggling malevolent flesh under his hands put him into the sort of frenzy of murderous and loathsome revulsion that he might have felt in crushing a rat bare-handed. He struck and tore and strangled frantically; and the man, caught with one arm beneath him and still fighting to get out his revolver, was unable to protect him- self from such an assault. When he got the weapon free he was blinded with his own bleeding, and Carey wrenched the revolver from him and beat him on the head with it. He went limp. Carey was kneeling on his chest, throttling the life out of him, when the lack of resistance and the choking under his hands brought him to his senses. For one horrified moment he thought he had killed. Then the battered wreck under him drew a long gurgle of breath that sounded like water in a waste-pipe. Carey staggered to his feet. He took up the revolver and cocked it.
"Now, you dog," he said, "get up!"
The man rolled over, writhing painfully.
"Come here, Mary," he ordered.
She was standing erect in the doorway, her nostrils dilated, her hands clenched. She came forward slowly in that attitude.
"This is your dog," he said. "Do you understand?"
She nodded, without taking her eyes from the creature on the floor.
"Good! Shall I shoot him?"
The man undoubtedly thought he had to do with a maniac. Nothing else could explain the villainous ferocity of the attack. He began to whimper and snuffle in plaintive oaths and pleadings, smearing his bleeding face with his torn hands.
"Shall I kill him?"
Mary shook her head, wide-eyed.
"Come closer," Carey ordered.
She came.
"Now," he said to the man, "roll over and lick her boots. Do it, you hound, or I'll tear the heart out of you!" With a cruelty that he would never have used to a dog Carey turned him over with the side of his foot. "On all-fours," he ordered. "Do it!"
He did it—after a fashion. It was not a pretty scene.
"There!" Carey said. "Good! Now! This is your dog, Mary. Understand? See him. Your dog. Wipe your feet on him. Do it!"
She did it—with the expression of a child who is being encouraged to touch a cowed animal that she has been afraid of.
"Good! Now kick him!"
She shook her head. She said, slowly, "Let him go."
Carey looked at her. There was no fear of any one in her face. "Fine!" he said. "Here, you cur, crawl back to that door! Go on! Do it! Slowly! Grovel. Whine like the cur you are. Whine, or I'll shoot the ears off you. Now! If I ever meet you again, I'll kill you on sight."
He threw the door open. The man crawled out on hands and knees. Carey kicked the hat out after him and slammed the door shut.
They heard him stumbling frantically up the outer stairs.
Carey stood waiting—an unromantic figure—his collar torn open, his face scratched, one eye beginning to swell, and his complexion turning a delicate green with a seasick feeling that never afflicted his heroes after battle. She came toward him with her hands out, slowly, stiffly, tremulously confident, smiling, dry-lipped, pale. He laid the revolver on the table and took her in his arms. "There!" he said. "Now! Good!" Then suddenly, in another voice, leaning on her heavily, he added: "Get me something to drink—quick. I'm all in."
And in that inelegant manner Mary Carey was reconciled to reality.
14
I say "Mary Carey," for he dropped the "Rosalind"; and though he married her under the name of McGillicuddy in order to escape publicity, she is known as Mary Carey to the few friends whom she has made—chiefly at summer resorts—since she has gradually emerged from her seclusion.
She has never emerged very far. She is too busy. She still acts as her husband's secretary, though a trio of silent Chinese have supplanted her as house-maid, valet, and cook. Carey has not emerged at all. He is, for one thing, too happy in his home. For another, he is—Owen Carey. He has taken refuge from all reality in his romantic art, and he devotes himself to it in the silence of a Trappist monk. How any one ever interested him in the Authors' League I cannot imagine. He resigned from the executive committee as soon as they began to talk about affiliating with the American Federation of Labor.
She is as silent as he, but she gives much more the impression of being a personage in her own right. She has a low-voiced air of grave young placidity, and she is slenderly graceful and well-dressed, with one of those Madonna-like faces that seem to show nothing of experience but its increment of wisdom. You could never imagine her starving in degradation on the streets. She seems born to be the successful wife of a successful author. And if his last novels have not been so successful as his earlier ones, it is, I think, because Mary Carey has become so interested in actualities that she is rather spoiled as an inspirer of the "literature of escape."
Not that it matters to either of them. He has saved a fortune. And she has an independent annuity of her own, which he bought for her with the surplus royalties from The Queen's Quest, Sweet Rosalind, With Crash of Shield, and In Cloth of Gold.