CHAPTER ONE
BEFORE the tent-flap of every woman's soul, I think, sleeps a wolf-hound that answers to the name of Instinct. And Instinct stood up and showed the white of an eye as Big Ben Locke crossed over to the office door and swung it shut.
"Baddie," he said, as he sank back in his creaking swivel chair, "I want to talk to you. I've got to talk to you."
"About what?" I asked, wondering as to the origin of this newborn need of intimacy.
"About us!" he declared, as he sat there blinking down at his desk-top, apparently digesting that unlooked-for audacity of bracketing his august self with one of his younger operatives. And low was the growl from that four-footed shadow standing on guard over the timorous souls of women. For life had long since taught me to beware the man of power with meekness in his eye. Yet I waited, outwardly calm, for the Chief to continue.
"You're kind of tired out, aren't you, Baddie?" he ventured, in a sort of eager solicitude, as he finally let his eye meet mine. It was that glance of his, more than the question itself, which made the ghost-hound still growling from the door-mat of my soul suddenly lift his nose in the air and kai-yai aloud.
"I don't think I've ever complained," I parried, doing my best to buckle on that armor of impersonality which half a million business girls of America have learned to don, morning by morning, as surely as they don their straight-fronts.
"But what would you say to a little holiday?" the Chief was asking me, with a sort of hang-dog wistfulness that made my heart go down, floor by floor, like a freight elevator, until it bumped against the very bed-rock of desperation,
"Where?" I rather inanely asked, trying to cover up the catch in my breath. For Big Ben Locke had always struck me as a man of iron, as something as solid as a locomotive. In and out of that office he'd always seemed to swing through his cluster of operatives, men and women alike, about the same as the Transcontinental Limited swings through the clump of track-navvies who step quietly aside to let the big Mogul thunder past.
"Anywhere you say," he explained in his heavy chest-tones. "Long Beach for three or four days, or a run down to Hot Springs!"
"On a case?" I queried. Yet I tried to make it more a prompt cue than a question, in a sort of frantic eagerness to get the big Mogul safely back on the rails.
"No, Baddie," he announced with a deliberation which seemed to translate that announcement into an ultimatum, "just for a holiday!" And hope went out of my heart like light out of a room when a switch is turned. For I knew then what he meant. I knew it beyond a shadow of doubt. And if Big Ben Locke had quietly reached to his desk and taken up an Indian pogamoggan and with it struck me over the head, I don't think I could have been more startled. It was unbelievable. It was unfair. It was unreasonable. It was as absurd as standing there and witnessing a Tottenville coast-gun trying to do a fox-trot.
"I don't—don't understand," I quavered, trying to swallow my bewilderment. For always, in that office, I'd been taught to cover up every warmer impulse of life, to hide my human feelings under a false front of cynicism, the same as bald-headed men hide their barren bumps of veneration by festooning them with side-fringes from below the timber-line. I prided myself on knowing the world, and its shams. But no woman, I've concluded, can be sure of any man's character until she's seen and studied him for half a lifetime, and then, like the poor old philosopher in Pisgah Sights, the light of wisdom dawns on her only when they start lettering her tombstone.
"I'm trying to make you understand," explained Big Ben, in his grim and ponderous meekness. "For I may as well tell you now, straight out, Baddie, that you've got me beat!"
"Got you beat!" And I echoed that odious phrase in a helpless sort of gasp, for I saw my position in that office suddenly blowing up like a pink-and-blue circus-balloon. And that position had grown into something more than a mere habit with me. It had become a necessity. It held me up in the world, the same as a nursery "walker" holds up a child still uncertain as to the use of its legs.
"You're different, of course," continued the heavy-jawed man in the swivel chair. "And that's what I like about you. You're—"
"Don't!" I said, trying to keep him from noticing the shake in my knees. I hated to see him stare at me with those hungry-looking eyes of his, like an old mastiff's. It seemed to demean him, that incongruous humility of his, almost as much as it demeaned me. It seemed to leave the whole world fetid and tainted, like the smoke-laden and breathed-over air of a "revue" theater when you happen in on the last act. It made me ache for out-of-doors, for the final sanity of a fresh wind against my face.
There was a time, I remembered, when it might not have meant so much to me. But things were different now. I'd worn the shoe-leather of civilization, and I had to face its penalty of being tender-footed. So a feeling strangely like hate smoldered deep down in my heart, hate for that heavy-bodied animal who seemed something of the Stone Age where man stunned his dinner with a club and ate it raw.
"Baddie," that poor purblind cave-man in the twentieth-century swivel chair was trying to tell me, "you're too hanged good-looking for this sleuthing work here!"
I looked at him. He seemed almost pathetic, with that sirupy sort of smile wrinkling his big ursine face. And for a moment I was able to remarshal my scattering lines of courage.
"You didn't tell me that," I somewhat tremulously reminded him, "when you took me into this office. You took the pains to announce, in fact, that an operative who didn't look like a hen-hawk and dress like a scrub-woman would be of special value to you in your work!"
But argument, before that barbaric method of attack, was out of the question. It was like trying to hold discourse with a hungry grizzly. And my helplessness in the whole thing sent a tidal wave of exasperation through my tingling body.
"But you're too young for all this, Baddie," my sad-eyed ogre of persecution went on. "It's too full of danger for a girl like you!"
"So it seems!" was my bitter retort. But it went from him, like water off a duck's back.
"It's full of risks, my dear, full of risks," he went lumbering on, as though his paternalism with a string to it were the last haven for the storm-tossed heart of youth.
"I think that was the part of it which rather appealed to me," I contended, with a final effort at calmness. "And I don't think I ever complained about its dangers, its honest dangers."
"No, you haven't," admitted the Chief. "And I like you for it. I like you a mighty lot. And I want to make life easier for you. I want—"
At that I cut him short.
"How are you going to make life easier for me?" I suddenly and shrilly demanded, with Caution no longer standing there and plucking me by the sleeve. I'd seen enough of the world to know when a situation such as this had become hopeless. And in my heart of hearts I realized that I'd reached my Rubicon, and that I had to cross it.
For a moment or two there was no response to that challenge of mine. Then we both rose from our chairs, slowly and deliberately. It was almost ridiculous. You may have noticed two pullets do much the same thing, two chicken-run combatants coming slowly up together and continuing to eye each other as they go circling slowly about with their neck- feathers all ruffled up.
"Don't you think," Big Ben quietly yet ponderously asked me as he rounded his desk-end, "don't you think love can always make it that way?"
It made me gasp. And as I backed away from the big hand which he reached out toward my shoulder I saw, as clear as daylight, the cowardly advantage he was taking of his position.
"What is Mrs. Locke's opinion of that?" I asked, trying hard to swallow the sudden choke in my throat. But that choke couldn't be swallowed, for instead of being in my neck, it was somewhere in my heart. I didn't want to laugh. But I made myself, for I knew that if I didn't laugh I'd be crying like a baby and covering a perfectly good blue serge waist-front with spots.
There weren't many people, I knew, could afford to laugh at Big Ben Locke. I wasn't ignorant of what it would cost me, for the same hand that had wielded that uncouth pogamoggan was also the hand that doled out the wampum. I could see what was coming. But I didn't care any longer. The pressure was more than I could stand. So I let the gates swing open and the flood go tumbling out. I simply blew up, as poor old Bud Griswold would have phrased it.
"Listen to me," I said, as I faced the master of that office. "You may be a great detective, and you may control the pay envelope of a couple of hundred people, but until you're man enough to know the difference between decency and indecency you're never going to keep one kind of woman on your pay-list. And I'm that kind. Until you're able to detect the difference between a girl who's—"
"Wait!" interrupted the Chief.
"No, I can't wait, and I won't wait," I flung back at him, "for I've waited too long. You may use what you call a down-and-outer in petticoats for a few lines of your work, but don't make the mistake of putting me in that class because I happened to do some of this work for you. It may have called for a shell of coarseness, more often than not, and I gave you what you wanted. I wore commonness for you, the same as I wore this nickel badge of yours. And I may have picked up the trick of handing over your Eighth Ward style of talk because you pointed out that it often paid in your line of business. But I've lived clean, and I'm going to stay clean. You even thought you could break my spirit by giving me the worst of your rough-neck work in that Antonino abduction case. I didn't even object when you used me as a plant for that Mann-Act photographer up in the Arcade Building when he advertised for figure-models. And you put me through some moves that only an honest woman would have endured when we rounded up that Brooklyn false-claims couple. But I swallowed it all because I knew I was working on the side of the law. Then it began to dawn on you that I could do the finer lines of work, and you began by dressing me up and using me as a spotter on that Fifth Avenue bus-route. Then you saw I wasn't a failure on that Rosenthal wire-tapping case and even decided to send me into society. You found you could rent me out as a guard for those Fifth Avenue weddings where the bride's family don't seem above stealing back the silver butter-dishes if they get the chance. I could go among those guests without any of them dreaming I wasn't one of them. I could live at the St. Regis for three weeks, when I had to shadow those Nevada mine-swindlers for you, without even the house-detective finding out I wasn't one of the Four Hundred. And I didn't object to any of that work. I almost liked the excitement of it. I was helping you to run down crooks. And I soon saw how clever you were at that work. You seemed to know all their tricks, and just how their minds worked, and just what they'd do under any given conditions. And now I know why. You could understand them, and forestall them, every move, because you were one of them. I know, now, that you were nothing but—"
"Stop!" boomed out Big Ben, and I had the satisfaction of seeing his color deepen.
"But you don't know women, Mr. Locke," I swept on, for the whole thing had rather gone to my head and I was as drunk as a reservation buck in the last steps of a sun-dance. "And you don't know what decency is, or you'd never have cheapened your name and your work the way you've cheapened it right here in this office. And I repeat that I've never objected to working for the law. But I do object to working for a yellow cur. And as I consider you one, I'm going to walk out of this office and this position before you can make a bluff at saving that broken-winded dignity of yours by discharging me!"
My hands were shaking and something had undoubtedly gone wrong with my knee-joints, but I managed to pull on my gloves and cross to the door as my last machine-gun of rage emptied itself against his aldermanic vest-front. And before Big Ben Locke could get his breath or sink back in his swivel chair I stepped through that door and slammed it after me, slammed it so hard that the glass rattled in the frame and little Dugmore, in the outer office, stared at me with eyes as round as saucers.
I didn't even wait to take the elevator. I walked down. And when I landed on Broadway I felt as though I'd fallen from a Turkish-bath steam-room. I scarcely knew which way I headed. But I kept on walking, for there was a fever in my blood that made me see double.
I may have saved my self-respect, but, in the language of the worker, I'd lost my job. I'd lost my job! That fact kept going back and forth in the empty garret of my head, like a bat in a house attic. I'd had my say; I'd set off my fireworks; I'd eased my soul of its anger; but now there was the piper to pay.
I was more than humiliated; I was stunned. Benjamin Locke had seemed something almost bloodless to me, as cold and metallic a thing as the Sherman statue in the Plaza. It gave me sudden and sickening doubts as to my own personality, to remember how I'd been the instrument that had brought Big Ben down from his pedestal. Was I the wrong sort, after all? I kept asking myself. Were all my ideas about fair dealing and right living only talk, only the crazy ideal of convent girls who forget the turgid streams that flow through every great city? And was the fight I'd been making for a footing in that upper world nothing more than the moonshine Big Ben's overtures tried to make it? And was it even worth while, I asked myself.
Something, in that moment of stress, fell away from me, and left me half pagan again. Across two long years of respectability came some ghostly call of the wild, vaguely unsettling me, as the sudden beat of tomtoms might disturb the stateliest porter who ever wore the uniform of the Pullman Company. It took me back to the old manner of thought and speech and made me ask if it wouldn't be better to slip down to Slim Totten's hang-out and inquire if he wasn't in need of a gun-moll to gay-cat for him in his established profession of bank-sneak? Or swing in with Trigger Lennygan on his annual migration to the Pacific Coast as a hotel-beat? For I had a sudden hunger to put space between me and the scene of my humiliation. I had a feeling that San Francisco and Los Angeles would seem more home-like than this sodden Great White Way that was no more white than the flue of a smoke-stack is white.
But I knew, once I'd thought it over, that there could be no going back. I hadn't the courage, for courage is the first thing that civilization seems to take away from us. I hadn't climbed far, on that upward trail, but to get even where I had got had cost me too much to let me think of slipping back into that Black Valley behind me. When a girl is fighting for a lost position, I'd found, it's almost harder than fighting for life itself. There's always some one, when she's fighting for the latter, to throw her a life-buoy. But every buoy she gets, in the other sort of fight, comes with a line to it, a line which may look like rescue at one end but turns into something terribly like capture at the other.
No, I told myself, I couldn't go back! There were certain things now that would always make a difference. The rabbit-dog, I remembered, always had the advantage of the cotton-tail. It's better being the hunter than the hunted,—and it's incomparably more comfortable. It's safer having a nickel badge under your coat-lapel than a record on the police-blotter that gives you prairie-squint looking for Central Office "singed cats." I'd even grown to like the rabbit-dog side of the business, with all the machinery of Big Ben Locke's offices to back me up when it came to a tangled trail and all the majesty of the law of the commonwealth to interpose an arm when it came to a tight corner.
But I'd lost my position! That dolorous fact kept tolling at the back of my head, the same as the bells of Trinity toll above the noonday tumult of Wall Street. And I'd never been the sort of girl that had new positions forever whimpering at her heels. The only other offer I'd had was from the man with the three-carat diamond in the Asteroid Theater Building. He had told me that if I "fleshed up" he thought he could place me in a road company at twenty dollars a week. That was earlier in the year, when, like about every other empty-headed girl out of work, I considered the possibility of stepping up into stage work, very much the same as you step into an air-ship, and floating off among the stars that spell their own names to the skies in colored electric bulbs.
But I hadn't "fleshed up." The hot weather and the worry of it all, in fact, had left me as thin as a rail, and often, in the elevator mirrors, I grimly asked myself why somebody didn't mistake me for the poison label on a medicine bottle. One thing, however, I still possessed. And that was the ironically well-tailored raiment in which the Locke office had togged me out. Those clothes, I knew, would have to take the place of the back pay which the Chief would never now surrender. And fine feathers, I also knew, usually made fine birds. So then and there I decided to go back to the three-carat diamond man and ask him to reopen that road-company offer. For above all things I was afraid of idleness. I was nothing but a sort of human whip-top, and unless something kept me on the move, always on the move, there was the never-ending danger of going over.
That decision brought me back to earth again. I looked about me, took my bearings, and resolutely headed for the Asteroid Theater Building. I drifted back down Broadway with a sudden new hope in my heart. The tide had already turned. I kept repeating poor old Bud Griswold's slogan to the effect that it always pays to keep up a good front. For as Bud used to say, I never could be strong on the crape and broken-column business. And I forgot to notice that that tourist's slum known as the Great White Way was as ugly as it had seemed a short half-hour before.
I was quite composed as I sent in my card to the three-carat man, who was alone in his office at the end of a day's work. Then I strolled into the room that was blue with cigar-smoke and confronted the three-carat man in person. His name was Heydt. And he was in his shirt-sleeves.
He smiled as he swung half-way round in his swivel chair. I thought at first that it was a kindly smile.
"So you've come back after that road-company work, eh?" he said, as he relit his well chewed cigar. I noticed that he did not smoke with a dry lip. And his lips were thick, so the madura-brown was well spread.
"Then you remember me?" I cooed, with a flutter of self-satisfied hope.
"Sure," was his easy rejoinder. He leaned back in his chair and looked me over. I knew then, in one flash, why I'd always hated the thought of stage work. It was that look, the look that came from all of them, the look that I knew would forever curdle my marrow. It was the look that left women merely flesh, live stock to be duly appraised by the buyer. And it made me feel that I had hives and nettle-rash and scarletina all at once.
"You're too much of a queen to fade out of this busy bean of mine in one short summer," he calmly announced.
He was bald and his eyes protruded. Yet in the strong side-light from the office window, I noticed, those eyes were the softest of seal-brown. I hated to meet their glance, however, for they made me think of a sleepy diamond-back rattle-snake curled up behind zoo glass. I stared up at the portrait of Rose Elton in the old-fashioned fleshlings of the old-fashioned merry-merry. I stared at her billowy lines and remembered that she had at some time "fleshed up" to their standard. I stared at a photograph of Flynn and Rice, and at eight pictures of a male star sprawling over eight different pieces of furniture, and at five more of a matinée idol leaning against mantels. Then I got courage to look back at the brown-velvet eyes, which seemed to be enjoying my discomfiture.
"Can you give me—give me work?" I finally squeaked out, like a field-mouse cowed by a blacksnake.
"Sure," said the man in the eternal office swivel chair. His skin was sallow, and he looked as though he had tobacco-heart. I was afraid of him, not merely because he was so sure of himself, but because he seemed so sure of me.
"How soon could you give it to me?" I managed to ask.
He seemed to be thinking this over.
"What's the matter with our getting somewhere quiet, where we can talk things over—Carlton Terrace for dinner, eh, and then a run out to Oyster Eddie's?"
It was about time, instinct told me, to buckle on the armor-plate.
"What's the matter with getting down to business right here in this office?" I inquired.
He was laughing as he got up from his swivel chair. And at the same moment that he got up from his chair I got up from mine. It brought the scene in Big Ben's office back to me, in a sudden sickening flash. Only, this time, it didn't seem to terrify me. It was more the feeling you get from a Coney Island steamer-deck when it swings around into open water, and begins to rise and fall, and make you wish you'd been a little more careful about what you'd eaten.
"Why're you getting so up-stage about all this?" he jocularly inquired, as he came closer to me.
"Can you give me work?" I demanded, as I rounded the desk, for the Big War I'd been through had taught me it was always best to have a buffer state between belligerents.
"Do you want it bad?" he asked, still smiling.
"I've got to have it," I confessed.
"You've got to," he repeated.
"I've got to," I told him.
"Then, honey-child, we're sure going to come to terms," he said, as he rocked on his heels and once more eyed me up and down. I knew, then, that the call was going in for a quick curtain. Yet even as I knew it I kept dumbly asking why lightning should strike twice in the same place. It didn't seem fair; it didn't even seem reasonable. But it's the first flare that does the charcoal-act. You can't look for a big fire on the encore play. That's the way, I suppose, old Mother Nature saves us from madness.
That man seemed suddenly a thousand miles away from me as I looked at him. The cigar smoke made me a little dizzy. I think I must have gone rather white, all of a sudden.
"What's the matter with you, anyway?" he asked in genuine alarm.
"What's the matter with me?" I heard myself repeating, and my own voice sounded like a long- distance wire on a wet night. "I'll tell you what's the matter with me. It seems like a funny ailment, but d'you know, I'm terribly tired of dogs!"
"Tired of dogs?" he echoed, staring at me with his pop-eyes wider open than ever. He had discovered, apparently, that he was face to face with a crazy woman, and not even a policeman in sight.
"Yes," I calmly explained to him. "I came up into this office looking for a man. An hour ago I was in another office looking for a man."
"A man?" he echoed.
"Yes. And both times, instead of finding one, I found a yellow hound!"
That was my exit speech, and having delivered it, I took my departure. I wasn't excited this time; I was merely nauseated. I wanted to get out into the open air, and I was glad to see that the elevator cage stood there waiting for me. And I was also glad that there was no one in it except a weasel-faced little runt of an old man in rusty black, for cool as I had kept myself in that smoky office, I found a foolish gush of tears streaking the talcum off my cheeks as I made my way out to the street. And I never did care to do my crying before strangers.
I walked up Broadway once more, with no sense of time or place or direction. I only knew that I was glad to mix with the sidewalk crowds, the same as a slum boy with prickly-heat must be glad to take a header off an East Side wharf-end. I had been hurt, and hurt without understanding why. It bewildered me. I wanted to be alone, to think things out. And like any other animal on two legs or four, when it gets hurt, I found myself swayed by an instinct to make for the tall timber, to go in hiding. Without being quite conscious of it I directed my steps toward Central Park. There I wandered on until I found a leafy solitude and a bench which a gray squirrel vacated as I took possession. And I sat back on that bench, deep in thought, and let my battered spirit lick its wounds.