Somewhere a Tree Grows. Welby Thomas Cox, Jr.
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confused and confusing ordinary minds and such an intelligence as his own—simple, luminous, enlightening all minds, however dark, so long as they were in the light-flooded region around it.
"Have I made the meaning clear?" he asked.
He hoped she would reply that he had not, though this would have indicated a partial defeat in the object he had—to put the complex thing so plainly that no one could fail to understand. But she answered, "Yes."
He congratulated himself that his overestimate of her ignorance of affairs had not lured him into giving her the names of the parties at interest to transcribe. But did she really understand? To test her, he said:
"What do you think of it?"
"That it's wicked," replied she, without hesitation and in her small, quiet voice.
He laughed. In a way this girl, sitting there—this inconsequential and negligible atom—typefied the masses of mankind against whom that secret agreement was directed. They, the feeble and powerless ones, with their necks ever bent under the yoke of the mighty and their feet ever stumbling into the traps of the crafty—they, too, would utter an impotent "Wicked!" if they knew. His voice had the note of gentle raillery in it as he said:
"No—not wicked. Just business."
She was looking down at her book, her face expressionless. A few moments before he would have said it was an empty face. Now it seemed to him sphynxlike.
"Just business," he repeated. "It is going to take money from those who don't know how to keep or to spend it and give it to those who do know how. The money will go for building up civilization, instead of for beer and for bargain-trough finery to make working men's wives and daughters look cheap and nasty."
She was silent.
"Now, do you understand?"
"I understand what you said." She looked at him as she spoke. He wondered how he could have fancied those lack-luster eyes beautiful or capable of expression.
"You don't believe it?" he asked.
"No," said she. And suddenly in those eyes, gazing now into space, there came the unutterably melancholy look—heavy-lidded from heartache, weary-wise from long, long and bitter, experiences. Yet she still looked young—girlishly young—but it was the youthful look the classic Greek sculptors tried to give their young goddesses—the youth without beginning or end—younger than a baby's, older than the oldest of the sons of men. He mocked himself for the fancies this queer creature inspired in him; but she none the less made him uneasy.
"You don't believe it?" he repeated.
"No," she answered again. "My father has taught me—some things."
He drummed impatiently on the table. He resented her impertinence—for, like all men of clear and positive mind, he regarded contradiction as in one aspect impudent, in another aspect evidence of the folly of his contradictor. Then he gave a short laugh—the confessing laugh of the clever man who has tried to believe his own sophistries and has failed. "Well—neither do I believe it," said he. "Now, to get the thing typewritten."
She seated herself at the machine and set to work. As his mind was full of the agreement he could not concentrate on anything else. From time to time he glanced at her. Then he gave up trying to work and sat furtively observing her. What a quaint little mystery it was! There was in it—that is, in her—not the least charm for him. But, in all his experience with women, he could recall no woman with a comparable development of this curious quality of multiple personalities, showing and vanishing in swift succession.
There had been a time when woman had interested him as a puzzle to be worked out, a maze to be explored, a temple to be penetrated—until one reached the place where the priests manipulated the machinery for the wonders and miracles to fool the devotees into awe. Some men never get to this stage, never realize that their own passions, working upon the universal human love of the mysterious, are wholly responsible for the cult of woman the sphynx and the sibyl. But Norman, beloved of women, had been let by them into their ultimate secret—the simple humanness of woman; the clap-trappery of the oracles, miracles, and wonders. He had discovered that her "divine intuitions" were mere shrewd guesses, where they had any meaning at all; that her eloquent silences were screens for ignorance or boredom—and so on through the list of legends that prop the feminist cult.
But this girl—this Miss Hallowell—here was a tangible mystery—a mystery of physics, of chemistry. He sat watching her—watching the changes as she bent to her work, or relaxed, or puzzled over the meaning of one of her own hesitating stenographic hieroglyphics—watched her as the waning light of the afternoon varied its intensity upon her skin. Why, her very hair partook of this magical quality and altered its tint, its degree of vitality even, in harmony with the other changes. . . . What was the explanation? By means of what rare mechanism did her nerve force ebb and flow from moment to moment, bringing about these fascinating surface changes in her body? Could anything, even any skin, be better made than that superb skin of hers—that master work of delicacy and strength, of smoothness and color? How had it been possible for him to fail to notice it, when he was always looking for signs of a good skin down town—and up town, too—in these days of the ravages of pastry and candy? . . . What long graceful fingers she had—yet what small hands! Certainly here was a peculiarity that persisted. No—absurd though it seemed, no! One way he looked at those hands, they were broad and strong, another way narrow and gracefully weak.
He said to himself: "The man who gets that girl will have Solomon's wives rolled into one. A harem at the price of a wife—or a—" He left the thought unfinished. It seemed an insult to this helpless little creature, the more rather than the less cowardly for being unspoken; for, no doubt her ideas of propriety were firmly conventional.
"About done?" he asked impatiently.
She glanced up. "In a moment. I'm sorry to be so slow."
"You're not," he assured her truthfully. "It's my impatience. Let me see the pages you've finished."
With them he was able to concentrate his mind. When she laid the last page beside his arm he was absorbed, did not look at her, did not think of her. "Take the machine away," said he abruptly.
He was leaving for the day when he remembered her again. He sent for her. "I forgot to thank you. It was good work. You will do well. All you need is practice—and confidence. Especially confidence." He looked at her. She seemed frail—touchingly frail. "You are not strong?"
She smiled, and in an instant the frailty seemed to have been mere delicacy of build—the delicacy that goes with the strength of steel wires, or rather of the spider's weaving thread which sustains weights and shocks out of all proportion to its appearance. "I've never been ill in my life," said she. "Not a day."
Again, because she was standing before him in full view, he noted the peculiar construction of her frame—the beautiful lines of length so dexterously combined that her figure as a whole was not tall. He said, "A working woman—or man—needs health above all. Thank you again." And he nodded a somewhat curt dismissal. When she glided away and he was alone behind the closed door, he reflected for a moment upon the extraordinary amount of thinking—and the extraordinary kind of thinking—into which this poor little typewriter girl had beguiled him. He soon found the explanation for this vagary into a realm so foreign to a man of his high tastes and ambitions. "It's because I'm so in love with Josephine," he decided. "I've fallen into the sentimental state of all lovers. The whole sex becomes novel and interesting and worthwhile."
As he left the office, unusually late, he saw her still at work—no doubt doing over again some bungled piece of copying. She had her normal and natural look and air—the atomic little typewriter, unattractive and uninteresting. With another smile for his romantic imaginings, he forgot her. But when he reached the street he remembered her again. The threatened blizzard had changed into a heavy rain. The swift and sudden currents of air, that have made of New York a cave of the winds since the coming of the skyscrapers, were darting round corners, turning umbrellas inside out, tossing women's skirts about their heads, reducing all who were abroad to the same level of drenched and