Romance Island. Gale Zona
Yet when he opened the door of the city room the odour of the printers' ink somehow fused his elation in his liberty with the elation of the return. This was like wearing fetters for bracelets. When he had been obliged to breathe this air he had scoffed at its fascination, but now he understood. "A newspaper office," so a revered American of letters who had begun his life there had once imparted to St. George, "is a place where a man with the temperament of a savant and a recluse may bring his American vice of commercialism and worship of the uncommon, and let them have it out. Newspapers have no other use—except the one I began on." When St. George entered the city room, Crass, of the goblin's blood cravats, had vacated his old place, and Provin was just uncovering his typewriter and banging the tin cover upon everything within reach, and Bennietod was writhing over a rewrite, and Chillingworth was discharging an office boy in a fashion that warmed St. George's heart.
But Chillingworth, the city editor, was an italicized form of Chillingworth, the guest. He waved both arms at the foreman who ventured to tell him of a head that had one letter too many, and he frowned a greeting at St. George.
"Get right out on the Boris story," he said. "I depend on you. The chief is interested in this too—telephoned to know whom I had on it."
St. George knew perfectly that "the chief" was playing golf at Lenox and no doubt had read no more than the head-lines of the Holland story, for he was a close friend of the bishop's, and St. George knew his ways; but Chillingworth's methods always told, and St. George turned away with all the old glow of his first assignment.
St. George, calling up the Bitley Reformatory, knew that the Chances and the Fates were all allied against his seeing the mulatto woman; but he had learned that it is the one unexpected Fate and the one apostate Chance who open great good luck of any sort. So, though the journey to Westchester County was almost certain to result in refusal, he meant to be confronted by that certainty before he assumed it. To the warden on the wire St. George put his inquiry.
"What are your visitors' days up there, Mr. Jeffrey?"
"Thursdays," came the reply, and the warden's voice suggested handcuffs by way of hospitality.
"This is St. George of the Sentinel. I want very much to see one of your people—a mulatto woman. Can you fix it for me?"
"Certainly not," returned the warden promptly. "The Sentinel knows perfectly that newspaper men can not be admitted here."
"Ah, well now, of course," St. George conceded, "but if you have a mysterious boarder who talks Patagonian or something, and we think that perhaps we can talk with her, why then—"
"It doesn't matter whether you can talk every language in South America," said the warden bruskly. "I'm very busy now, and—"
"See here, Mr. Jeffrey," said St. George, "is no one allowed there but relatives of the guests?"
"Nobody,"—crisply.
"I beg your pardon, that is literal?"
"Relatives, with a permit," divulged the warden, who, if he had had a sceptre would have used it at table, he was so fond of his little power, "and the Readers' Guild."
"Ah—the Readers' Guild," said St. George. "What days, Mr. Jeffrey?"
"To-day and Saturdays, ten o'clock. I'm sorry, Mr. St. George, but I'm a very busy man and now—"
"Good-by," St. George cried triumphantly.
In half an hour he was at the Grand Central station, boarding a train for the Reformatory town. It was a little after ten o'clock when he rang the bell at the house presided over by Chillingworth's "rabble of wild eagles."
The Reformatory, a boastful, brick building set in grounds that seemed freshly starched and ironed, had a discoloured door that would have frowned and threatened of its own accord, even without the printed warnings pasted to its panels stating that no application for admission, with or without permits, would be honoured upon any day save Thursday. This was Tuesday.
Presently, the chains having fallen within after a feudal rattling, an old man who looked born to the business of snapping up a drawbridge in lieu of a taste for any other exclusiveness peered at St. George through absurd smoked glasses, cracked quite across so that his eyes resembled buckles.
"Good morning," said St. George; "has the Readers' Guild arrived yet?"
The old man grated out an assent and swung open the door, which creaked in the pitch of his voice. The bare hall was cut by a wall of steel bars whose gate was padlocked, and outside this wall the door to the warden's office stood open. St. George saw that a meeting was in progress there, and the sight disturbed him. Then the click of a key caught his attention, and he turned to find the old man quietly and surprisingly swinging open the door of steel bars.
"This way, sir," he said hoarsely, fixing St. George with his buckle eyes, and shambled through the door after him locking it behind them.
If St. George had found awaiting him a gold throne encircled by kneeling elephants he could have been no more amazed. Not a word had been said about the purpose of his visit, and not a word to the warden; there was simply this miraculous opening of the barred door. St. George breathlessly footed across the rotunda and down the dim opposite hall. There was a mistake, that was evident; but for the moment St. George was going to propose no reform. Their steps echoed in the empty corridor that extended the entire length of the great building in an odour of unspeakable soap and superior disinfectants; and it was not until they reached a stair at the far end that the old man halted.
"Top o' the steps," he hoarsely volunteered, blinking his little buckle eyes, "first door to the left. My back's bad. I won't go up."
St. George, inhumanely blessing the circumstance, slipped something in the old man's hand and sprang up the stairs.
The first door at the left stood ajar. St. George looked in and saw a circle of bonnets and white curls clouded around the edge of the room, like witnesses. The Readers' Guild was about leaving; almost in the same instant, with that soft lift and touch which makes a woman's gown seem sewed with vowels and sibilants, they all arose and came tapping across the bare floor. At their head marched a woman with such a bright bonnet, and such a tinkle of ornaments on her gown that at first sight she quite looked like a lamp. It was she whom St. George approached.
"I beg your pardon, madame," he said, "is this the Readers' Guild?"
There was nothing in St. George's grave face and deferential stooping of shoulders to betray how his heart was beating or what a bound it gave at her amazing reply.
"Ah," she said, "how do you do?"—and her manner had that violent absent-mindedness which almost always proves that its possessor has trained a large family of children—"I am so glad that you can be with us to-day. I am Mrs. Manners—forgive me," she besought with perfectly self-possessed distractedness, "I'm afraid that I've forgotten your name."
"My name is St. George," he answered as well as he could for virtual speechlessness.
The other members of the Guild were issuing from the room, and Mrs. Manners turned. She had a fashion of smiling enchantingly, as if to compensate her total lack of attention.
"Ladies," she said, "this is Mr. St. George, at last."
Then she went through their names to him, and St. George bowed and caught at the flying end of the name of the woman nearest him, and muttered to them all. The one nearest was a Miss Bella Bliss Utter, a little brown nut of a woman with bead eyes.
"Ah, Mr. St. George," said Miss Utter rapidly, "it has been a wonderful meeting. I wish you might have been with us. Fortunately for us you are just in time for our third floor council."
It had been said of St. George that when he was writing on space and was in need, buildings fell down before him to give him two columns on the first page; but any architectural manoeuvre could not have amazed him as did this. And too, though there had been occasions when silence or an evasion would have meant bread to him, the temptation to both was never so strong as at that moment. It cost St. George an effort, which he was afterward glad