The Bacillus of Beauty Part 1

The Bacillus of Beauty.

by Harriet Stark.

BOOK I.

THE BROKEN CHRYSALIS.

_(From the Shorthand Notes of John Burke.)_

THE BACILLUS OF BEAUTY

CHAPTER I.

THE METAMORPHOSIS.

NEW YORK, Sunday, Dec. 16.

I am going to set down as calmly and fully as I can a plain statement of all that has happened since I came to New York.

I shall not trim details, nor soften the facts to humour my own amazement, nor try to explain the marvel that I do not pretend to understand.

I begin at the beginning--at the plunge into fairy tale and miracle that I made, after living twenty-five years of baldest prose, when I met Helen Wins.h.i.+p here.

Why, I had dragged her to school on a sled when she was a child. I watched her grow up. For years I saw her nearly every day at the State University in the West that already seems so unreal, so far away, I loved her.

Man, I knew her face better than I knew my own! Yet when I met her here-- when I saw my promised wife, who had kissed me good-by only last June--I did not recognise her. I looked full into her great eyes and thought she was a stranger; hesitated even when she called my name. It's a miracle! Or a lie, or a wild dream; or I am going crazy. The thing will not be believed. And yet it's true.

This is my calmness! If I could but think it might be a tremendous blunder out of which I would sometime wake into verity! But there has been no mistake; I have not been dreaming unless I am dreaming now.

As distinctly as I see the ugly street below, I remember everything that has befallen me since my train pulled into Jersey City last Thursday morning. I remember as one does who is served by sharpened senses. Only once in a fellow's lifetime can he look upon New York for the first time-- and to me New York meant Helen. Everything was vividly impressed upon my mind.

I crossed the Cortlandt Street ferry and walked up Broadway, wondering what Helen would say if I called before breakfast. I could scarcely wait.

I stopped in front of St. Paul's Church, gaping up at a twenty-six story building opposite; a monstrous shaft with a gouge out of its south side as if lightning had rived off a sliver. I went over to it and saw that I had come to Ann Street, where Barnum's museum used to stand. The Post Office, the City Hall, the restaurant where I ate breakfast, studying upon the wall the bible texts and signs bidding me watch my hat and overcoat; the _Tribune_ building, just as it looks on the almanac cover--all these made an instant, deep impression. Not in the least like a dream.

By the statue of Horace Greeley I stood a moment irresolute. I knew that, before I could reach her, Helen would have left her rooms for Barnard College; breakfast had been a mistake. Then I noticed that Na.s.sau Street was just opposite; and, in spite of my impatience to be at her door, I constrained myself to look up Judge Baker.

Between its Babel towers narrow Na.s.sau Street was like a canyon. The pavements were wet, for folks had just finished was.h.i.+ng windows, though it was eight o'clock in the forenoon. Bicycles zipped past and from somewhere north a freshet of people flooded the sidewalk and roadway.

Down a steep little hill and up another--both thronged past belief--and in a great marble maze of lawyers' offices I found the sign of Baker & Magoun.

The boy who alone represented the firm said that I might have to wait some minutes, and turned me loose to browse in the big, high-ceiled outer room or library of the place where I am to work. After the dim corridors it was a blaze of light. On all sides were ma.s.sive bookshelves; the doorways gave glimpses of other rooms, fine with rugs and pictures and heavy desks, different enough from the plain fittings of the country lawyers' workshops I had known. The carpet sank under my feet as I went to the window.

I stood looking at the Jersey hills, blue and fair in the distance, and dreaming of Helen, who was to bless and crown my good fortune, when I heard a step at the door and a young man came in--a tall, blonde, supple fellow not much older than I. Then the Judge appeared, ponderous, slow of tread, immaculate of dress; the same, unless his iron-gray locks have retreated yet farther from his wall of a brow, that I have remembered him from boyhood.

"Burke!" he said, "I am glad to see you. Welcome to New York and to this office, my boy!"

The grasp of his big warm hand was as good as the words and the eyes beneath his heavy gray brows were full of kindness as, holding both my hands in his, he drew me toward the young man who had preceded him. With a winning smile the latter turned.

"Hynes," said the Judge, with a heartiness that made one forget his formal manner, "you have heard me speak of Burke's father, the boyhood companion with whom, when the finny tribes were eager, I sometimes strayed from the strait and narrow path that led to school. Burke, Hynes is the sportsman here--our tiger-slayer. He beards in their lairs those Tammany ornaments of the bench whom the flippant term 'necessity Judges,' because of their slender acquaintance with the law."

"Glad to see you, Burke," said Hynes, as dutifully we laughed together at the time-honoured jest.

I knew from the look of him that he was a good fellow, and he had an honest grip; though out where I come from we might call him a dude. All New Yorkers seem to dress pretty well.

Presently Managing Clerk Crosby came, and Mr. Magoun, as lean, brusque and mosquito-like as his partner is elephantine; and after a few words with them I was called into the Judge's private room, where a great lump rose in my throat when I tried, and miserably failed, to thank him for all his great kindness.

"Consider, if it pleases you," he said, to put me quite at my ease, "that I have proposed our arrangement, not so much on your own account as because I loved your father and must rely upon his son. It brings back my youth to speak his name--your name, Johnny Burke!"

Yes, I remember the words, I remember the tremour in the kind voice and the mist of unshed tears through which he looked at me. I'm not dreaming; sometimes I wish I were, almost.

When I left the Judge, of course I pasted right up to Union Square, though I felt sure that Helen would be at college. No. 2 proved to be a dingy brick building with wigs and armour and old uniforms and grimy pictures in the windows, and above them the signs of a "dental parlour" and a school for theatrical dancing.

It seemed an odd place in which to look for Nelly, but I pounded up the worn stairs--dressmakers' advertis.e.m.e.nts on every riser--until I reached the top floor, where a meal-bag of a woman whose head was tied up in a coloured handkerchief confronted me with dustpan and broom.

"I'm the new leddy scrubwoman, and not afther knowin' th' names av th'

tinants," she said, "but av ut's a gir-rul ye're seekin', sure they's two av thim in there, an' both out, I'm thinkin'."

I pushed a note for Nelly under the door she indicated--it bore the cards of "Miss Helen Wins.h.i.+p" and "Miss Kathryn Reid"--and hurried away to look up this gem of a hall bedroom where I am writing; you could wear it on a watch chain, but I pay $3 a week for it. The landlady would board me for $8, but regular dinners at restaurants are only twenty-five cents; good, too. And anybody can breakfast for fifteen.

Then I went back to Union Square, where I hung about, looking at the statues. Once I walked as far as Tammany Hall and rushed back again to watch Helen's door. Finally I sat down on a bench from which I could see her windows; and there in the brief December sunlight, with the little oasis around me green even in winter, and the roar of Dead Man's Curve just far enough away, I suppose I spent almost the happiest moments of my life.

I was looking at Nelly's picture, taken in cap and gown just before she graduated last June. My Nelly! Nelly as she used to be before this strange thing happened; eager-eyed, thin with over-study and rapid growth. Nelly, whose bright face, swept by so many lights and shadows of expression, sensitive to so many s.h.i.+fting moods, I loved and yearned for. Nearly six months we'd been apart, but at last I had followed to New York to claim her. As I sat smiling at the dream pictures the dear face evoked, my brain was busy with thoughts of the new home we would together build. I'd h.o.a.rd every penny, I planned; I'd walk to save car-fare, practice all economies--

Wasn't that a face at her window?

I reached the top landing again, three steps at a time; but the voice that said "Come!" was not Helen's and the figure that turned from pulling at the shades was short and rolypoly and crowned by flaming red hair.

"Miss Wins.h.i.+p?" said the voice, as its owner seated herself at a big table. "Can't imagine what's, keeping her. Are you the John Burke I've heard so much about? And--perhaps Helen has written to you of Kitty Reid?"

Without waiting for a reply, she bent over the table, scratching with a knife at a sheet of bold drawings of bears.

"You won't mind my keeping right on?" she queried briskly, lifting a rosy, freckled face. "This is the animal page of the Sunday _Star_ and Cadge is in a hurry for it, to do the obbligato."

I suppose I must have looked the puzzlement I felt, for she added hastily:--

"The text, you know; a little cool rill of it to trickle down through the page like a fine, thin strain of music that--that helps out the song--tee- e-e-um; tee-e-e-um--" She lifted her arm, sawing with a long ruler at a violin of air,--"but you don't have to listen unless you wish--to the obbligato, you know."

"Doesn't the writer think the pictures the un.o.btrusive embroidery of the violin, and the writing the magic melody one cannot choose but hear?"

I thought that rather neat for my first day in New York, but the shrewd blue eyes opened wide at the heresy.

"Why, no; of course Cadge knows it's the pictures that count; everybody knows that."

A writing-table jutted into the room from a second window, backing against Miss Reid's. On its flap lay German volumes on biology and a little treatise in English about "Advanced Methods of Imbedding, Sectioning and Staining." The window ledge held a vase of willow and alder twigs, whose buds appeared to be swelling. Beside it was a gla.s.s of water in which seeds were sprouting on a floating island of cotton wool.

"Admiring Helen's forest?" came the voice from the desk. "I'm afraid there's only second growth timber left; she carried away the great redwoods and all the giants of the wilderness this morning. Are you interested in zoology? Sometimes, since I have been living with Helen, I have wished more than anything else to find out, What is protoplasm? Do you happen to know?"