The Grain of Dust Part 7

"What possesses everybody to-night!" cried Norman. "I tell you the girl's as uninteresting a specimen as you could find."

"Then why are _you_ so interested in her?" teased the sister.

Norman shrugged his shoulders, laughed with his normal easy good humor and went to his own floor.

On top of the pile of letters beside his plate, next morning, lay a note from Josephine:

"Don't forget your promise about that girl, dear. I've an hour before lunch, and could see her then. I was out of humor last night. I'm very penitent this morning. Please forgive me. Maybe I can do something for her. JOSEPHINE."

Norman read with amused eyes. "Well!" soliloquized he, "I'm not likely to forget that poor little creature again. What a fuss about nothing!"

IV

Many men, possibly a majority, have sufficient equipment for at least a fair measure of success. Yet all but a few are downright failures, pa.s.sing their lives in helpless dependence, glad to sell themselves for a small part of the value they create. For this there are two main reasons. The first is, as Norman said, that only a few men have the self-restraint to resist the temptings of a small pleasure to-day in order to gain a larger to-morrow or next day. The second is that few men possess the power of continuous concentration. Most of us cannot concentrate at all; any slight distraction suffices to disrupt and destroy the whole train of thought. A good many can concentrate for a few hours, for a week or so, for two or three months. But there comes a small achievement and it satisfies, or a small discouragement and it disheartens. Only to the rare few is given the power to concentrate steadily, year in and year out, through good and evil event or report.

As Norman stepped into his auto to go to the office--he had ridden a horse in the park before breakfast until its hide was streaked with lather--the instant he entered his auto, he discharged his mind of everything but the business before him down town--or, rather, business filled his mind so completely that everything else poured out and away.

A really fine mind--a perfect or approximately perfect instrument to the purposes of its possessor--is a marvelous spectacle of order. It is like a vast public library constantly used by large numbers. There are alcoves, rows on rows, shelves on shelves, with the exactest system everywhere prevailing, with the attendants moving about in list-bottomed shoes, fulfilling without the least hesitation or mistake the mult.i.tude of directions from the central desk. It is like an admirably drilled army, where there is the nice balance of freedom and discipline that gives mobility without confusion; the divisions, down to files and even units, can be disposed along the line of battle wherever needed, or can be marshaled in reserve for use at the proper moment. Such a mind may be used for good purpose or bad--or for mixed purposes, after the usual fas.h.i.+on in human action. But whatever the service to which it is put, it acts with equal energy and precision. Character--that is a thing apart.

The character determines the morality of action; but only the intellect determines the skill of action.

In the offices of that great law firm one of the keenest pleasures of the more intelligent of the staff was watching the workings of Frederick Norman's mind--its ease of movement, its quickness and accuracy, its obedience to the code of mental habits he had fixed for himself. In large part all this was born with the man; but it had been brought to a state of perfection by the most painful labor, by the severest discipline, by years of practice of the sacrifice of small temptations--temptations to waste time and strength on the little pleasant things which result in such heavy bills--bills that bankrupt a man in middle life and send him in old age into the deserts of poverty and contempt.

Such an unique and trivial request as that of Josephine Burroughs being wholly out of his mental habit for down town, he forgot it along with everything else having to do with uptown only--along with Josephine herself, to tell a truth which may pique the woman reader and may be wholly misunderstood by the sentimentalists. By merest accident he was reminded.

As the door of his private office opened to admit an important client he happened to glance up. And between the edge of the door frame and his client's automobile-fattened and carefully dressed body, he caught a glimpse of the "poor little forlornness" who chanced to be crossing the outer office. A glint of sunlight on her hair changed it from lifelessness to golden vital vividness; the same chance sunbeam touched her pale skin with a soft yellow radiation--and her profile was delicately fine and regular. Thus Norman, who observed everything, saw a head of finely wrought gold--a startling cameo against the dead white of office wall. It was only with the second thought that he recognized her. The episode of the night before came back and Josephine's penitent yet persistent note.

He glanced at the clock. Said the client in the amusing tone of one who would like to take offense if he only dared, "I'll not detain you long, Mr. Norman. And really the matter is extremely important."

There are not many lawyers, even of the first rank, with whom their big clients reverse the att.i.tude of servant and master. Norman might well have been flattered. In that restrained tone from one used to servility and fond of it and easily miffed by lack of it was the whole story of Norman's long battle and splendid victory. But he was not in the mood to be flattered; he was thinking of other things. And it presently annoyed him that his usually docile mind refused to obey his will's order to concentrate on the client and the business--said business being one of those huge schemes through which a big monster of a corporation is constructed by lawyers out of materials supplied by great capitalists and controllers of capital, is set to eating in enormous meals the substance of the people; at some obscure point in all the princ.i.p.al veins small but leechlike parasite corporations are attached, industriously to suck away the surplus blood so that the owners of the beast may say, "It is eating almost nothing. See how lean it is, poor thing! Why, the bones fairly poke through its meager hide."

An interesting and highly complicated enterprise is such a construction.

It was of the kind in which Norman's mind especially delighted; Hercules is himself only in presence of an herculean labor. But on that day he could not concentrate, and because of a trifle! He felt like a giant disabled by a grain of dust in the eye--yes, a mere grain of dust! "I must love Josephine even more than I realize, to be fretted by such a paltry thing," thought he. And after patiently enduring the client for half an hour without being able to grasp the outlines of the project, he rose abruptly and said: "I must get into my mind the points you've given me before we can go further. So I'll not waste your time."

This sounded very like "Clear out--you've bored me to my limit of endurance." But the motions of a mind such as he knew Norman had were beyond and high above the client's mere cunning at dollar-trapping. He felt that it was the part of wisdom--also soothing to vanity--to a.s.sume that Norman meant only what his words conveyed. When Norman was alone he rang for an office boy and said:

"Please ask Miss Halliday to come here."

The boy hesitated. "Miss Hallowell?" he suggested.

"Hallowell--thanks--Hallowell," said Norman.

And it somehow pleased him that he had not remembered her name. How significant it was of her insignificance that so accurate a memory as his should make the slip. When she, impa.s.sive, colorless, nebulous, stood before him the feeling of pleasure was, queerly enough, mingled with a sense of humiliation. What absurd vagaries his imagination had indulged in! For it must have been sheer hallucination, his seeing those wonders in her. How he would be laughed at if those pictures he had made of her could be seen by any other eyes! "They must be right when they say a man in love is touched in the head. Only, why the devil should I have happened to get these crazy notions about a person I've no interest in?" However, the main point--and most satisfactory--was that Josephine would be at a glance convinced--convicted--made ashamed of her absurd attack. A mere grain of dust.

"Just a moment, please," he said to Miss Hallowell. "I want to give you a note of introduction."

He wrote the note to Josephine Burroughs: "Here she is. I've told her you wish to talk with her about doing some work for you." When he finished he looked up. She was standing at the window, gazing out upon the tremendous panorama of skysc.r.a.pers that makes New York the most astounding of the cities of men. He was about to speak. The words fell back unuttered. For once more the hallucination--or whatever it was--laid hold of him. That figure by the window--that beautiful girl, with the great dreamy eyes and the soft and languorous nuances of golden haze over her hair, over the skin of perfectly rounded cheek and perfectly moulded chin curving with ideal grace into the whitest and firmest of throats----

"Am I mad? or do I really see what I see?" he muttered.

He turned away to clear his eyes for a second view, for an attempt to settle it whether he saw or imagined. When he looked again, she was observing him--and once more she was the obscure, the cipherlike Miss Hallowell, ten-dollar-a-week typewriter and not worth it. Evidently she noted his confusion and was vaguely alarmed by it. He recovered himself as best he could and debated whether it was wise to send her to Josephine. Surely those transformations were not altogether his own hallucinations; and Josephine might see, might humiliate him by suspecting more strongly--... Ridiculous! He held out the letter.

"The lady to whom this is addressed wishes to see you. Will you go there, right away, please? It may be that you'll get the chance to make some extra money. You've no objection, I suppose?"

She took the letter hesitatingly.

"You will find her agreeable, I think," continued he. "At any rate, the trip can do no harm."

She hesitated a moment longer, as if weighing what he had said. "No, it will do no harm," she finally said. Then, with a delightful color and a quick transformation into a vision of young shyness, "Thank you, Mr.

Norman. Thank you so much."

"Not at all--not in the least," he stammered, the impulse strong to take the note back and ask her to return to her desk.

When the door closed behind her he rose and paced about the room uneasily. He was filled with disquiet, with hazy apprehension. His nerves were unsteady, as if he were going through an exhausting strain.

He sat and tried to force himself to work. Impossible. "What sort of d.a.m.n fool attack is this?" he exclaimed, pacing about again. He searched his mind in vain for any cause adequate to explain his unprecedented state. "If I did not know that I was well--absolutely well--I'd think I was about to have an illness--something in the brain."

He appealed to that friend in any trying hour, his sense of humor. He laughed at himself; but his nerves refused to return to the normal. He rushed from his private office on various pretexts, each time lingered in the general room, talking aimlessly with Tetlow--and watching the door. When she at last appeared, he guiltily withdrew, feeling that everyone was observing his perturbation and was wondering at it and jesting about it. "And what the devil am I excited about?" he demanded of himself. What indeed? He seated himself, rang the bell.

"If Miss Hallowell has got back," he said to the office boy, "please ask her to come in."

"I think she's gone out to lunch," said the boy. "I know she came in a while ago. She pa.s.sed along as you was talking to Mr. Tetlow."

Norman felt himself flus.h.i.+ng. "Any time will do," he said, bending over the papers spread out before him--the papers in the case of the General Traction Company resisting the payment of its taxes. A noisome odor seemed to be rising from the typewritten sheets. He made a wry face and flung the papers aside with a gesture of disgust. "They never do anything honest," he said to himself. "From the stock-jobbing owners down to the nickel-filching conductors they steal--steal--steal!" And then he wondered at, laughed at, his heat. What did it matter? An ant pilfering from another ant and a sparrow stealing the crumb found by another sparrow--a man robbing another man--all part of the universal scheme. Only a narrow-minded ignoramus would get himself wrought up over it; a philosopher would laugh--and take what he needed or happened to fancy.

The door opened. Miss Hallowell entered, a small and demure hat upon her ma.s.ses of thick fair hair arranged by anything but unskillful fingers.

"You wished to see me?" came in the quiet little voice, sweet and frank and shy.

He roused himself from pretended abstraction.

"Oh--it's you?" he said pleasantly. "They said you were out."

"I was going to lunch. But if you've anything for me to do, I'll be glad to stay."

"No--no. I simply wished to say that if Miss Burroughs wished to make an arrangement with you, we'd help you about carrying out your part of it."

She was pale--so pale that it brought out strongly the smooth dead-white purity of her skin. Her small features wore an expression of pride, of haughtiness even. And in the eyes that regarded him steadily there shone a cold light--the light of a proud and lonely soul that repels intrusion even as the Polar fastnesses push back without effort a.s.sault upon their solitudes. "We made no arrangement," said she.

"You are not more than eighteen, are you?" inquired he abruptly.

The irrelevant question startled her. She looked as if she thought she had not heard aright. "I am twenty," she said.

"You have a most--most unusual way of s.h.i.+fting to various ages and personalities," explained he, with some embarra.s.sment.

She simply looked at him and waited.