Bates lay staring at the green-shaded light on his desk and
disgustedly he realized that he must have been sleeping there for
hours on the leather couch in his office. His eyes were peppery,
his mouth dry. He rose, staggering with the burden of drowsiness,
and glanced at his watch. It was three in the morning.
"Idiot!" he said.
He wreathed to the window, twelve stories above the New
York pavements. The stupidity that lay over his senses like
uncombed wool was blown away as he exulted in the beauty of the
city night. It was as nearly quiet now as Manhattan ever becomes.
Stilled were the trolleys and the whang of steel beams in the new
building a block away. One taxicab bumbled on the dark pavement
beneath. Bates looked across a swamp of roofs to East River, to a
line of topaz lights arching over a bridge. The sky was not dark
but of a luminous blue - a splendid, aspiring, naked blue, in which
the stars hung golden.
"But why shouldn't I fall asleep here? I'll finish the
night on the couch, and get after the New Bedford specifications
before breakfast. I've never spent twenty-four hours in the office
before. I'll do it!"
He said it with the pride of a successful man. But he
ended, as he rambled back to the couch and removed his coat and
shoes: "Still, I do wish there were somebody who cared a hang
whether I came home or stayed away for a week!"
When the earliest stenographer arrived she found Bates at
work. But often he was first at the office. No one knew of his
discovery that before dawn the huckstering city is enchanted to
blue and crocus yellow above shadowy roofs. He had no one who would
ever encourage him to tell about it.
To Bates at thirty-five the world was composed of
re-enforced concrete; continents and striding seas were office
partitions and inkwells, the latter for signing letters beginning
"In reply to your valued query of seventh inst." Not for five years
had he seen storm clouds across the hills or moths that flutter
white over dusky meadows. To him the arc light was the dancing
place for moths, and flowers grew not in pastures but in vases on
restaurant tables. He was a city man and an office man. Papers,
telephone calls, eight-thirty to six on the twelfth floor, were the
natural features of life, and the glory and triumph of civilization
was getting another traction company to introduce the Carstop
Indicator.
But he belonged to the new generation of business men. He
was not one of the race who boast that they have had "mighty little
book learning," and who cannot be pictured without their derby
hats, whether they are working, motoring, or in bed. Bates was
slender, immaculate, polite as a well-bred woman, his mustache like
a penciled eyebrow; yet in decision he was firm as a chunk of
flint.
When he had come to New York from college Bates had
believed that he was going to lead an existence of polite society
and the opera. He had in fourteen years been to the opera six
times. He dined regularly with acquaintances at the Yale Club, he
knew two men in his bachelor apartment building by their first
names, and he attended subscription dances and was agreeable to
young women who had been out for three years. But New York is a
thief of friends. Because in one night at a restaurant you may meet
twenty new people therefore in one day shall you also lose twenty
older friends. You know a man and like him; he marries and moves to
Great Neck; you see him once in two years. After thirty Bates was
increasingly absorbed in the one thing that always wanted him, that
appreciated his attention - the office.
He had gone from a motor company to the Carstop Indicator
Company. He had spent a year in the Long Island City factory which
manufactures the indicators for the Eastern trade. He had worked
out an improvement in the automatic tripping device. At thirty-five
he was a success. Yet he never failed when he was dining alone to
wish that he was to call on a girl who was worth calling on.
After fourteen years of the candy-gobbling,
cabaret-curious, nice-man-hunting daughters of New York, Bates had
become unholily cautious. His attitude to the average debutante was
that of an aviator to an anti-aircraft shell. And he was equally
uncomfortable with older, more earnest women. They talked about
economics. Bates had read a book all about economics shortly after
graduation, but as he could never quite remember the title it
didn't help him much in earnest conversations. He preferred to talk
to his stenographer. He mentioned neither wine suppers nor her
large black eyes. "Has the draftsman sent over the blue prints for
Camden?" he said. Or: "Might hurry up the McGulden correspondence."
That was real conversation. It got somewhere.
Then he began to talk to the girl in the building across
the street.
That building was his scenery. He watched it as an old maid
behind a lace curtain gapes at every passer-by on her village
street. It had the charm of efficiency that is beginning to make
American cities beautiful with a beauty that borrows nothing from
French châteaux or English inns. The architect had supposed that he
was planning neither a hotel nor a sparrow's paradise, but a place
for offices. He had left off the limestone supporting caps that
don't support anything, and the marble plaques which are touchingly
believed to imitate armorial shields but which actually resemble
enlarged shaving mugs. He had created a building as clean and
straight and honest as the blade of a sword. It made Bates glad
that he was a business man.
So much of the building opposite was of glass that the
offices were as open to observation as the coops at a dog show.
Bates knew by sight every man and woman in twenty rooms. From his
desk he could not see the building, but when he was tired it was
his habit to loaf by the window for a moment. He saw the men coming
in at eight-thirty or nine, smoking and chatting before they got to
work, settling at desks, getting up stiffly at lunch-time, and at
closing hour, dulled to silence, snapping out the lights before
they went home. When he worked late at night Bates was saved from
loneliness by the consciousness of the one or two men who were sure
to be centered under desk lights in offices across the way.
He sympathized with the office boy at whom the
red-mustached boss was always snarling in the eleventh-floor office
on the right, and was indignant at the boy he saw stealing stamps
on the thirteenth. He laughed over a clerk on the eleventh changing
into evening clothes at six - hopping on one leg to keep his
trousers off the floor, and solemnly taking dress tie and collar
from the top drawer of his desk. And it was a personal sorrow when
tragedy came to his village; when the pretty, eager secretary of
the manager in the twelfth-floor office exactly opposite was
missing for several days, and one morning a funeral wreath was laid
on her desk by the window.
The successor of the dead girl must have come immediately,
but Bates did not notice her for a week. It was one of those weeks
when he was snatched from Task A to Task B, and from B to hustle
out C, when the salesman out on the road couldn't sell milk to a
baby, when the telephone rang or a telegram came just as Bates
thought he had a clear moment, when he copied again every night the
list of things he ought to have done day before yesterday, and his
idea of heaven was a steel vault without telephone connection. But
at the end of the storm he had nothing to do except to try to look
edifyingly busy, and to amble round and watch the stenographers
stenograph and the office boy be officious.
He sat primly lounging in the big chair by the window,
smoking a panetela and unconsciously gazing at the building across
the street. He half observed that the manager in the office just
opposite was dictating to a new secretary, a slim girl in blue
taffeta with crisp white collar and cuffs. She did not slop over
the desk tablet, yet she did not sit grimly, like the oldish
stenographer in the office just above her. She seemed at the
distance to be unusually businesslike. In all the hive that was
laid open to Bates' observation she was distinguished by her erect,
charming shoulders, her decisive step, as she was to be seen
leaving the manager's desk, going through the partition - which to
Bates' eye was an absurdly thin sheet of oak and glass - hastening
to her typewriter, getting to work.
Bates forgot her; but at dusk, spring dusk, when he stood
by his window, late at the office yet with nothing to do, enervated
with soft melancholy because there was no place he wanted to go
that evening, he noticed her again. Her chief and she were also
staying late. Bates saw them talking; saw the chief sign a pile of
correspondence, give it to her, nod, take his derby, yawn and
plunge out into the general office, heading for the elevator. The
secretary briskly carried away the correspondence. But she stopped
at her desk beside a window. She pressed her eyes with her hand,
passed it across them with the jerky motion of a medium coming out
of a trance.
"Poor tired eyes!" Bates heard himself muttering.
No scent of blossoms nor any sound of eager birds reached
the cement streets from the spring-flushed country, but there was
restlessness in the eternal clatter, and as the darkening
silhouette of the building opposite cut the reflected glow in the
eastern sky his melancholy became a pain of emptiness. He yearned
across to the keen-edged girl and imagined himself talking to her.
In five minutes she was gone, but he remained at the window, then
drooped slowly up to the Yale Club for dinner.
Doubtless Bates' life was making him selfish, but that
evening while he was being incredibly bored at a musical comedy he
did think of her, and for a second hoped that her eyes were rested.
He looked for her next morning as soon as he reached the
office, and was displeased with the entire arrangement of the
heavenly bodies because the light wasn't so good across there in
the morning as in the afternoon.
Not till three o'clock was he certain that she was wearing
what appeared to be a waist of corn-colored rough silk, and that
for all her slight nervousness her throat was full and smooth. Last
night he had believed her twenty-eight. He promoted her to
twenty-three.
He sighed: "Capable-looking young woman. Wish my secretary were as
interested in her work. She walks with - well, graceful. Now who
can I get hold of for dinner tonight?"
