Ever After (22 page)

Dinah was riding side-saddle on a respectable little mare this time, obviously with the benediction of the grooms. Dewdrop was getting old and was considered safe. Clare had learned on her. It was not the first time he had seen Dinah mounted and dressed as it was considered proper she should be. But he noticed that her face was childish and aglow between the severe white stock and the hard bowler hat of her habit, and she was genuinely glad to see him.

“Many happy returns,” she recited punctiliously as she rode up to him, and held out a small square parcel wrapped in white paper. “It isn’t anything, really, I only have a shilling a week pocket-money, and you can’t do much with that.”

It was a music box; not one of the best ones, but he saw that she must have begun to save almost the whole of her allowance as soon as she knew that his birthday was coming.

“Oh, Dinah, that’s very clever of you, we’ll start a collection,” he said much moved. “I’ll bring you back one from New York.”

“It plays something called
L’Elisir
d’Amour,
”
she said without
embarrassment
. “But I’m not responsible for that, I had to write and send them the money and let them choose.”

“That’s funny,” he said. “Aunt Sue has one that plays the same thing.” He pressed the catch and the music box tinkled its tiny tune in the morning stillness. “I’ll take it home with me when I go, for company.”

“Are you
sure
to come back?” she asked, and the words were anxious.

“Very sure.” The music box had gone silent with a little click, and his eyes held hers solemnly. “I swear to come back, Dinah,” he said. “You can count on that.”

“I do. I do count on you. It’s a very cosy feeling. You don’t make half-promises like other people and then forget all about them. When you say you’ll do a thing I feel as though nothing can stop you.”

“Under Providence,” he said. “You’ll never be rid of me now. How do you like the prospect?”

“I shall bear up under it, I think,” she said, with her rare, wide smile, and it was only by the greatest effort that he removed his gaze from her face and forbore to pursue the subject further.

Their horses moved on slowly down the slope while they laid confident plans for things to happen after his return early in the year. He would be back in time for the best of the hunting in February when the big dog-foxes were travelling—Dinah told him how last year they had killed one in the Friday country up near Stow-in-the-Wold which had weighed close to sixty pounds. She pointed out to him, a little farther on, what Archie always said was the prettiest find in England, where the Field gathered on a hill above the covert so they saw the fox leave and the hounds gather on his line. By now they had ridden behind a spinney which hid them from view on all sides, and Dinah glanced around and broke off in the middle of a sentence.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to say goodbye now instead of this afternoon with everyone looking,” she said, and drew off her glove and offered him her hand across the saddle. As he took it he saw with dismay that her eyes were full of tears.

“Here,
Dinah
, hold up, it’s not for long, only a couple of months, possibly three—and I’ll write to you every week, will that help?”

Her lips quivered. She couldn’t speak, but sat looking at him helplessly, her hand in his. He slid from the saddle and lifted her down against him and she buried her face in his coat and clung to him, sobbing. But it was a child’s grief only, at parting from a friend, and he held her like a child, patting her shoulder and
murmuring
nothings, while his heart sang because she cared so much, no matter how, and there was lots of time. On a sudden inspiration he put his hand into his breast pocket and brought out the flat box where the watch lived and flipped it open.

“Look!” he said, as though she were about two. “See the pretty toy”

“
Oh
!
You brought it!” Her tears stopped. Her hands cupped the box lovingly, holding his between them.

“I always bring it. It never leaves me. It’s our luck, Dinah, whichever of us has it.”

“It’s the loveliest watch in the world. I’m glad it’s going with you because if it’s mine that means you’ll have to come back to give it to me, won’t you?”

“My darling, it
is
yours, and you’ll see it again in January, at the latest.”

Her tear-wet face was raised to his incredulously, while her eyes spilled over again.

“You called me—” With an arm thrown round his neck, she tiptoed quickly to kiss his cheek. “Goodbye till January,” she whispered.

“Thank you,” he managed to say quietly. “I’ll take the twin to that the day I get back.”

The farewell luncheon party that day was for Bracken something of an anti-climax. Archie was missing from the circle and Virginia’s spirits visibly drooped. Clara’s eyes were cool and reproachful because Bracken seemed to have nothing whatever on his mind with regard to her own valuable self, and Alwyn was aggressively cheerful to cover the shock of Virgina’s having refused to become the future and eighth Countess of Enstone.

Only Sue was entirely composed and happy, for soon she would be able to see Fitz again, and come at the matter of his hypothetical love-affair. She felt as though she had narrowly missed the edge of a precipice, for suppose, oh, just
suppose
she had allowed herself to be bewitched by poor Gratian’s good looks and gold braid and sweet ways, and then Fitz had got into trouble and they wanted her at home!

F
ITZ, WITH HIS SOFT DRAWL AND SLOUCHING, GRACEFUL CARRIAGE,
professed to have become a sure-’nough Yankee after nearly a year in New York. He was waiting on the dock with Cabot and Eden to welcome his cousins home.

A little in the background there hovered a fourth figure which Fitz dragged forward affectionately, saying, “You remember Johnny Malone, Cousin Sue,” and Sue said she did and gave her hand to a young man in a soft hat who seized it gratefully, mangled it in his, and murmured something embarrassed and complimentary. She then recalled having seen him about now and then during the flurried days before they had sailed in the spring, and supposed that he worked on Cabot’s newspaper too.

“Well, Johnny!”
Virginia was crying in an astonishment too well done to be quite convincing. “Whatever are
you
doing here?”

Johnny Malone blushed, swallowed, and started to explain that he had just happened to come down to the docks to see about a fire—

“That’s a lie, Ginny,” said Fitz gently. “He’s been meeting this boat ever since she sailed from Liverpool. All I could do to keep him from swimming down to Sandy Hook. And will you all please note his alarming state of sobriety at this time of day?”

Virginia laughed happily and patted Johnny’s sleeve with light gloved finger-tips.

“Never you mind him, Johnny, I appreciate your coming down here no end,” she said, and her long eyelashes lifted intimately to Johnny’s enraptured gaze. “My, it’s good to see some dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers again, after what I’ve been through!” she added, and cast herself devotedly on Cabot’s chest.

There were two carriages waiting. But somehow when they rolled away from the dock Johnny Malone, after being tirelessly
helpful
about the luggage, was not in either one of them.

“It must be pretty tough to be in love with the Boss’s daughter,” Fitz remarked thoughtfully when Johnny’s tactful absence was
discovered
.
“If it ever happened to me I’d just cut my throat and rest in peace.”

“Johnny will live through it, I think,” said Eden kindly. “He’s a very impressionable young man.”

Eden knew that no young man, however impressionable, but with the good reporter’s capacity and affection for hard liquor which Johnny had, stood a ghost of a chance of marrying any daughter of hers. Cabot was not a snob, and Johnny was a good news hound who had manfully served his stiff apprenticeship in the police courts, with the fire department, and among the obituaries, several years before Fitz started to work in the same office. Johnny had risen to forty a week now, on the gaudy Tenderloin beat which he loved the best, among the theatres and all-night restaurants, where the chorus girls and the crooks and the politicians were as likely to make him their confidant as to resent his vocation, and where he had learned more than enough professional secrets to get him shot any day, except for his cast-iron discretion, drunk or sober. Johnny had Cabot’s promise—they called it a threat—of a by-line before long if he behaved himself. But he would never make the City Editor’s desk at the rate he was drinking.

Johnny drank whisky the way a baby guzzles milk, with an artless joy and the most harmless results. Johnny was in fact very funny when he was drunk. It didn’t make him quarrelsome, he seldom picked fights, and he was never disgusting or demoralized. He simply got delightfully, blissfully soused and he stayed that way for hours, sometimes it seemed for days. It rarely interfered with his work, and he remained quite coherent even on the telephone if it became necessary to dictate a story back to the office. But it did not recommend him as a possible suitor for the Boss’s daughter.

Cabot had viewed with approval the firm friendship which grew up between the neophyte Fitz and Johnny Malone, particularly as Fitz showed no inclination to try to keep up with Johnny’s drinking. (Fitz mostly stuck to beer.) Johnny knew the ropes around the City Room, knew the map of New York like the palm of his hand, knew all the most useful policemen on all the best beats, knew the
bar-keeps
by name from the Bowery to the Forty-second Street Reservoir, and—it came first from Fitz—Johnny was always ready to go to a music hall show.

In Johnny’s company Fitz saw them all—the Atlantic Gardens on the Bowery, which had a female baritone and a ladies’ orchestra in white dresses who drank beer between times with the customers; Prospect Gardens on Fourteenth Street where the prima donna was the wife of the proprietor and must be treated as such; the
Winter
Garden whose female patrons were not exactly ladies, though its owner called it a family resort, and it often sheltered on its
big-hearted
bill some hard-luck act which otherwise would have been laid off and which gratefully drew a maximum fifteen dollars a week; Tony Pastor’s which was respectable, and the Alhambra just across the way which was barely so, and the Haymarket on Sixth Avenue which was far, far otherwise and had gambling rooms and other more private apartments upstairs; and many more unsavoury holes-in-the-wall where the beer was good and the company quite bad and the music so-so, and where there was seldom a dull moment.

Johnny called most of the soubrettes by their first names and they addressed him in even more intimate terms. From Johnny Fitz learned the rules and customs of each house, and sat night after night under the dim, smoky lights drinking cool dark Münchner while the band played Viennese waltzes and modern ragtime and two-steps; learned to josh the waiters, buy drinks for the musicians, and pay lurid compliments to the specialty ladies in flesh-coloured tights and brief spangled costumes with a discreet fringe which came half-way down the thigh. From Johnny he learned that the girls got cold tea when you bought them a drink, and that most of them would give you their eye-teeth for a pair of silk stockings; and that if you could get a popular soubrette to plug your song and it caught on and the audiences took up the choruses with her and went away whistling it, you might get it published with
Introduced
by
— on the cover, and then if it went into the bill at Pastor’s or Koster and Bail’s the royalties started rolling in, and the first thing you knew you had money, and then those who had looked askance on song-writing as an occupation were confounded and you could afford to be
magnanimous
and buy them presents with you’re earnings….

Johnny had been impressed when he discovered that Fitz wrote songs. Anybody could hold down a forty-a-week newspaper job, but only talented people could read music, much less write it. Such an accomplishment ensured that Fitz would never have to live and die a rum-soaked reporter, said Johnny with awe, and added that he trusted when Fitz’s tunes had become as well known as
Daisy
Bell
and
The
Little
Lost
Child
and were being sung every week by Lottie Gilson and Della Fox, and maybe with slides, too, he trusted that then, Johnny would repeat, raising the slow, emphatic forefinger which assisted his utterance as his sentences became more and more involved, trusted that
then
the wealthy composer would remember who his old friends were, even when his sales had reached fabulous figures in the piano trade.

Thus, over Fitz’s Münchner and Johnny’s perpetual rock and rye, they would map out Fitz’s profitable future. Fitz also had a
responsibility
during those tours of the lesser music halls and beer-gardens. For whereas Johnny could take care of himself with the soubrettes and the ladies’ orchestras, who never seemed to expect from him anything
but the most casual amenities, Fitz must never by any chance allow his friend to stray upstairs to where the gambling-rooms were. Because if ever this did happen, the results were dire and went on all night, leaving Johnny with nothing to pay his rent or even buy his lunch with the next day.

Fitz was seeing life with Johnny. At first his contacts with the New York underworld had been purely in the line of business and he had considered them quite revolting. His gentle breeding and rural background had not prepared Fitz for the metropolitan night courts, where the human soul sometimes appears at its nakedest, or the morgue, whose sights are not for the squeamish, but both were
included
in the regular beat of a cub reporter on a New York daily. Fitz set his teeth and schooled himself to Johnny’s philosophical acceptance of the baser aspects of humanity. Gradually Fitz grew his own callouses, so that the sight of a nameless man done violently to death no longer made him retch, and he could view the ageing, painted, hopeless faces of streetwalkers picked up on minor charges of thievery and vagrancy with only an impersonal compassion, and could refrain from giving away his last dollar to hideous beggars who displayed their deformities as their chief stock in trade.

Finally he ceased to feel strange and apprehensive in the sinister backwaters west of Fifth Avenue, and accustomed himself to Johnny’s catholic acquaintance with characters the police were looking for—or should be looking for, if it had not been made worth their while to be blind. Theodore Roosevelt had been called to Washington to act as President McKinley’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and under Tammany rule New York was relaxing again into its old easy ways before he had been Police Commissioner. The clean-up was over. The town was bulging wide open again. Anything could happen almost unquestioned, and most of it did.

Johnny’s friends included gamblers, cab-drivers, firemen, beer-hall proprietors, vaudeville actors, cheap politicians, barflies in general, strong-arm men who carried guns and felt free to use them, women who lived precariously and died young—Johnny mingled with them all, and in his company Fitz witnessed as bad or worse in his leisure hours as on his routine newspaper assignments. But they were not required to write it up, except that Johnny sometimes used it under the guise of fiction, as Richard Harding Davis did. Fitz no longer winced at language, nor blushed when shameless women made jocular love to him. He held his tongue when it wasn’t his quarrel or Johnny’s, and he ducked automatically when a gun went off in the middle distance. But he had never learned to control the pit of his stomach. He never quite lost the impulse and the desire to be somewhere else when a ruckus began. Which only went to show, Johnny would point out sadly, that he was not a born reporter.

It was a Cinderella-like existence Fitz lived anyway. Each day he left Cabot’s brownstone mansion on Madison Avenue for the grubby environs of Park Row, spent his working hours recording the sordid aftermath of everything from pocket-picking to Chinatown murder, and returned again—often with the most heartfelt relief—to the sane and usual world presided over by his beautiful Aunt Eden, where one dressed for dinner and occupied a box at the theatre, and people’s more private and violent emotions were kept decently hidden.

“The Shop” over which Cabot Murray presided as owner and editor of the
New
York
Evening
Star
was not the picturesque
madhouse
which was becoming fashionable with some rival newspaper offices which considered themselves more live and up-and-coming. There were almost no office politics at the
Star,
or personal feuds and jealousies. There was no visible excitement as the time for going to press drew near, and no frantic last-minute endeavour. The greater the pressure and the higher the tension over a big story, the quieter and more efficient the City Room became.

The
Star
had one of the finest newspaper plants in the world, modestly housed in the basement whence the throb of the presses and the smell of printers’ ink rose comfortably to the effective serenity of the editorial floor. Cabot did not believe in beating the big drum for himself or his plant, but he was one of the first to install speaking-tubes in order to eliminate shouting, and typewriters in order to eliminate bad handwriting, just as he had been one of the first to utilize telephones, and the cables while they were still expensive, to eliminate delay, and to run a leased wire straight from Washington into the office. He hated noise and confusion, even as he hated sloppy writing. He read every line of his paper every day and knew who had written it, and bestowed praise as generously for a bright three inches about a lost child as for a breakneck scoop on a crime case. His pitiless blue pencil developed in
Star
men a trenchant, hard-hitting style all their own which was studied all over the country. Whenever a reporter lifted his eyes from his desk they encountered a sign which carried in large letters the only slogan the
Star
ever employed: DON’T BORE THEM.

Cabot usually wrote the leader himself, and every other editorial line had to pass his inspection. It was an era when most of the big newspapers reflected the personalities of the men who owned and edited them—magnetic, colourful, fearless personalities with the gift of words, who said what they chose and stood by it, and could make and unmake legislators and even Cabinets by the weight and passion of their opinions. He wielded a brillant and a stringent pen, himself. People who bought the paper seldom said, “What’s in the
Star
?” but rather, “What’s Murray got today?” He could
always cover a big assignment better than his star reporters and they knew it.

Cabot had bought the New York paper after the death of his father who during the ’60’s had owned a contentious, froth-at-the-mouth Republican organ in Trenton. The
Star
was then a prosy sheet devoid of interest and policy. Within a remarkably short time Cabot turned it into a vital, newsy, highly profitable property which bore the imprint of his own personality on every page. He had a genius for hiring the right subordinates and a profound
conviction
that a newspaper’s first business was news, and not
professional
crusading nor circulation stunts. His word in the Shop was law, his policy the only one, and his wrath when something went wrong was swift and terrible. Yet he was accessible all day long to anybody from the Managing Editor to the office boy with toothache, and you were likely at any minute to be called into his private office and praised for something you hardly knew you had done, or fired for something you hoped nobody had noticed. But if you made good at the
Star
, and behaved yourself, and tried always to do better still, you had a job for life if you wanted it.