Good-bye, proud world

Front matter

3% wr 3

REFERENCE LIBRARY Of HOUGHTON MIFFLIN

Boston

Chapter I The Visitor With A Black Bag

THE office of Alonzo Grainger, proprietor and chief editor of the great ‘* Dawn”’ newspaper, was always jealously guarded. Hugh Mayo, his secretary, had a desk in the alcove and knew how to head off intruders. It was well known that Mr. Grainger declined to see any visitors who came without the proper credentials. It was his way to roar out at any such suggestion, “ Every crank takes a bee-line to my office. Let him go to Miss Waldo.” All through the great ‘ Dawn” building the sound of that roar from the chief’s office was listened for, dreaded, laughed at by those who escaped and borne by those upon whom the storm broke like cyclone and whirlwind. Alonzo Grainger was a tall, stoutish man with a great head rising powerfully from the broad shoulders; strongly cut, arrogant features; a wide mouth, the set of whose lips could convey almost any impression of his meaning without the necessity of a word; and an eye which darted into the heart of a subject with a hawklike swiftness, with not seldom the suggestion of a beak and claw behind it. Mr. Grainger — rather piqued himself on the terror he could inspire. He only was responsible—the rest were hirelings, and hirelings commonly needed whip and spur to get the best pace out’ of them. ‘Twice at different intervals during the twenty-four hours it was his way to leave his office and walk from one end to the other of the great establishment. When that heavy tread was heard resounding along the corridor, even Lawrence Snow, the best writer on the staff, —as he more than once confided to Milicent Waldo — experienced a chill along his spinal marrow and found himself crouching close over his task like a whipped cur; and the retiring footfall, as the great man proceeded on his way, was hailed as a benediction.

Milicent Waldo understood. She had measured the whole ordeal. If nowadays she did not dread the chief it was because she had given the go-by to such terrors. It had taken her at least twelve months to adjust herself to the workings of the great machine. She had been established for nine years in the Hearth and Home department, and yet day after day, month after month, year after year, she had gone on without any feeling of security ; conscious always of that restless, never satisfied force behind her which urged her on, which demanded always something novel, something that should surprise and delight her audience, and at her slackening for one moment, would detect her incompetence and dismiss her.

“ Miss Waldo does very good work sometimes,” Mr. Grainger had said more than once to Lawrence Snow, “but I never count much on a woman. Women have no sustained force.”

In which verdict Milicent was ready enough to acquiesce, only too ready to confess how often it seemed as if her little torch, utterly quenched, had gone out forever.

“You can afford to put a man into a groove and hold him responsible,” was another dictum of the chief’s, “ but not a woman.”

Miss Waldo knew her place: she was there to round off the corners, to save the time of the real workers on the paper, to take in the many-sidedness of things. She had the room at the end of the left-hand corridor, on the same floor as the office of the chief, with the sign ‘“ Hearth and Home Department ” in great letters above the door.

“You must go to Miss Waldo’s department,” “That belongs to Miss Waldo’s department,” it was everybody’s way to say at the desks in the public office downstairs and along the lobbies. Thus there were few hours in the day when Miss Waldo, in the midst of the thud and beat from the great presses below which often made her feel as if she were on shipboard, did not have to answer a knock and call “Come in!” —then look up to see some stranger, man or woman, framed in the doorway. It might be some enthusiast with a new idea, anew religion ; some inventor of a new principle of anything from an electric battery down to a hook and eye; the author of a new book which he had himself printed; then poets came by scores; also humanitarians, temperance agitators, — even women with babies brought up on some new food; above all, men and women who wanted positions, occupations, introductions to the public.

“ Always find out what they have come for,” was the chief’s order. ‘ Very important to the interests of the paper that we should keep in touch with all that’s going. Can’t afford to miss anything.”

And Milicent had indeed a sincere sympathy for these adventurers in life, most of them adrift on a tempestuous sea of affairs without rudder or compass, all of them with one burning need, that is, to reach the happy haven where they should find some way of making money. Milicent could recall her own coming to the office with a dozen little bits of talk about books, and what was being done in society, which she had offered to Hugh Mayo and which he had promised to show the chief. Something in her way of doing things had pleased Mr. Grainger, that was clear. Perhaps the idea had been shaping in his mind and she answered a need. What he had said was, “ The paper needs a bright woman’s point of view.

Women read it and want to know what other women think about the new books and fashions, about every new fad and kink — even what other women say and think about politics.”

He was not a man who did anything in haste. Nevertheless when Milicent returned next day to find out the fate of her papers, these two rooms had been cleared out and the chief himself led her into them and told her to sit down and write six articles on different subjects. He gave hera week to do it in, and she had a good reference library, with multitudes of periodicals and newspapers to help her at a pinch.

If asked to define her sensations when all through those first days she sat locked up in this prisonhouse, Milicent would have confessed to a horrible feeling of littleness, of being a swimmer in deep waters with no land in sight and the overarching heavens too far off to heed her. How she dreaded the moment when the master’s eye should fall upon what she had written! The very sound of that step in the passage had checked her pulses and frozen her feet and fingers !

Well, Mr. Grainger had kept her on, but, as he always declared, it was he who had taught her all she knew about writing. “ Very pretty, but it isn’t journalism,” he had said, pulling up every flower of her fancy. ‘Some people,” he would add with a sort of indignation, “some people can’t learn, but I fancy you can.”

At first the huge individuality which dominated the whole establishment seemed to the girl to crush everything spontaneous out of her; it was as if her originality had dropped to zero, and what she accomplished was by a whipping up of the vital forces. But after a little the coercion which had hurried her on with the strength of a torrent, and which she soon learned to obey with no thought of resisting, had come to seem not only a necessity but an inspiration. It was fairly amazing to herself nowadays to find what she could accomplish. It had passed into the current fund of tradition concerning the head of the woman’s department that not only could she bear interruptions, take every man’s burdens off his shoulders, but that she could listen with an air of edification and make the veriest bore furnish so much “copy.” The men went on to say that everything was easy to Miss Waldo. Miss Waldo writes just as a bird sings. A man has to know what he writes about—at least he has to know where to put his hand on somebody who has got hold of the facts; but a woman, that is Miss Waldo, always accepting the merest superficialities of the subject, knows how to give things a touch, a turn of the kaleidoscope, and if necessary can add a little rainbow glint to the bubble out of her own fancy. To anybody else —considering that she often had to waste half her day in listening to the visitors who beset the Hearth and Home department — her stint of a

OO column each for both morning and evening editions, a double amount for Saturday, and on Sunday a whole page, might have seemed a heavy weight to carry. Not for her. Her work was always ready. She wrote a capital hand, of which no compositor complained, although of late years she had occasionally made use of the services of a typewriter.

“That girl is a curious study,” Alonzo Grainger would sometimes say. “She takes in a hint so easily that I never know where what was in my mind ends and where her idea begins. It+sometimes seems to me as if she knew everything. Then again I am brought up standing, wondering if she has got a real grasp of anything — whether her wisdom isn’t all intuition. I tell you there is no getting hold of a woman. But she is pliant and she fits in.”

One thing that was observable about Milicent’s work was that she put herself on its exact level and had a just and accurate sense of what it needed to be. Mr. Grainger had convinced her. She believed in his cunning knowledge, accepted his methods, clear, regular, uniform. Nowadays, when she knew how to press her every mood into service, she thought sometimes that she had paid a merciless price for this surer instinct, this larger experience, this clearer vision. Her line was to be clever.

“Confess it now, don’t you see you have improved?” Fred White would say to her when she had written her weekly page about the new books, not knowing whether she liked them or did not like them, whether she believed in them or did not believe in them; in fact certain of nothing — not even if two and two make four.

Part of the efficacy of her work, at least to the perceptions of the chief, lay in the fact that, while she was one of the hardest workers on the paper, she still had a sure social footing in the world outside. When she first presented herself at the office she made no claim, said nothing about herself. Her question was only, * Do I do the right sort of work?” But then,—as Mr. Grainger had said, in a moment of expansion when he found some thought of Milicent’s happily expressed, couched in just the form he always looked for in his paper, and sometimes looked in vain, — to write in that way one has got to be born into society, to have lived in it, and to understand it all through. When he first saw Milicent he had asked her age, and her reply had been that she was under thirty. She was twenty-four then, but looked older. Now she was thirty-three but looked younger. Gradually the facts about her came out. She had a mother and a sister to support, and lived in a flat on Eleventh Street. Fred White’s wife happened to fall ill and it turned out that her medical man attended Mrs. Waldo, who, although reduced in circumstances, was one of his best paying patients.

Mrs. Waldo had been a Gentry. John Gentry of Madison Avenue was her brother and Mrs. Whitehouse of Park Place was her sister. The kernel of knowledge grew. Andrew Waldo, her father, had been a successful lawyer, but had lost money in his brother’s failure and had died. Mrs. Waldo was a pretty, elegant, exotic, spoiled old woman, who had never succeeded in looking at any of the facts of life as they existed, but had lived on fictions of her own imagination, believing that she had prestige when she had no prestige, that society insisted that she should do this, that, and the other, when society was lamentably indifferent. Voblesse oblige was her motto. Necessity obliges was Milicent’s. But Mrs. Waldo was dead now, so also was her pretty butterfly of an eldest daughter. Milicent had worn mourning for her sister three years, then for her mother, so that everybody thought of her in a plain black dress. She was much admired by the men all through the office. Something half pathetic in her whole look and manner showed that she had lived and that she had suffered, and that her experience and feeling had gone deep and had set into play her deepest resolution and energy. It has been said that when she came to the office she looked older than her years, and that now she looked younger. She seemed nowadays, in fact, to have found out the secret of life which had at first baffled her. Her hair was brown and so were her eyes. Her whole face and manner were a little dreamy; there seemed something half veiled about her expression — like a goddess, Fred White said. “I tell you she looks like the Aphrodite of Cnidus.” But as the chief said, Fred White was always slopping over. Whether pretty or beautiful, Milicent was so far a goddess as to be marble in putting between herself and any sort of coquetry, lightness, or cajolery a constant seriousness of intention, giving invariably her best powers to her work, never for one instant faltering in zeal.

It was one morning at the beginning of November, 1889, that a man carrying a black bag had come into the general office and asked to see the proprietor of the “Dawn” newspaper. There was a quiet impressiveness about this stranger —he inspired the belief that he had something to communicate. Everybody was inclined to pass him on, for it seemed as if the manager might like to meet him. Even Hugh Mayo, the secretary, was impressed by the man’s look and bearing, and after the least possible hesitation consented to take in the card which bore the name “Josiah Ransom, Solicitor, Windybank, Connecticut.”

Mr. Alonzo Grainger, however, was not similarly impressed.

-“ Who is Josiah Ransom? Where is Windybank, Connecticut? Every crank takes a bee-line to my office. Let him go to Miss Waldo.”

Mr. Mayo, although still unconvinced, did not urge his chief, but came back to the visitor outside, who, with the merest average powers of hearing, could not have helped understanding every word that was uttered.

“Better see Miss Waldo, Mr. Ransom,” Mayo said with the blandness of long habit. ‘ Miss Waldo is just at the end of the other corridor.”

Mr. Ransom looked at Mr. Mayo over his spectacles.

“Miss Waldo?” he repeated. “ Does her name happen to be Miss Milicent Waldo?”

“Exactly. Miss Milicent Waldo. At the head of the Hearth and Home department. Left corridor. All you have to do is to walk on and turn, and then, at the far end of the passage, there it is. Good-morning.”

A certain reluctance in Mr. Ransom’s manner, as if something unexpected had happened and as if for a moment his resolution had hung fire, was still apparent. Yet afew minutes later Milicent, who was dictating to the girl who came in three times a week to do her typewriting, had called “Come in” in answer to a knock, and looking up saw the visitor, something in whose face startled her. This man was very different from the ordinary run of eallers. He was so quiet, 8o impressive, so dignified, so mild, — above all, as he stood there with his chin sunk on his breast, and his eyes looking out from over his spectacles, he seemed to be gazing at her, bringing a message to her, —

Milicent Waldo.

“Ts this Miss Waldo?” he inquired — “ Miss Milicent Waldo?”

Then when she assented he took a step nearer.

“My errand is to you,” he said in a deep, soft voice. He glanced at the slim, dark-eyed girl sitting at the typewriting machine. She evidently was in the way. Milicent, standing in the centre of the room, hesitated for a moment. It was a particularly busy day, and if he were only a friendly visitor she could ill spare the time. She held some sheets of yellow paper in her hand. These she gave to the girl.

«“ Carry the machine into the little room, Selma,” she now said. ‘ You can be doing this.”

Mr. Ransom had by this time closed the door and stood looking round, evidently taking in an impression of the place, struck, perhaps, by its pleasantness as well as by its suggestion of a press of work. A long table ran across one side, and on this were carefully laid out assorted piles of books, papers, and magazines; beside it was a great desk well equipped with utensils in bronze and red leather. Opposite was a well-filled bookease. Here and there on the wall hung maps, and, as if to give a touch of color, a sunny window held growing plants. There was also a low table covered with blue china, and a kettle over a lamp suggested a casual cup of tea.

Milicent, coming back after closing the door upon Selma Meyers, met again that flash of recog:

nition in her visitor’s eyes. He waved his hand by way of signifying his liking for the space, the comfort of the room, the air it wore of its owner commanding large resources. He made a low, old-fashioned bow to her, with an air of being impressed.

“Did you say, sir, you came to see me?” she now inquired.

His whole manner gave assent. There was a curious benignity about him.

A little puzzled and doubtful, Milicent motioned toward a chair. He waited until she herself sat down, then drew the chair nearer to her, seated himself in a slow, deliberate way, put his hat on the floor, and drew from his pocket a blank bag pad and a pencil.

“You see,” he now remarked, “I came to this place to make inquiries about a Miss Milicent Waldo, possibly a descendant of Andrew Waldo of Hartford, Connecticut. I am looking up the genealogy of the Waldos, and hope that you can help me.” Milicent, with the flicker of a sense that for a moment she had had some curiosity about the definite errand which concerned herself, was a little amused to find that he was only in search of statistics. At least this was better than being asked for five dollars for some person in distress. But as she met his glance she liked his face, and a throb of response in hers answered the kind look he bent upon her.

“T ought, perhaps, to introduce myself,” he now said. “My name is Josiah Ransom, and I ama lawyer in Windybank, Connecticut.”

“Oh, Windybank,” said Milicent. “I have been in Windybank. Of course you know my great-aunt Lovering who lives there?”

Strangely enough, Mr. Ransom, instead of expanding in sympathy, seemed to draw himself up, as if to bring Milicent back to a sense that he had come upon business.

“‘T have come,” said he, “to ask you to tell me everything you know about the Waldo family. Is there a large connection ?”

“Of Waldos?” said Milicent with a curious, detached feeling, as if this possibly large family and she had no point in common. Her mind ran over her recollections.

“It seems to me I am the only Waldo I know anything about,” she said.

‘‘ You have no brothers or sisters?”

“I had one brother, the eldest in the family. He died when he was ten years old, and my one sister died six years ago.”

What swam between her and Mr. Ransom was a sense that, although he kept his pencil hovering over his paper, pretending to jot down each detail, he knew it already.

“And your father—what was your father’s name?”

“ Andrew.”

“Simply Andrew?”

“Simply Andrew.”

** And what brothers and sisters had he?”

“Uncle Truman and aunt Lydia — they were all.”

“You are sure there were just those three children?”

‘Quite sure.” She paused a moment, then went on: ‘‘ My father died when I was fourteen, and all the associations which belong to the time before that seem to belong to another world, but I am quite clear about it now. There were only just those three.”

“ And your grandfather ?”

“I do not remember him,” said Milicent.

“Of course not, of course not,’ said Mr. Ransom in a tranquillizing way. “Andrew Waldo, senior, died in 1852. You were not born.”

Why did this man come to her with this knowledge about herself and these questions about her family of whom she knew so little ?

“Are you one of my relations?” she now demanded, with a sudden thrill in her voice, and her whole face showing surprise and bewilderment.

“Certainly not,” said Mr. Ransom. ‘“ My sole errand is to get hold of every clue I can about the Waldo family. I know that your grandfather, Andrew Waldo, was a son of Nehemiah Waldo of Hartford, Connecticut. Nehemiah Waldo was an only son. His father, John Waldo, was killed in the battle of White Plains, a mere boy of twenty, before Nehemiah was born. He, too, was an only child and was brought over from England by his mother, who was a widow.”

He now drew forth a document from the black bag.

‘You may like to see the family record of the Waldos as I have made it out,” he said.

Milicent took the paper he offered, unfolded it, and looked it over. At this moment the dead and vanished generations meant little to her. What her eye fastened upon in the line of descent, with a quickening of interest and memory, was the generation one remove from her own. ‘There were Andrew, Truman, and Lydia Waldo, her father, uncle, and aunt. Also John and Waldo Lovering, the children of John Lovering of Windybank and her great-aunt, Milicent Waldo, whose namesake she was.

“‘T remember my two Windybank cousins, John and Waldo Lovering,’” she said, — “ particularly Waldo. He was a boy of ten or twelve when I was at aunt Lovering’s and he was very good to me. He knew all the birds’ nests on the place, and lifted me up to let me see into one in the hollow of a cherry-tree.”

She paused a moment. The expression of her face grew dreamy.

“How strange that I should know so little about my kinspeople,” she said. “So John and Waldo are married. Are they living at Windybank?”

“They are both dead,” said Mr. Ransom.

“Dead! How dreadful!”

She mused again.

“ Both left children, I suppose ?”

“John Lovering had two sons,” said Mr. Ransom with peculiar dryness, ‘‘ but they are both dead. Waldo Lovering made a mess of his marriage. He never had achild. Now, Miss Waldo,” — his tone brought her up sharply, — “let me know, if you please, anything you can tell me about your uncle Truman and your aunt Lydia. You see I have not been able to fill out their record.” )

“Aunt Lydia never married. She died just before her appointed wedding-day.”

“T thought I had heard that. How about your uncle Truman? Try to remember.”

A serious, anxious patience was visible all over the man.

‘“¢T! ought to remember poor uncle Truman,” she said with a faint smile, “for his failure made all the woes of my life. Before that we had nothing but happy times. He had three children, Andy, Truman, and Milly. Her name was Emily, after our grandmother Waldo, who had been a Truman, while I was called after aunt Lovering. In those days uncle Truman had a beautiful place on the Hudson, and we went to them in summer and they came to us at Christmas. Uncle Truman’s wife had died the year before he failed, and afterward he took the children out West.”

“Can you name the place where he went?”

“Tt was in Michigan, and was not far from Sault Sainte Marie. He and both the boys were engaged in the lumber business.”

“ Did Truman Waldo marry again ?”’

“Tf he did I never heard of it.”

“ Now tell me about your cousins.”

« Andy was drowned. It happened soon after they went West. He was on a raft of logs and got caught in an eddy.”

“ And Milly?”

“She married very young, and died within the year, at the birth of her first child.”

“Did the child live?”

Milicent, speaking all the time cautiously and with an air of feeling her way in the dark, while Mr. Ransom waited, with that same air of extreme patience as she was once more getting in touch with old memories, was always conscious that although he listened he did not greatly care about her answer, and that he was merely testing her knowledge by his, as if the point of his questions had been unimportant. But she herself was becoming more and more interested in finding out what she did remember.

«J think so,” she now answered. Then, as if to answer some accusation in his mind, she went on pleadingly, “I ought to know. I ought to have kept in touch with Milly’s child. It must seem strange that I know so little about my nearest relations; but remember, Mr. Ransom, that I was only fourteen when my father died, and afterwards our life, such as it was, taxed all my powers. I had so much to do, so many to plan for. But I always loved Milly. Her death was terrible to me, and I have always mourned her and missed her. When it happened we were living in Switzerland, in Clarens, and I was too far off to do anything.”

“Oh, I quite understand,” said Mr. Ransom. “J will just say that Milly, as you call her, married a lawyer in Chicago by the name of Loomis, and her child only lived three months. Now ‘can you tell me anything about your cousin Truman Waldo?”

“JT regret to say, nothing,” said Milicent. “I had almost forgotten that any Waldos existed. Not for years have I had any sign or communication from uncle Truman.”

“JT doubt if he is alive. Indeed, I doubt if his son is alive,’ said Mr. Ransom.

Her eyes widened out. Could it be that they were all gone?

Before he spoke again, he looked about the room as if measuring it with some other possible conditions.

‘“‘' You have been established here some patel he now remarked.

*¢ Nine — almost ten.”

“ Your life, I take it, is very full, very busy — it satisfies your every ambition?”

His tone and glance were so kind that she found herself answering him with candor.

“Tt is full and busy,” she said, “and in a way has many advantages. As for ambition, I have to confess that I have had but one, which is, to keep up my strength, to do my work, to pay my debts, and if possible save a little to keep myself from starvation.”

“ Debts?” he asked, sharply.

“My mother’s illness was very expensive, and so indeed was poor Minny’s.”

“ Holding a position on a good paper like this you ought to be very well paid.”

“T took the place at twenty-five dollars a week, then I had thirty-five, and now have forty. I do not despair utterly of ultimately getting fifty fel can stand the pace. But I am getting very tired. I sometimes feel as if I could not go on. The last morsel of debt was paid nine months ago, and ever since then I have had a great longing for rest.”

She paused a moment, looked at him, and smiled. ‘It may seem strange in me to tell you this,” she went on; ‘“ but somehow you seem like an old friend. Often nowadays I long to throw it all away and fold my hands and sit still.”

« But you are going on?”

“Yes, I shall go on. I shall strain every nerve to lay up five thousand dollars. When I have accomplished so much I shall say — ‘ Good-bye, proud world, I’m going home.’ ”

“Where is home?”

“¢ Anywhere outside of the city,” said Milicent. “‘T feel as if I could sit for a whole year and watch the sky and the trees blowing in the wind. Perhaps,” she said, with a little laugh, ‘“ now that you have reminded me of Windybank, I may go to Windybank. Please tell me about my great-aunt Lovering, Mr. Ransom — she must be very old now.”

*“ You do not know, then, that she is dead ?”’

“ Dead? No,” said Milicent. ‘ When did it happen ?”

‘She died the twenty-fifth of last March, ”’ jet Mr. Ransom; “ she was seventy-nine years old.”’

Milicent heaved a sigh. ‘I wish now that I had gone and looked her up in my vacation a year ago last summer,” she said, after a pause. “ But I have only two weeks, and my idea is to rest and to get ahead of my work as much as possible.”

‘¢ And both her sons are dead,” she now went on ; ‘and they left no children! I suppose the place has gone to some of the Lovering family ?”