Robert Chambers - Athalie

Bathed, and once more in negligée, she let down the dull gold mass of hair which fell heavily curling to her shoulders. Then she started to comb it out as earnestly, seriously, and thoroughly as a beautiful, silky Persian cat applies itself to its toilet.

But there was now an absent expression in her dark blue eyes as she sat plaiting the shining gold into two thick and lustrous braids.

Perhaps she wondered, vaguely, why the spring-tide and freshness of a girl's youth should exhale amid the sere and sordid circumstances which made up, for her, the sum-total of existence; why it happened that whatever was bright and gay and attractive in the world should be so utterly outside the circle in which her life was passing.

Yet in her sober young face there was no hint of discontent, nothing of meanness or envy to narrow the blue eyes, nothing of bitterness to touch the sensitive lips, nothing, even, of sadness; only a gravity – like the seriousness of a youthful goddess musing alone on mysteries unexplained even on Olympus.

Seven years' experience in earning her own living had made her wiser but had not really disenchanted her. And for seven years now, she had held the first position she secured in New York – stenographer and typist for Wahlbaum, Grossman & Co.

It had been perplexing and difficult at first; so many men connected with the great department store had evinced a desire to take her to luncheon and elsewhere. But when at length by chance she took personal dictation from Wahlbaum himself in his private office – his own stenographer having triumphantly secured a supporting husband, and a general alarm having been sent out for another to replace her – Athalie suddenly found herself in a permanent position. And, automatically, all annoyances ceased.

Wahlbaum was a Jew, big, hearty, honest, and keen as a razor. Never was he in a hurry, never flustered or impatient, never irritable. And she had never seen him angry, or rude to anybody. He laughed a great deal in a tremendously resonant voice, smoked innumerable big, fat, light-coloured cigars, never neglected to joke with Athalie when she came in the morning and when she left at night, and never as much as by the flutter of an eyelid conveyed to her anything that any girl might not hear without offence.

Grossman's reputation was different, but except for a smirk or two he had never bothered her. Nor did anybody else connected with the firm. They all were too much afraid of Wahlbaum.

So, except for the petty, contemptible annoyances to which all young girls are more or less subjected in any cosmopolitan metropolis, Athalie had found business agreeable enough except for the confinement.

That was hard on a country-bred girl; and she could scarcely endure the imprisonment when the warm sun of April looked in through the windows of Mr. Wahlbaum's private office, and when soft breezes stirred the curtains and fluttered the papers on her desk.

Always in the spring the voice of brook and surf, of woodland and meadow called to her. In her ears was ever the happy tumult of the barn-yard, the lowing of cattle at the bars, the bleat of sheep. And her heart beat passionate response.

Athalie was never ill. The nearest she came to it was a dull feeling of languor in early spring. But it did not even verge on either resentment or despondency.

In winter it was better. She had learned to accept with philosophy the noises of the noisiest of cities. Even, perhaps, she rather liked them, or at least, on her two weeks' vacation in the country, she found, to her surprise, that she missed the accustomed and incessant noises of New York.

Her real hardships were two; poverty and loneliness.

The combined earnings of herself and her sisters did not allow them a better ventilated, or more comfortable apartment than the grimy one they lived in. Nor did their earnings permit them more or better clothing and food.

As for loneliness, she had, of course, her sisters. But healthy, imaginative, ardent youth requires more than sisters, – more even than feminine friends, of which Athalie had a few. What she needed, as all girls need, were acquaintances and friends among men of her own age.

And she had none – that is, no friends. Which is the usual fate of any business girl who keeps up such education and cultivation as she possesses, and attempts to add to it and to improve her quality.

Because the men of her social and business level are vastly inferior to the women, – inferior in manners, cultivation, intelligence, quality – which seems almost to make their usually excellent morals peculiarly offensive.

That was why Athalie knew loneliness. Doris, recently, had met a few idle men of cultivated and fashionable antecedents. Catharine, that very evening, was evidently going to meet a man of that sort for the first time in her career.

As for Athalie, she had had no opportunity to meet any man she cared to cultivate since she had last talked with C. Bailey, Jr., on the platform of the Sixth Avenue Elevated; – and that was now nearly four years ago.

Braiding up her hair she sat gazing at herself in the mirror while her detached thoughts drifted almost anywhere – back to Spring Pond and the Hotel Greensleeve, back to her mother, to the child cross-legged on the floor, – back to her father, and how he sat there dead in his leather chair; – back to the bar, and the red gleam of the stove, and a boy and girl in earnest conversation there in the semi-darkness, eating peach turnovers —

She turned her head, leisurely: the electric bell had sounded twice before she realised that she ought to pull the wire which opened the street door below.

So she got up, pulled the wire, and then sauntered out into the sitting-room and set the door ajar, not worrying about her somewhat intimate costume because it was too late for tradesmen, and there was nobody else to call on her or on her sisters excepting other girls known to them all.

The sitting-room seemed chilly. Half listening for the ascending footsteps and the knocking, partly absorbed in other thoughts, she seated herself and lay back in the dingy arm-chair, before the radiator, elevating her dainty feet to the top of it and crossing them.

A gale was now blowing outside; invisible rain, or more probably sleet, pelted and swished across the curtained panes. Far away in the city, somewhere, a fire-engine rushed clanging through cañons, storm-swept, luminously obscure. Her nickel alarm clock ticked loudly in the room; the radiator clicked and fizzed and snapped.

Presently she heard a step on the stair, then in the corridor outside her door. Then came the knocking on the door but unexpectedly loud, vigorous and impatient.

And Athalie, surprised, twisted around in her chair, looking over her shoulder at the door.

"Please come in," she said in her calm young voice.

A RATHER tall man stepped in. He wore a snow-dusted, fur-lined overcoat and carried in his white-gloved hands a top hat and a silver-hooked walking stick.

He had made a mistake, of course; and Athalie hastily lowered her feet and turned half around in her chair again to meet his expected apologies; and then continued in that attitude, rigid and silent.

"Miss Greensleeve?" he asked.

She rose, mechanically, the heavy lustrous braids framing a face as white as a flower.

"Is that you , Athalie!" he asked, hesitating.

"C. Bailey, Junior," she said under her breath.

There was a moment's pause, then he stepped toward her and, very slowly, she offered a hand still faintly fragrant with "cream of lilacs."

A damp, chilly wind came from the corridor; she went over and closed the door, stood for a few seconds with her back against it looking at him.

Now under the mask of manhood she could see the boy she had once known, – under the short dark moustache the clean-cut mouth unchanged. Only his cheeks seemed firmer and leaner, and the eyes were now the baffling eyes of a man.