The Eleventh Virgin · Part II · Chapter 2 2 (1/3)

II

One day June was walking leisurely along Fourteenth Street when she met Terry Wode coming out of a saloon.

“A little appetizer,” he murmured, wiping his lips.

“Aren’t you pretty far uptown?” June reproved him. “And I thought that you weren’t going to do any investigating without me.”

Terry was a feature writer whom June had met while she was working on the Clarion, with whom she had often joined forces while on an assignment. Some time before, they had started what they called an investigation of all the saloons, between the Battery and Canal Street and the East and North Rivers. By limiting themselves thus they had hopes of someday visiting them all. (But they had not finished their explorations before prohibition went into effect.)

“Why, it’s only twelve o’clock and you know I never begin my investigations until two. As I said, I merely dropped in to build up an appetite for lunch and if you’ll come in and have a glass of port I’ll take you along. You’ll have an opportunity of meeting Mr. Hugh Brace, assistant managing editor of the Flame. I’ve got to hand in the stuff for the dramatic page today.”

“Sure, I’d love to. But I’ve already got an appetite and don’t want to drink. You’re only looking for a chance and an excuse to go back into a saloon again.”

As they entered a German restaurant on Third Avenue, a young man rose from his table to meet them.

Hugh Brace was a tall, slightly-built youth who was thirty-three and looked twenty-three. There was a look of great delicacy about him, an appearance of living in the night hours and sleeping during the day. As a matter of fact most of his work was done at night, not only on his own writing, but his editorial work on the Flame, a monthly magazine.

An artist who had the conviction that Hugh would become famous⁠—as a matter of fact most of his friends had that conviction⁠—had painted a life-size portrait of him several years before and in it brought out his extremely dusky transparency. There was almost a greenish light on his face. You did not notice the color of his hair or eyes. They were contradictory eyes. They were curiously detached and yet luminously sympathetic.

During the course of the lunch June noticed that his clothes as well as his manners had the same awkwardness. It came, she thought, from extreme shyness, and remained with him even when he forgot himself in the heat of discussion. Behind his writing desk, he had poise. With a pen in his hand he was gracious as well as graceful. He lost neither his dignity nor his train of thought when interrupted even when he had fulfilled the expectations of his friends and did become famous, giving up his magazine work to spend eight hours a day or an entire night, as the case may be, at his desk. For back of his apparent softness there was a streak of iron and he was never ill.

“Tomorrow the magazine goes to press,” he told them, “and I am short two book reviews. Have you got your ‘copy’ with you, Terry?”

Terry produced his “copy.” As dramatic critic, he didn’t feel called upon to confine his attention to the current plays on Broadway. He had found himself down on the Bowery near the Italian burlesque show not many weeks before and the result was a criticism and comparison of that production with the latest success of Broadway. Terry did not generally call himself a dramatic critic. He preferred to think of himself as a critic of life and there was much philosophy of a sort in his articles. His style reminded June of Robert Ingersoll. While the latter directed his criticism at the theology of the day, Terry hurled defiance and ridicule at the conventions of the world. All his energy he seemed to put in his writing.

After Terry’s contribution had been read and discussed Hugh reverted to his own troubles. “I’ve got one review planned out pretty well,” he said. “There are really only three ways of writing reviews. Usually you have to struggle to make the book fit into one of the three reviews⁠—that is, if it is worth reviewing. As a matter of fact this one falls in perfectly with one of them and it’s as good as written now. It’s the story of a man’s spiritual development, and you can take the personal view. You test its worth by applying your personal experience. The man in the story finally comes to believe in a God⁠—strange, but it’s a book that’s making a big sale with young soldiers on their way to the front.

“We all have a God of one kind or another. At one time, my God was a socialist ideal. Just now I find myself a Tolstoyan without accepting his idea of a personal Deity. But it’s wartime and our only ideal can be internationalism.

“But, damn it! That doesn’t solve the question of where I’m going to get another review to fill those extra two pages. I don’t feel as though I’m going to write more than that one I’m interested in.”

“I’ve just been reading a book that I’d like to review,” June put in.

Hugh looked at her hopefully.

“It’s an old copy of Aurora Leigh that I picked up in a secondhand store over on Third Avenue, printed in eighteen seventy-seven or thereabouts. I’ve read Aurora Leigh before and it’s been reviewed before. But this is an exceptional copy. There’s nothing like it in the world. Better than any first edition. It’s a present some young woman made to a friend of hers fifty years ago, but before she made the gift she went through it calling attention to different parts of it in marginal notes. And it seems from the notes that both of them were ardent suffragettes and indignant at the part they had to play in life as stay-at-homes.”

“That sounds as though it would be amusing,” Hugh said enthusiastically. “We could call it ‘Review of the marginal notes in an old edition of Aurora Leigh.’ You couldn’t have it done by tomorrow, could you?”

“Sure,” June agreed willingly. “I’m so interested in the book that it would be easy to write a review of it. I thought of it in fact, but was too lazy to do it. Now that there is some reason for it and somebody wants it, I’ll get right to work.”

A week after that Hugh Brace telephoned June at her office inviting her to lunch with him the next day. When she met him in a little restaurant near the Flame office, he showed her the proof of her review and it looked far more dignified to her than any of the signed “stories” that she had seen under her name in the Clarion. Only her initials were signed to it.

“And now,” said Hugh, “how would you like to have a steady editorial position on the Flame? Do you know anything about makeup or type or proof reading? No. Well those things don’t matter because I can teach them to you very easily. What really matters is whether you have good taste and from the tone of your review, I think you have. You can’t tell anything from your newspaper work, you know. Journalism is beyond taste, it seems to me.”

That was how June felt about it.

“What we want is literary taste and I guess you have it. Alaric is going to spend most of the summer lecturing in the west on poetry⁠—woman’s clubs, you know, and I’ve kicked about the burden of work falling on me. So he’s agreed to pay ten dollars a week to someone who will assist me.”

“And what’ll I have to do?” asked June breathless.

“Well, the simplest thing is to read proof every month after the material has gone to the press. You’ve got to be very careful about that. We’re exceptionally meticulous. We can’t afford good paper, so we pay as much attention to the printing and makeup as we can.

“Every day you read the contributions that come into the office, sending back most of them of course. Those that aren’t any good go back with printed slips. If you like what is sent in in the way of poetry or story or article and yet think that it isn’t good enough to print or suited to the magazine, you can write a little note to send back with it. We don’t pay for anything we accept, so we have to be as appreciative as we have time to be.

“You also interview the people that come to the office to see me or any other editor, taking the place of a private secretary which none of us has ever had. In general you add to the dignity of the office. And of course every month you’ll have to have one or two reviews written. I dummy up the magazine and I’ll show you how to do it so you can help.”

“You’ll have to show me how to write book reviews,” June told him. “You said there were three ways, but you only told me one of them. I understand how that one is done all right, but I don’t think that I’d have self-confidence enough to write a book review in the first person, applying my personal experience to it as a test of worth.”

There was no need to say whether or not she would accept the position. The expression on her face when Hugh mentioned it told him that. He told her before they parted that he was sorry her pay would be five dollars less than she had received on the Clarion but that she would work only five hours a day most of the month.

June had a feeling that she had graduated from journalism, and mentally agreed with her father, when she set out to her afternoon assignments, that newspaper work was not a job for a woman. She almost strutted.

June took it for granted the next Monday when she set out for the Flame office that her duties began at nine. Her first eagerness for this new and responsible position made her wake up hours too early. It was still dark but there was a softness about the sky which pressed against the window, promising dawn. Too drowsy to get out of bed to look at her watch on the bureau, she lay there, watching the window. The shades had been left up, contrary to her custom, for she was used to sleeping late and she wished the first light to awaken her. As she watched, the sky changed to violet, then became sickly pale. There was a sudden chirping of birds on the neighboring housetops.

From the river came the sound of a man whistling the Star Spangled Banner, all out of tune. He was silent and the river seemed empty. Then a tug sneezed violently. A few coughs of the engine, a grating and creaking against the pier, clearly heard although it was two blocks away, and a gentle rhythmical chugging and steaming. A man called out. Someone answered. Then the boat swished past leaving only the tentative caress of the waves against the little beach; like a baby’s lips pressing against its mother’s breast when it is not quite hungry, June thought. A tender, happy sound. And she lay there and appreciated her simile until the first rays of the sun reddened the room.

It was good to live in the daylight again. Although she had forced herself to rise every morning at eleven while she was working on the Clarion, she felt that she had lived at night for seven months. It was springtime, and early morning, so she hopped out of bed, splashed through her bathing, mended a pair of stockings and dressed. By this time it was seven o’clock. Whistling almost as disjointedly as the man on the river had, she started out, reflecting that she had time to walk to the office.

Breakfasts at seven in April always taste good to you. Both the month and the hour are in their favor. Poached eggs on toast, the latter thick with fresh butter, coffee that is half milk, the paper which has the most features in it propped up against the water carafe before you. You can get such a breakfast in some of the East Side Jewish bakeries. The very sounds of the elevated, the people in the street, the waiter beside the steaming coffee urn, are crisp.

It takes three-quarters of an hour to read and appreciate a newspaper thoroughly. It was after eight when June was swinging along the strangely clear sidewalks of Fifth Avenue and exactly nine when she passed the thirty-sixth block and reached Fourteenth Street where the office was then situated.

The elevator boy looked very drowsy to June who was glowing. On the fourth floor where the three office rooms were there was a complete silence. From behind the desk at one of the windows, a girl’s head popped up.

June named herself.

“O-o-oh! You’re Miss Henreddy. Mr. Brace told me that you’d be around this morning. But he ought to have told you⁠—nine o’clock is awfully early for the Flame. I got here early today because I left a book here that I was reading and I wanted to go on with it.” She held out Ann Veronica. “I’m the stenographer. The business manager gets here at ten and the advertising manager about noon. And Mr. Brace⁠—we never know what time to expect him. Lots of times he works at home.”

After showing June into the office which she was to share with Mr. Brace, the latter returned to the business office and Ann Veronica, leaving June to survey with pride her new domain.

There were four tables in the room, two of them stacked with drawings, manuscripts and proofs in the utmost confusion. Huge drawings stood against the wall, reprints of the same drawings were tacked around the room. On four sides, two shelves had been built and these were crowded with books that had been reviewed, as June could tell by the titles, and books to be reviewed. The one window in the room looked out over Union Square’s battleship.

June explored thoroughly and then sat down at her desk which held a pile of opened mail six inches high. Evidently Mr. Brace didn’t care for reading manuscripts. She did not wonder, as she read them carefully at first and then more swiftly, signing her initials to rejection blanks and enclosing them in return envelopes with their luckless contributions.

One page held these three:

There were two of them,

tight-corseted,

tight-lipped,

tight-minded,

jealous

of my loose dress,

loose breasts,

loose morals

the lover at my side.

My apartment house

stands like an old horse

that is being curried

Two men are shearing off its coat.

Pennies,

Lice,

Garlic and Waterspouts⁠—

When I would swing by my tail from the treetops

Life keeps a cord

About my neck.

Bad as the poems were, June took an enthusiastic interest in all of them. Mr. Brace had said that she was to write letters to those whose work seemed worthy of criticism if not publication and she ventured a few replies, not to be sent however until they had been approved. The work was engrossing, and it was one o’clock before she knew it. By two she had finished the stack, and selecting a book from the shelves which she thought she would like to review for the next number, she proceeded to lunch.

Mr. Brace did not appear in the office for several days and June continued the work which he had pointed out to her at her leisure. She took to arriving at ten, answering the mail and reading by the open window which looked out over Union Square. Artists dropped in now and then, bringing drawings for the next number of the magazine and stopped to chat.

There was a little round-faced, round-bodied man with a curl on the top of his head like one of the Katzenjammer kids. He was the best cartoonist on the staff and in addition to running a comic monthly magazine of his own, represented a large capitalist monthly, for which he drew political cartoons.

There were two serious young artists, one an American Jew and another a Hungarian, who often came together for an hour’s gossip with Brace or June, whoever happened to be in the office.

The younger group of radicals that June met every day no longer talked of the war. That had already been declared. Now it was the draft which followed upon the heels of the declaration on April first. Registration day was June fifth. Were they to register? If they were consistently opposed to war, it was inconsistent to register. Registering and taking the chance that they wouldn’t be conscripted and so have to plead conscientious objection seemed cowardly. Not to register would make them fugitives from the law.