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+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
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+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #69030 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69030)
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-The Project Gutenberg eBook of The girl in the crowd, by Albert
-Payson Terhune
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
-of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
-will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
-using this eBook.
-
-Title: The girl in the crowd
-
-Author: Albert Payson Terhune
-
-Release Date: October 9, 2022 [eBook #69030]
-
-Language: English
-
-Produced by: Roger Frank
-
-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GIRL IN THE CROWD ***
-
-
-
-
-
-                       The Girl in the Crowd
-
-                      by Albert Payson Terhune
-
-
-Stretch an invisible cord knee-high across the sidewalk at Broadway
-and Forty-second Street, and in five minutes a hundred prettier
-girls than Daisy Reynolds will stumble over it. (A hundred homelier
-girls too, for that matter!)
-
-Daisy was just the Girl in the Crowd. Look down the aisle of your
-subway- or surface- or L-car on the way home to-night, and you will
-see her. You will see her by the dozen.
-
-But you will not observe her, unless you look hard. She is not the
-type of girl to make you murmur fatuously: “Gee, but I wish she was
-_my_ stenographer!” Nor is she the sort that excites pity for her
-plainness. She is--yes, my term “the Girl in the Crowd” best fits
-her.
-
-For three years, after she left high school, Daisy occupied
-twenty-eight inches of space along one of the two sides of a room
-whose walls were wainscoted in honeycombed metal. At shelves in
-front of the honeycombing sat double lines of girls with ugly steel
-appliances over their frizzed or lanky hair. Their hands were ever
-flitting from spot to spot in the perforated wainscoting, deftly
-shifting plugs from hole to hole.
-
-An excrescence, like a misshapen black-rubber lily, jutted forth
-from the wall facing each girl. Into these lily-mouths the damsels
-were wont to croon such airy sentiments as these:
-
-“Schuyler 9051 don’t answer. --Yes, I’m ringing Aud’bon
-2973. --Beekman 4000 is busy. --I’ll give you Inf’ma-tion. --’Xcuse
-it, please. --No’m, _I_ didn’t cut you off. What number was you
-talking to? --Schuyler 4789 is still busy. --It’s just
-twelve-forty-two, by the c’rect time. --Number, please.”
-
-Up and down the double rank marched a horribly efficient woman who
-discouraged repartee and inter-desk conversation. The long room
-buzzed with the rhythmic droning of fifty voices and with the
-purring of countless plugs clicked into innumerable sockets.
-
-To end, once and for all, the killing suspense, the room wherein
-Daisy Reynolds toiled for the first three years of her business
-career was a telephone exchange.
-
-And at the three years’ end, she was assigned to the job of
-day-operator at the Clavichord Arms.
-
-
-The pay at the hotel was no larger than at the exchange; but there
-was always the possibility of tips, and the certainty of
-Christmas-money. Besides, there were chances to rest or to read
-between calls. On the whole, Daisy rejoiced at the change--as might
-a private who is made corporal.
-
-The Clavichord Arms is a glorious monument to New York’s efforts at
-boosting the high cost of living. The building occupies nearly a
-third of a city block, in length and depth, and it towers to the
-height of nine stories. Its facade and main entrance and
-cathedral-like lobby are rare samples of an architecture whose
-sacred motto is, “Put all your goods in the show-window.”
-
-When the high cost of living first menaced our suffering land,
-scores of such apartment-houses sprang into life, in order that New
-Yorkers might do their bit toward the upkeep of high prices. Here,
-at a rental ranging from fifteen hundred to five thousand dollars a
-year, one may live in quarters almost as commodious as those for
-which a suburbanite or smaller city’s dweller pays fifty dollars a
-month.
-
-And nobly did New York rally to the aid of the men who sought thus
-to get its coin. So quickly did the new apartments fill with tenants
-that more and yet more and more such buildings were run up.
-
-Men who grumbled right piteously at the advance of bread from five
-to six cents a loaf eagerly paid three thousand dollars a year for
-the privilege of living in the garish-fronted abodes, and they
-sneered at humbler friends who, for the same sum, rented thirty-room
-mansions in the suburbs.
-
-And this, by prosy degrees, brings us back to Daisy Reynolds.
-
-
-The Clavichord Arms’ interior decorator had used up all his
-ingenuity and his appropriation before he came to the cubby-hole
-behind the gilded elevators--the cubby-hole that served as the
-telephone-operator’s quarters. The cubby-hole was airless,
-windowless, low and sloped of ceiling, calcimined of wall, and
-equipped with no furniture at all except the switchboard-desk, a
-single kitchen chair, one eight-candle-power electric light and an
-iron clothes-hook.
-
-Here, for eight hours a day, sat Daisy Reynolds. Here, with stolid
-conscientiousness, she manipulated the plugs, that the building’s
-seventy tenants might waste their own and their friends’ time in
-endless phone-chats.
-
-It was dull and uninspiring and lonely in the dark cubby-hole, after
-the lights and the constant work and companionship of the Exchange.
-There was much more leisure, too, than at the Exchange.
-
-Daisy at first tried to enliven this leisure by reading. She loved
-to read; book or magazine--it was all the same to Daisy, so long as
-the hero and heroine at last outwitted the villain and came together
-at the altar.
-
-But there are drawbacks to reading all day--even to reading
-union-made love stories, by eight-candle-power light and with
-everlasting interruption from the switchboard. So Daisy, by way of
-amusement, began to “listen in.”
-
-“Listening in” is a plug-shifting process whereby the
-telephone-operator may hear any conversation over the wire. In some
-States, I understand, it is a misdemeanor. But perhaps there is no
-living operator who has not done it. In some private exchanges it is
-so common a custom that the cry of “Fish!” warns every other
-operator in the room that a particularly listenable talk is going
-on. This same cry of “Fish” is an invitation for all present to
-listen in.
-
-(Yes, your telephonic love-talk, your fierce love-spats and your
-sacredest love-secrets have been avidly heard--and possibly
-repeated--again and again, by Central. Remember that, next time.
-When you hear a faint click on the wire during your
-conversation,--and sometimes when you don’t,--an operator is pretty
-certain to be listening in.)
-
-At first Daisy was amused by what she heard. The parsimonious
-butcher-order of the house’s richest woman, the hiccoughed excuses
-of a husband whom business detained downtown, the vapid chatter of
-lad and lass, the scolding of slow dressmakers, the spicy anecdotes
-told by half-hour phone-gabblers--all these were a pleasant
-variation on the day’s routine. But at last, they began to pall. And
-just as they waxed tiresome--romance began.
-
-
-The voice in Apartment 60--a clear voice, girlish and
-vibrant--called up 9999-Z Worth. And Worth 9999-Z replied in a tone
-that fairly throbbed with eager longing. That was the beginning.
-Shamelessly--soon rapturously--Daisy Reynolds listened in.
-
-The voice in Apartment 60 belonged to a girl named Madeline. And
-Worth 9999-Z (whose first name, by the way, was Karl) spoke that
-foreign-sounding name _Madeline_ as though it were a phrase of
-hauntingly sweet church music. He and Madeline had known each other,
-it appeared, for some months; but only recently had they made the
-divine discovery of their mutual love. It was then that the phone
-talks had begun--the talks that varied in number from three to seven
-a day, and in length from three to thirty minutes.
-
-Always, now, promptly at nine o’clock in the morning, Karl called up
-his sweetheart. And always, an hour or so later, she called him up
-for a return-dialogue. Their talk was not mushy; it was beautiful.
-It thrilled with a love as deathless as the stars, a love through
-whose longing ran a current of unhappiness that Daisy could not
-understand.
-
-Daisy grew to live for those talks. They became part of her very
-life--the loveliest part. She was curt, almost snappish, when other
-calls interfered with the bliss of listening-in. More than once she
-shamelessly broke off the connection when Madeline chanced to be
-talking to some old bore at a time when Karl sought to speak to her.
-
-Karl, it seemed, was a downtown business man. As scientists
-reconstruct an entire fossil animal from a single bone of its left
-hind leg, so Daisy Reynolds built up a vision of Karl from his deep
-and powerful voice. He was tall, slender, graceful, yet broad of
-shoulder and deep of chest. Brown curls crisped above his white
-Greek forehead. His eyes were somber yet glowing. His age was from
-twenty-eight to thirty. He dressed like a collar advertisement.
-
-Madeline was still easier to reconstruct, from her voice. She too
-was tall. She was willowy and infinitely graceful--gold-brown of
-hair, dark blue of eye, with soft-molded little features and long
-jetty lashes. With such a voice, she could not have been otherwise.
-
-Daisy gathered from their earlier talks that Madeline’s family
-disapproved the match. She even learned, from something Karl said,
-that there was another suitor--one Phil--on whom the family smiled
-and whom Madeline cordially detested. Once or twice, too, Phil
-called up Apartment 60. He had a husky voice and spoke brief
-commonplaces. Madeline answered him listlessly and still more
-briefly. But he seldom phoned to her. And she never, by any chance,
-phoned to him.
-
-
-So the ardent, tenderly melancholy love-story wore on. The lovers
-would make appointments for clandestine meetings--would speak in
-joyous retrospect of luncheons or motor-drives of the preceding day.
-Evidently, Madeline’s cruel family kept stern watch upon her
-movements. Daisy used to smile in joyous approval at the girl’s
-dainty cleverness in outmaneuvering them and meeting her sweetheart.
-
-Ever through the glory of their love ran that black thread of
-melancholy. Apparently all the glad secret meetings and the adoring
-phone-talks could not make up to them for the family’s opposition.
-Daisy had to bite her lips, sometimes, to keep from breaking in on
-the conversation and demanding:
-
-“Why don’t you two run off and get married? They’d have to come
-around, then. And if they didn’t, why should you care?”
-
-To a girl cooped up alone all day in a stuffy cubby-hole,
-imagination is ten times stronger than to the girl whose thoughts
-can be distracted by outside things. To Daisy, immured in her
-dim-lighted cupboard behind the elevators, this romance of Karl and
-Madeline was fast becoming the very biggest thing in her drab life.
-
-These two lovers were as romantic, as poetical, as yearningly
-adoring as _Romeo_ and _Juliet_. Karl was as desperately jealous as
-_Othello_ or as the hero of one of Laura Jean Libbey’s greatest
-books. Madeline was _the Captive Maid_ come to life again. Oh, it
-was all very, very wonderful!
-
-Then came the day of jarring disillusionment, a day which Daisy
-followed by sobbing until midnight on her none-too-soft
-boarding-house bed, three blocks to westward.
-
-
-Promptly at nine that morning, as usual, Karl called up Apartment
-60.
-
-“Sweetheart,” he joyfully hailed Madeline, “I’ve just bought the new
-car. It’s a beauty. And you’re going to be the very first person to
-ride in it--to consecrate it.”
-
-“That’s darling of you!” replied Madeline in evident delight. “I’d
-rather ride in a wheelbarrow with you than in a Rolls-Royce
-with--with--”
-
-“With Phil?” asked Karl almost savagely.
-
-“With anybody,” she evaded. “Tell me more about the car. Is it--”
-
-“I’m not going to tell you,” he refused. “I’m going to show it to
-you instead. Here’s my idea: I’ll knock off work at noon and bring
-the car uptown. I’ll meet you at the subway kiosk at half-after
-twelve; we can run up to the Arrowhead to lunch, and then on up to
-the Tumble Inn for--”
-
-“But I can’t, dear--I _can’t_!” expostulated Madeline. “Don’t you
-remember? I told you I have to lunch with Phil and those people from
-Buffalo, at the Knickerbocker, at one o’clock. Oh, dear! I wish I
-didn’t have to. But I--”
-
-“Phone him you’re sick,” urged Karl. “I’ve set my heart on
-christening the new car this way.”
-
-“I could get away to-morrow--” she began.
-
-“But _I_ can’t,” he said. “I’ve a directors’ meeting at three. Oh,
-come along to-day, Beautiful! Tell Phil you’re sick and--”
-
-“And have him come rushing up here, in a fidget, for fear I’m going
-to die?” she suggested. “That is just what Phil would do. No, dear,
-I--”
-
-“Then tell him you don’t _want_ to lunch with him,” urged Karl,
-losing patience as a man will when some babyishly cherished
-woman-plan of his is upset. “Tell him you have to go to your
-sister’s or--”
-
-“I can’t, Karl!” she declared; and she added, beseechingly: “Don’t
-be unreasonable, dear boy. Please don’t. And don’t be cross; it
-makes me so unhappy when you are. You know how hard I try to do
-everything you want me to--and how glad I am to. But I _can’t_ get
-out of this luncheon. Phil especially wants me to be there. These
-Buffalo people are old friends of his.”
-
-“Why should you have to go there, just because he wants you to?”
-demanded Karl, far more crankily than ever Daisy had heard him
-speak. “Why do you? You aren’t his slave.”
-
-“No,” returned Madeline, her own temper beginning to fray, “but I am
-his _wife_. You seem to forget that.”
-
-“I don’t forget it half as often as _you_ do!” flashed Karl.
-
-At which brutally truthful reply, the receiver of Apartment 60’s
-wire clanked down upon its hook. Nor could all of Karl’s repeated
-efforts bring Madeline back to the telephone.
-
-
-Daisy Reynolds slumped forward upon the switchboard desk, her face
-in her hands, her slim body a-shake. She felt as though her every
-nerve had been wrenched. She was sick all over. This, then, was the
-wondrous romance in which she had reveled. This was the melancholy,
-beauteous love-story which had become part of her own colorless
-life! A vulgar intrigue between a married woman (not a wife, but a
-married woman--Daisy now realized the difference between the two)
-and a man not her husband!
-
-The iridescent bubbles of romance burst into thinnest air. Daisy was
-numb with the horror and disgust of it all. Even of old she had
-fastidiously refused to listen in when another girl’s merry cry of
-“Fish!” had told that some such illicit dialogue was on the wire.
-And now, for weeks, she had been raptly listening to just such
-talks.
-
-She loathed herself for the silly bubbles she had blown. Their
-lovely sheen was miasmic slime. They were filled with foul gases. A
-great shame possessed Daisy Reynolds.
-
-Next morning Daisy came to work swollen-eyed from futile crying over
-the death of her dreams, and dull-headed from too little sleep. Half
-an hour later, promptly at nine, Karl called up Apartment 60.
-
-Daisy’s hand trembled as she made the connection. She hated herself
-for listening in. Yet from morbid fascination she did it.
-
-“Darling!” was Karl’s remorsefully passionate greeting as Madeline
-answered the phone-bell’s summons. “I’m so sorry! So horribly sorry!
-I spoke rottenly to you yesterday. Wont you forgive me? _Please_
-do!”
-
-“Please don’t let us speak about it,” began Madeline stiffly.
-
-Then her shell of offendedness collapsed, and she went on with a
-break in her sweet voice.
-
-“Oh, I’m so glad you called up! I was so afraid you wouldn’t. And I
-was going to try so hard not to phone to you. But I knew I’d do
-it--I _knew_ I would--if you didn’t call me first. I’ve been
-terribly unhappy, dear.”
-
-“You’ve had nothing on me, in that,” he made answer. “I haven’t
-slept all night, thinking how I spoke to you. It was our first
-quarrel. And it was all my fault.”
-
-“It wasn’t,” she contradicted chokily. “It was all mine. I shouldn’t
-have been hurt by what you said about my forgetting so often that--”
-
-“Don’t, dear,” he begged. “Don’t! It was a rotten thing for me to
-say.”
-
-“It was--it was true,” she replied, her voice quavering as she
-fought back the tears. “But you told me yourself that you don’t
-blame me. You know what my life with him has been, from the very
-beginning. And till I met you I used to wish I were dead. Oh, you
-_can’t_ blame me for forgetting him, for--for _you_!”
-
-“You’re an angel!” he declared. “I’m not fit to touch your hand. But
-my love for you is the only thing there is in my life. And it’s
-brought me the only happiness I ever knew. I used to think I’d like
-to kill myself if it weren’t for my mother. And now you’ve given me
-something--everything--to live for. I love you so, Madeline! Are you
-sure you’ve forgiven me?”
-
-“_Forgiven_ you?” she echoed. “Why, Karl, I _love_ you.”
-
-Yes, the reply was banal enough. But the tone was not, nor was the
-wordless exclamation of worship with which Karl received it. And to
-her own self-disgust Daisy felt a stir of answering emotion in her
-own breast.
-
-Just then she was required to connect Apartment 42 with the market,
-and at once afterward to put through a long-distance call for the
-building’s superintendent. And when next she sought to listen in,
-Karl and Madeline were finishing their talk. All Daisy could catch
-was Madeline’s childish query:
-
-“Can’t we please try out the new car to-morrow, if the directors’
-meeting is going to keep you this afternoon?”
-
-And he answered gayly:
-
-“To blue blazes with the directors! We’re going to Tumble Inn
-to-day, you and I, sweetheart--even if New York doesn’t get a stroke
-of business done south of Canal Street all afternoon. Good-by.
-You’ll be sure to call me up later, wont you?”
-
-
-Daisy sat back in her wabbly chair to take mental account of stock.
-
-She was amazed at herself--amazed, and a bit displeased, though not
-as much so as she could have wished. All her ideas and ideals seemed
-to be as wabbly as the kitchen chair she sat in. Womanlike, she
-straightway began to justify herself. True, an hour earlier, she had
-been filled with contempt for these two. Equally true, she was now
-irresistibly drawn to them again--which most certainly called for a
-reason; so she supplied the reason:
-
-Madeline had been forced into a marriage, in mere childhood, with a
-man she did not love. And had she not said, “You know what my life
-with him has been, from the very beginning?” That alone told the
-story--the heartbreaking story of neglected wifehood, of
-ill-treatment, of a starved soul.
-
-Who was Daisy to blame this pathetic young wife if she had at last
-let love into her heart after years of bondage to a brute? Daisy
-recalled Phil’s husky voice. From it she built up a physique that
-was a blend of _Simon Legree’s_ and _Falstaff’s_, with a tinge of
-_Bill Sikes_. And, her moral sense deserting her, she realized that
-right or wrong she was steadfastly on the side of the lovers.
-
-During the days that followed, she listened in again, with all her
-old-time hero-and-heroine-worship. Now she understood the strain of
-melancholy in these two people’s love. It was the hopelessness of
-that love which made them so sad, in the midst of their stolen
-happiness.
-
-Once, in a free moment, Daisy slipped from her cubby-hole and into
-the superintendent’s office, to ask for a stronger light-bulb. There
-on the wall hung a typed list of the house’s tenants. Stealing a
-glance at it while the superintendent’s back was turned, Daisy ran
-her eye down the list until she came to the number she wanted:
-
-Apartment 60--Mr. and Mrs. Philip Caleb Vanbrugh.
-
-_Caleb!_ Yes, that was the sort of middle name her ugly-tempered
-clod of a husband would have been likely to own. The names
-_Madeline_ and _Caleb_ could no more blend than could violets and
-prunes. Doubly, now, Daisy’s heart was with the lovers.
-
-One qualm, only, marred her sympathy. From the fact that Karl always
-spoke of Vanbrugh by his first name, the men apparently were
-friends. And to woo one’s friend’s wife is black vileness. Even
-Daisy knew that. So she readjusted matters in her elastic mind, and
-decided the men were merely close business acquaintances, and that
-friendship did not enter into their relations. Daisy felt better
-about it, after that--much better.
-
-
-One morning when Daisy connected the wire for the lovers and
-prepared for her daily feast of listening in, a sharp whir from
-another apartment in the house drew her back to earth. In her
-nervous haste to make the new connection and get back to her
-listening, she awkwardly knocked out a plug or two. Absent-mindedly
-she readjusted them, trying meantime to catch what the second caller
-was trying to say to her.
-
-This caller was a fussy woman in Apartment 12, who first wanted to
-know the correct time and then asked for a wire to Philadelphia. A
-full minute elapsed before Daisy could get back to the lovers. And
-as she turned again to their talk, she realized with a guilty start
-that in the mix-up of the various plugs she had left the switch
-open.
-
-Have you ever called up a telephone number and been let in on a
-conversation already going on between the person you called up and
-somebody else? It gives one an absurdly guilty feeling. And it means
-the switch has carelessly been left open, so that anybody calling up
-can tap the wire. That is the condition in which Daisy had chanced
-to leave the switch to Apartment 60. Eagerly she stretched forth her
-hand to repair the error. As she did so, three sentences struck her
-ear. They were spoken in quick succession by three people--as
-follows:
-
-“Good-by, darling,” said Karl. “I’ll be there at one.”
-
-“Good-by, boy dear,” answered Madeline. “I’ll call you up again
-before then.”
-
-“Who in hell are _you_?” bellowed a third and huskier voice. “And
-what do you mean by calling my wife darling?”
-
-_Click!_ All three wires were shut off by one lightning swirl of
-Daisy’s fingers.
-
-
-She sat aghast. The third voice had most assuredly been
-Phil’s--Philip Caleb Vanbrugh’s. What had she done? What _hadn’t_
-she done? Then she became aware of a buzzing call.
-
-“Clavichord Arms,” she said primly in reply as she sought to rally
-her shaky nerves.
-
-“That the house operator?” harshly demanded the husky voice. “I
-called up my apartment--Apartment 60--a minute ago, and my wife was
-talking over the phone. What number was she talking to?”
-
-“What apartment did you say?” asked Daisy.
-
-“Sixty!”
-
-“Apartment 60 hasn’t had a call this morning,” solemnly answered
-Daisy, her throat tightening under the grip of outraged conscience.
-“Nor it hasn’t sent in one, either.”
-
-“I’d swear that was my wife’s voice,” growled the man. “I couldn’t
-place the man’s. But it was my wife’s, all right. And--”
-
-“It may ’a’ been Sarah Bernhardt’s voice, for all I know,” snapped
-Daisy. “But it didn’t come from Apartment 60. Not any calls have
-been turned in from there since I came on.”
-
-“You’re sure?” he asked in sour doubt.
-
-“You can look at my slip here on the desk,” pertly retorted Daisy.
-“All the calls are marked on that.”
-
-“No,” said the man slowly, “I wont do that--because, if you’ve lied,
-you wouldn’t be past altering the slip. What I’m going to do is to
-ask the building’s superintendent for an itemized list of all the
-calls from my apartment for the past month or two. He’s obliged to
-furnish it on demand. That ought to tell me something.”
-
-
-He hung up. Daisy sat gasping. Before her mental gaze ranged the
-memory of forty-odd calls a month to Worth 9999-Z. Then she came to
-a decision. Out into the marble-lined hallway she went. There she
-corralled the second elevator-boy and bribed him with twenty-five
-cents to take charge of the switchboard for a few minutes. A moment
-or so later, a colored maid was ushering her into Apartment 60.
-
-In the middle of a garish living-room stood Daisy, trying
-desperately to think straight. The curtains parted, and a woman came
-into the room. Daisy blinked at her in bewilderment--then said:
-
-“I should like to speak to Mrs. Vanbrugh, please. It’s very
-important.”
-
-“I’m Mrs. Vanbrugh,” answered the woman, eying the girl with
-curiosity.
-
-“I--I mean Mrs. Madeline Vanbrugh,” faltered the girl.
-
-“I am Mrs. Madeline Vanbrugh,” was the answer, and now Daisy
-recognized the voice, “--Mrs. Philip C. Vanbrugh. What can I do for
-you?”
-
-Daisy could not answer at once. Around her dumfounded head the
-bubbles were bursting like a myriad Roman-candle balls.
-
-This woman framed in the doorway was Madeline--_her_ Madeline? This
-woman whose dumpy figure was swathed in a bedraggled negligee that
-had once been clean! This woman whose scalp was haloed by a crescent
-of kid-curlers that held in hard lumps her brass-hued front hair!
-This woman with the hard, light eyes and sagging mouth-lines and
-beaklike nose--this woman whose face was sallow and coarse, because
-it had not yet received its daily dress of make-up! This--_this_ was
-Madeline!
-
-“What can I do for you?” the woman was saying for the second time,
-her early air of curiosity merging into one of dawning hostility.
-
-“I am the switchboard operator downstairs,” said Daisy faintly.
-
-
-A look of terror that had all along lurked in the hard eyes now
-sprang to new light.
-
-“What do you want of me?”
-
-“I want to tell you your husband heard the last part of your
-phone-talk just now,” returned Daisy conscientiously, though her
-heart was no longer in her mission of rescue. “He called me up about
-it. I--”
-
-“You told him?” blithered the woman in panic.
-
-“I told him your apartment hadn’t had a call all morning.”
-
-“You _did_?” cried the woman, her sweet voice sharpening to a
-peacock screech of relief. “Good for you! Good for _you_! And you
-were perfectly right to come directly up here for your pay. What do
-you think would be fair reward? Don’t be afraid to say. You’ve done
-me a great service, and--”
-
-“I don’t understand you,” stammered Daisy. “I don’t understand you
-at all. If you think I did this for money--”
-
-“My dear,” laughed the woman nervously, “we do everything for money.
-So you needn’t be ashamed. We don’t always _say_ it’s for money. But
-it is. That’s why I got into this scrape. My husband is the
-stingiest man in New York. He pretends his business is on such a
-ragged edge that he can’t give me any extra cash. But I know better.
-That’s why I let myself get interested in Mr. Schreiner. He is a
-widower, and he has more money than he can--”
-
-“Oh!” cried Daisy in sick horror.
-
-“So he’ll make it good to you for all that you’ve done for us,”
-prattled on the woman, without noticing. “He’ll--”
-
-“That isn’t why I came up here!” broke in Daisy angrily. “And I
-don’t want your filthy money, either. I wont touch it. I came up
-here to warn you that your husband is going to--”
-
-
-The buzz of the flat’s front-door bell interrupted her. The woman,
-too, turned nervously to look. They heard the maid fumble with the
-knob. Then some one brushed past the servant and into the
-living-room.
-
-The intruder was a chunky and yellowish man, of late middle
-years--incredibly bald of head and suspiciously black of eyebrows.
-He caught sight of Mrs. Vanbrugh, who chanced to be standing between
-him and Daisy. And he exclaimed:
-
-“I jumped into a taxi and hustled here, as soon as I left the phone.
-I didn’t dare call up again. Do you suppose he recognized me?”
-
-Yes, the voice was indubitably the voice of Karl. But the fat and
-elderly swain was in anything but a loverly mood. He was a-quake
-with terror. Beads of sweat trickled down on his brows and mustache.
-His yellowish complexion was blotchy from fear. He was not a pretty
-sight.
-
-Daisy by this time should have been past surprise. Yet her
-preconceived vision of Karl--of young, athletic, hero-featured
-Karl--died hard and in much and sudden pain. Poor Daisy! Until he
-spoke, she had mistaken him for the husband.
-
-“If he knew my voice,” babbled the man, “we’re up against it. I’d
-better get out of town for a while, I suppose. Maybe he--”
-
-“Don’t worry!” interposed Madeline acidly. “You wont have to run
-away from town and leave me to face it all. This girl has gotten us
-out of it. She is the operator downstairs. Phil called up and asked
-her all sorts of questions. And she told him the apartment hadn’t
-had a call all morning. Isn’t she a brick?”
-
-A sound like the exhaust of an empty soda-siphon broke from between
-Karl’s puffy lips--a sound of pure if porcine reaction from dread.
-
-“Good girl!” he croaked, still hoarse with recent fright. “_Dandy_
-girl!”
-
-He sought to pat Daisy approvingly on the shoulder with one pudgy
-hand. She recoiled.
-
-“How much?” he asked jovially, not observing the stark repulsion in
-her face and gesture as she shrank away. “How much, little girl?
-You’ve done a mighty big stroke of business this day. What do you
-say I owe you? Or will you leave it to me to do the right thing by
-you?”
-
-He juggled a bloated wad of bills from his trousers pocket as he
-spoke. And at his motion something in Daisy’s taut brain seemed to
-snap.
-
-
-The girl did not “see red.” She saw only two fat and greasy
-creatures who thought she was as vile as they--who took it for
-granted that she had done this thing to extort a rich tip from them,
-for covering up their sin. And wrath gave her back her momentarily
-lost power of speech.
-
-“_Oh!_” she cried in utter loathing, “you’d dare _pay_ me for trying
-to help you? If I’d known what you both are, all the money in New
-York wouldn’t have gotten me to lift a finger for you. You
-horrible--”
-
-“There, there, my dear!” oilily soothed Karl. “You’re a little bit
-excited. Calm down and tell us how much--”
-
-“If you don’t want pay,” shrilled Madeline, “what did you come here
-for?”
-
-“What did I come here for?” echoed Daisy, white with rage. “To make
-a fool of myself, of course. To warn you that your husband is going
-to get the call-lists for the past month from the super, and find
-out from them what numbers you’ve been calling up. That’s--”
-
-“Good Lord!” gabbled the woman in crass horror.
-
-Karl’s fat jaw dropped upon his fatter throat. He tried to speak. He
-could only gargle.
-
-“That’s why I came here!” finished Daisy, striding past them toward
-the door. “To warn you. And now I’ve done it. Your husband’s liable
-to be streaking back home any minute now. And I’m going. And if
-either of you says any more about money, I’ll--”
-
-She was making for the outer door. But for all her start, Karl
-reached it three lengths ahead of her. He banged it shut after him
-as he darted out. Through the panel Daisy could hear him ringing
-frantically for the elevator.
-
-Daisy was following, when a choking sound made her turn back. The
-woman still stood in the middle of the living-room. Her hard, light
-eyes were dark and dilated. Her sallow face was haggard and ghastly.
-Yet her features were unmoved. There was about her bearing and
-expression a certain hopeless courage that lent dignity to the squat
-figure.
-
-
-Daisy hesitated--then turned back into the room. The woman stared
-dully past her toward the doorway through which Karl had vanished.
-She acknowledged the girl’s presence by muttering, in a curiously
-dead voice, more to herself than to Daisy:
-
-“Men are queer animals, aren’t they? He has sworn to me, time and
-again, that he’d stand by me to the end.”
-
-“Yes,” assented Daisy in perfect simplicity, “I’ve heard him say it
-to you myself--twice.”
-
-“He’s gone,” went on the woman in that same dead voice so unlike her
-own. “He’s gone. And I’m left to hold the bag. I--I think I’m cured.
-There are worse things than a husband who loves you--even if he
-can’t give you all the money you want to spend. Phil would never
-have run away like that, from _anything_--not that the lesson is
-likely to do me any good, now.”
-
-“Here!” exclaimed the girl, shaking the dazed Madeline roughly by
-the shoulder. “I’m going to get you out of this. I don’t know why,
-but I am. Maybe I’ve a bill of my own to pay, as well as you have.
-We’ve all done some learning to-day, I guess. And learning isn’t on
-the free-list.”
-
-“But--”
-
-“Go to the phone right away,” commanded Daisy, “and call up the
-super. Tell him you’ve got to see him, up here, in a hurry. Act
-scared. Tell him it can’t wait a single minute. Get him up here.
-That’s the main thing. Then--then tell him you want new faucets in
-the bathroom. Or tell him anything at all. Do as I say. Jump! There
-isn’t much time to waste. Hubby’s sure to be hotfooting it home. And
-when hubby comes, deny everything. _Deny!_ And keep on denying. He
-wont have any proof, remember that. _He’ll have no proof._ Pay for
-the lie by being a whole lot decenter to him, forever-after-amen.”
-
-
-Moving away from the dumfounded woman, Daisy bolted out of the flat
-and was lucky enough to catch a down-going elevator. She reached the
-ground floor just as the building’s perplexed superintendent came to
-the shaft on his way to answer Madeline’s urgent summons.
-
-Into the superintendent’s deserted office sped Daisy. Going directly
-to his unlocked desk, she rummaged feverishly amid its drawers until
-she found what she wanted.
-
-Crumpling and pocketing the telephone-sheets for the past two
-months, she crossed to the file cabinet, hunted through a stack of
-dusty papers and drew forth the sheaf of penciled telephone-slips
-for the preceding year.
-
-Selecting from these the slips for the two corresponding months, she
-put back the rest of the Sheaf. Then, changing with eraser and
-pencil the date of the year on the two slips she had abstracted from
-the cabinet, she put them in the drawer. After which, feeling oddly
-weak about the knees, she started out of the office.
-
-At the door she almost collided with the returning superintendent.
-Vexed at having been called upstairs in such haste on an utterly
-trivial errand, he very naturally wreaked his ill-temper on the
-first subordinate he chanced to meet--which was Daisy.
-
-“What are you doing away from your switchboard?” he snarled. “I
-won’t stand for any loafing. Get that into your mind, once and for
-all. What did you want in here, anyhow?”
-
-“I came in to see you, sir,” was the girl’s demure reply.
-
-“What do you want of me?” he rasped.
-
-“I wanted to tell you I’m leaving here to-morrow,” said Daisy. “I’m
-going back to work at the Exchange. I’m lonesome on this job. There
-aren’t enough things happening at the Clavichord Arms. It’s too
-slow--not enough excitement for a live wire like me. That’s all,
-sir.”
-
-
-[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the October 1917 issue
-of Blue Book magazine.]
-
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-<p style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The girl in the crowd, by Albert Payson Terhune</p>
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-<p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: The girl in the crowd</p>
-<p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Albert Payson Terhune</p>
-<p style='display:block; text-indent:0; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: October 9, 2022 [eBook #69030]</p>
-<p style='display:block; text-indent:0; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</p>
-  <p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; text-align:left'>Produced by: Roger Frank</p>
-<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GIRL IN THE CROWD ***</div>
-
-<h1>The Girl in the Crowd</h1>
-<div style='text-align:center'>by Albert Payson Terhune</div>
-<div class='figcenter' style='width:80%; max-width:1578px'>
-    <img src='images/illus-fpc.jpg' alt='' style='width:100%;height:auto;' />
-</div>
-
-<p>Stretch an invisible cord knee-high across the sidewalk at Broadway
-and Forty-second Street, and in five minutes a hundred prettier girls
-than Daisy Reynolds will stumble over it. (A hundred homelier girls too,
-for that matter!)</p>
-
-<p>Daisy was just the Girl in the Crowd. Look down the aisle of your
-subway-&#160;or surface-&nbsp;or L-car on the way home to-night, and you will see
-her. You will see her by the dozen.</p>
-
-<p>But you will not observe her, unless you look hard. She is not the
-type of girl to make you murmur fatuously: “Gee, but I wish she was
-<i>my</i> stenographer!” Nor is she the sort that excites pity for her
-plainness. She is&mdash;yes, my term “the Girl in the Crowd” best fits
-her.</p>
-
-<p>For three years, after she left high school, Daisy occupied
-twenty-eight inches of space along one of the two sides of a room whose
-walls were wainscoted in honeycombed metal. At shelves in front of the
-honeycombing sat double lines of girls with ugly steel appliances over
-their frizzed or lanky hair. Their hands were ever flitting from spot to
-spot in the perforated wainscoting, deftly shifting plugs from hole to
-hole.</p>
-
-<p>An excrescence, like a misshapen black-rubber lily, jutted forth from
-the wall facing each girl. Into these lily-mouths the damsels were wont
-to croon such airy sentiments as these:</p>
-
-<p>“Schuyler 9051 don’t answer.&nbsp;&mdash;Yes,&#160;I’m ringing Aud’bon 2973.&#160;&#8212;Beekman
-4000 is busy.&#160;&#8212;I’ll give you Inf’ma-tion.&#160;&#8212;’Xcuse it, please.&#160;&#8212;No’m,
-<i>I</i> didn’t cut you off. What number was you talking to?&#160;&#8212;Schuyler
-4789 is still busy.&#160;&#8212;It’s just twelve-forty-two, by the c’rect
-time.&#160;&#8212;Number, please.”</p>
-
-<p>Up and down the double rank marched a horribly efficient woman who
-discouraged repartee and inter-desk conversation. The long room buzzed
-with the rhythmic droning of fifty voices and with the purring of
-countless plugs clicked into innumerable sockets.</p>
-
-<p>To end, once and for all, the killing suspense, the room wherein
-Daisy Reynolds toiled for the first three years of her business career
-was a telephone exchange.</p>
-
-<p>And at the three years’ end, she was assigned to the job of
-day-operator at the Clavichord Arms.</p>
-
-
-<p class='sb'>The pay at the hotel was no larger than at
-the exchange; but there was always the possibility of tips, and the
-certainty of Christmas-money. Besides, there were chances to rest or to
-read between calls. On the whole, Daisy rejoiced at the change&#8212;as might
-a private who is made corporal.</p>
-
-<p>The Clavichord Arms is a glorious monument to New York’s
-efforts at boosting the high cost of living. The building occupies
-nearly a third of a city block, in length and depth, and it towers to
-the height of nine stories. Its facade and main entrance and
-cathedral-like lobby are rare samples of an architecture whose sacred
-motto is, “Put all your goods in the show-window.”</p>
-
-<p>When the high cost of living first menaced our suffering land, scores
-of such apartment-houses sprang into life, in order that New Yorkers
-might do their bit toward the upkeep of high prices. Here, at a rental
-ranging from fifteen hundred to five thousand dollars a year, one may
-live in quarters almost as commodious as those for which a suburbanite
-or smaller city’s dweller pays fifty dollars a month.</p>
-
-<p>And nobly did New York rally to the aid of the men who sought thus to
-get its coin. So quickly did the new apartments fill with tenants that
-more and yet more and more such buildings were run up.</p>
-
-<p>Men who grumbled right piteously at the advance of bread from five to
-six cents a loaf eagerly paid three thousand dollars a year for the
-privilege of living in the garish-fronted abodes, and they sneered at
-humbler friends who, for the same sum, rented thirty-room mansions in
-the suburbs.</p>
-
-<p>And this, by prosy degrees, brings us back to Daisy
-Reynolds.</p>
-
-
-<p class='sb'>The Clavichord Arms’ interior decorator had used up all his
-ingenuity and his appropriation before he came to the cubby-hole behind
-the gilded elevators&#8212;the cubby-hole that served as the
-telephone-operator’s quarters. The cubby-hole was airless, windowless,
-low and sloped of ceiling, calcimined of wall, and equipped with no
-furniture at all except the switchboard-desk, a single kitchen chair,
-one eight-candle-power electric light and an iron
-clothes-hook.</p>
-
-<p>Here, for eight hours a day, sat Daisy Reynolds. Here, with stolid
-conscientiousness, she manipulated the plugs, that the building’s
-seventy tenants might waste their own and their friends’ time in endless
-phone-chats.</p>
-
-<p>It was dull and uninspiring and lonely in the dark cubby-hole, after
-the lights and the constant work and companionship of the Exchange.
-There was much more leisure, too, than at the Exchange.</p>
-
-<p>Daisy at first tried to enliven this leisure by reading. She loved to
-read; book or magazine&#8212;it was all the same to Daisy, so long as the hero
-and heroine at last outwitted the villain and came together at the
-altar.</p>
-
-<p>But there are drawbacks to reading all day&#8212;even to reading union-made
-love stories, by eight-candle-power light and with everlasting
-interruption from the switchboard. So Daisy, by way of amusement, began
-to “listen in.”</p>
-
-<p>“Listening in” is a plug-shifting process whereby the
-telephone-operator may hear any conversation over the wire. In some
-States, I understand, it is a misdemeanor. But perhaps there is no
-living operator who has not done it. In some private exchanges it is so
-common a custom that the cry of “Fish!” warns every other operator in
-the room that a particularly listenable talk is going on. This same cry
-of “Fish” is an invitation for all present to listen in.</p>
-
-<p>(Yes, your telephonic love-talk, your fierce love-spats and your
-sacredest love-secrets have been avidly heard&#8212;and possibly
-repeated&#8212;again and again, by Central. Remember that, next time. When you
-hear a faint click on the wire during your conversation,&#8212;and sometimes
-when you don’t,&#8212;an operator is pretty certain to be listening
-in.)</p>
-
-<p>At first Daisy was amused by what she heard. The parsimonious
-butcher-order of the house’s richest woman, the hiccoughed excuses of a
-husband whom business detained downtown, the vapid chatter of lad and
-lass, the scolding of slow dressmakers, the spicy anecdotes told by
-half-hour phone-gabblers&#8212;all these were a pleasant variation on the
-day’s routine. But at last, they began to pall. And just as they waxed
-tiresome&#8212;romance began.</p>
-
-
-<p class='sb'>The voice in Apartment 60&#8212;a clear voice, girlish and
-vibrant&#8212;called up 9999-Z Worth. And Worth 9999-Z replied in a tone that
-fairly throbbed with eager longing. That was the beginning.
-Shamelessly&#8212;soon rapturously&#8212;Daisy Reynolds listened in.</p>
-
-<p>The voice in Apartment 60 belonged to a girl named Madeline. And
-Worth 9999-Z (whose first name, by the way, was Karl) spoke that
-foreign-sounding name <i>Madeline</i> as though it were a phrase of
-hauntingly sweet church music. He and Madeline had known each other, it
-appeared, for some months; but only recently had they made the divine
-discovery of their mutual love. It was then that the phone talks had
-begun&#8212;the talks that varied in number from three to seven a day, and in
-length from three to thirty minutes.</p>
-
-<p>Always, now, promptly at nine o’clock in the morning, Karl called up
-his sweetheart. And always, an hour or so later, she called him up for a
-return-dialogue. Their talk was not mushy; it was beautiful. It thrilled
-with a love as deathless as the stars, a love through whose longing ran
-a current of unhappiness that Daisy could not understand.</p>
-
-<p>Daisy grew to live for those talks. They became part of her very
-life&#8212;the loveliest part. She was curt, almost snappish, when other calls
-interfered with the bliss of listening-in. More than once she
-shamelessly broke off the connection when Madeline chanced to be talking
-to some old bore at a time when Karl sought to speak to her.</p>
-
-<p>Karl, it seemed, was a downtown business man. As scientists
-reconstruct an entire fossil animal from a single bone of its left hind
-leg, so Daisy Reynolds built up a vision of Karl from his deep and
-powerful voice. He was tall, slender, graceful, yet broad of shoulder
-and deep of chest. Brown curls crisped above his white Greek forehead.
-His eyes were somber yet glowing. His age was from twenty-eight to
-thirty. He dressed like a collar advertisement.</p>
-
-<p>Madeline was still easier to reconstruct, from her voice. She too was
-tall. She was willowy and infinitely graceful&#8212;gold-brown of hair, dark
-blue of eye, with soft-molded little features and long jetty lashes.
-With such a voice, she could not have been otherwise.</p>
-
-<p>Daisy gathered from their earlier talks that Madeline’s family
-disapproved the match. She even learned, from something Karl said, that
-there was another suitor&#8212;one Phil&#8212;on whom the family smiled and whom
-Madeline cordially detested. Once or twice, too, Phil called up
-Apartment 60. He had a husky voice and spoke brief commonplaces.
-Madeline answered him listlessly and still more briefly. But he seldom
-phoned to her. And she never, by any chance, phoned to him.</p>
-
-
-<p class='sb'>So the ardent, tenderly melancholy love-story wore on. The lovers
-would make appointments for clandestine meetings&#8212;would speak in joyous
-retrospect of luncheons or motor-drives of the preceding day. Evidently,
-Madeline’s cruel family kept stern watch upon her movements. Daisy used
-to smile in joyous approval at the girl’s dainty cleverness in
-outmaneuvering them and meeting her sweetheart.</p>
-
-<p>Ever through the glory of their love ran that black thread of
-melancholy. Apparently all the glad secret meetings and the adoring
-phone-talks could not make up to them for the family’s opposition. Daisy
-had to bite her lips, sometimes, to keep from breaking in on the
-conversation and demanding:</p>
-
-<p>“Why don’t you two run off and get married? They’d have to come
-around, then. And if they didn’t, why should you care?”</p>
-
-<p>To a girl cooped up alone all day in a stuffy cubby-hole, imagination
-is ten times stronger than to the girl whose thoughts can be distracted
-by outside things. To Daisy, immured in her dim-lighted cupboard behind
-the elevators, this romance of Karl and Madeline was fast becoming the
-very biggest thing in her drab life.</p>
-
-<p>These two lovers were as romantic, as poetical, as
-yearningly adoring as <i>Romeo</i> and <i>Juliet</i>. Karl was as
-desperately jealous as <i>Othello</i> or as the hero of one of Laura
-Jean Libbey’s greatest books. Madeline was <i>the Captive Maid</i> come
-to life again. Oh, it was all very, very wonderful!</p>
-
-<p>Then came the day of jarring disillusionment, a day which Daisy
-followed by sobbing until midnight on her none-too-soft boarding-house
-bed, three blocks to westward.</p>
-
-
-<p class='sb'>Promptly at nine that morning, as usual, Karl called up
-Apartment 60.</p>
-
-<p>“Sweetheart,” he joyfully hailed Madeline, “I’ve just bought the new
-car. It’s a beauty. And you’re going to be the very first person to ride
-in it&#8212;to consecrate it.”</p>
-
-<p>“That’s darling of you!” replied Madeline in evident delight. “I’d
-rather ride in a wheelbarrow with you than in a Rolls-Royce
-with&#8212;with&#8212;”</p>
-
-<p>“With Phil?” asked Karl almost savagely.</p>
-
-<p>“With anybody,” she evaded. “Tell me more about the car. Is it&#8212;”</p>
-
-<p>“I’m not going to tell you,” he refused. “I’m going to show it to you
-instead. Here’s my idea: I’ll knock off work at noon and bring the car
-uptown. I’ll meet you at the subway kiosk at half-after twelve; we can
-run up to the Arrowhead to lunch, and then on up to the Tumble Inn
-for&#8212;”</p>
-
-<p>“But I can’t, dear&#8212;I <i>can’t</i>!” expostulated Madeline. “Don’t you
-remember? I told you I have to lunch with
-Phil and those people from Buffalo, at the Knickerbocker, at one
-o’clock. Oh, dear! I wish I didn’t have to. But I&#8212;”</p>
-
-<p>“Phone him you’re sick,” urged Karl. “I’ve set my heart on
-christening the new car this way.”</p>
-
-<p>“I could get away to-morrow&#8212;” she began.</p>
-
-<p>“But <i>I</i> can’t,” he said. “I’ve a directors’ meeting at three.
-Oh, come along to-day, Beautiful! Tell Phil you’re sick and&#8212;”</p>
-
-<p>“And have him come rushing up here, in a fidget, for fear I’m going
-to die?” she suggested. “That is just what Phil would do. No, dear,
-I&#8212;”</p>
-
-<p>“Then tell him you don’t <i>want</i> to lunch with him,” urged Karl,
-losing patience as a man will when some babyishly cherished woman-plan
-of his is upset. “Tell him you have to go to your sister’s
-or&#8212;”</p>
-
-<p>“I can’t, Karl!” she declared; and she added, beseechingly: “Don’t be
-unreasonable, dear boy. Please don’t. And don’t be cross; it makes me so
-unhappy when you are. You know how hard I try to do everything you want
-me to&#8212;and how glad I am to. But I <i>can’t</i> get out of this luncheon.
-Phil especially wants me to be there. These Buffalo people are old
-friends of his.”</p>
-
-<p>“Why should you have to go there, just because he wants you to?”
-demanded Karl, far more crankily than ever Daisy had heard him speak.
-“Why do you? You aren’t his slave.”</p>
-
-<p>“No,” returned Madeline, her own temper beginning to fray, “but I am
-his <i>wife</i>. You seem to forget that.”</p>
-
-<p>“I don’t forget it half as often as <i>you</i> do!” flashed
-Karl.</p>
-
-<p>At which brutally truthful reply, the receiver of Apartment 60’s wire
-clanked down upon its hook. Nor could all of Karl’s repeated efforts
-bring Madeline back to the telephone.</p>
-
-
-<p class='sb'>Daisy Reynolds slumped forward upon the switchboard desk, her face
-in her hands, her slim body a-shake. She felt as though her every nerve
-had been wrenched. She was sick all over. This, then, was the wondrous
-romance in which she had reveled. This was the melancholy, beauteous
-love-story which had become part of her own colorless life! A vulgar
-intrigue between a married woman (not a wife, but a married woman&#8212;Daisy
-now realized the difference between the two) and a man not her
-husband!</p>
-
-<p>The iridescent bubbles of romance burst into thinnest air. Daisy was
-numb with the horror and disgust of it all. Even of old she had
-fastidiously refused to listen in when another girl’s merry cry of
-“Fish!” had told that some such illicit dialogue was on the wire. And
-now, for weeks, she had been raptly listening to just such
-talks.</p>
-
-<p>She loathed herself for the silly bubbles she had blown. Their lovely
-sheen was miasmic slime. They were filled with foul gases. A great shame
-possessed Daisy Reynolds.</p>
-
-<p>Next morning Daisy came to work swollen-eyed from futile crying over
-the death of her dreams, and dull-headed from too little sleep. Half an
-hour later, promptly at nine, Karl called up Apartment 60.</p>
-
-<p>Daisy’s hand trembled as she made the connection. She hated herself
-for listening in. Yet from morbid fascination she did it.</p>
-
-<p>“Darling!” was Karl’s remorsefully passionate greeting as Madeline
-answered the phone-bell’s summons. “I’m so sorry! So horribly sorry! I
-spoke rottenly to you yesterday. Wont you forgive me? <i>Please</i>
-do!”</p>
-
-<p>“Please don’t let us speak about it,” began Madeline
-stiffly.</p>
-
-<p>Then her shell of offendedness collapsed, and she went on with a
-break in her sweet voice.</p>
-
-<p>“Oh, I’m so glad you called up! I was so afraid you wouldn’t. And I
-was going to try so hard not to phone to you. But I knew I’d do it&#8212;I
-<i>knew</i> I would&#8212;if you didn’t call me first. I’ve been terribly
-unhappy, dear.”</p>
-
-<p>“You’ve had nothing on me, in that,” he made answer. “I haven’t slept
-all night, thinking how I spoke to you. It was our first quarrel. And it
-was all my fault.”</p>
-
-<p>“It wasn’t,” she contradicted chokily. “It was all mine. I shouldn’t
-have been hurt by what you said about my forgetting so often
-that&#8212;”</p>
-
-<p>“Don’t, dear,” he begged. “Don’t! It was a rotten thing for me to
-say.”</p>
-
-<p>“It was&#8212;it was true,” she replied, her voice quavering as she fought
-back the tears. “But you told me yourself that you don’t blame me. You
-know what my life with him has been, from the very beginning. And till I
-met you I used to wish I were dead. Oh, you <i>can’t</i> blame me for
-forgetting him, for&#8212;for <i>you</i>!”</p>
-
-<p>“You’re an angel!” he declared. “I’m not fit to touch your hand. But
-my love for you is the only thing there is in my life. And it’s brought
-me the only happiness I ever knew. I used to think I’d like to kill
-myself if it weren’t for my mother. And now you’ve given me
-something&#8212;everything&#8212;to live for. I love you so, Madeline! Are you sure
-you’ve forgiven me?”</p>
-
-<p>“<i>Forgiven</i> you?” she echoed. “Why, Karl, I <i>love</i>
-you.”</p>
-
-<p>Yes, the reply was banal enough. But the tone was not, nor was the
-wordless exclamation of worship with which Karl received it. And to her
-own self-disgust Daisy felt a stir of answering emotion in her own
-breast.</p>
-
-<p>Just then she was required to connect Apartment 42 with the market,
-and at once afterward to put through a long-distance call for the
-building’s superintendent. And when next she sought to listen in, Karl
-and Madeline were finishing their talk. All Daisy could catch was
-Madeline’s childish query:</p>
-
-<p>“Can’t we please try out the new car to-morrow, if the directors’
-meeting is going to keep you this afternoon?”</p>
-
-<p>And he answered gayly:</p>
-
-<p>“To blue blazes with the directors! We’re going to Tumble Inn to-day,
-you and I, sweetheart&#8212;even if New York doesn’t get a stroke of business
-done south of Canal Street all afternoon. Good-by. You’ll be sure to
-call me up later, wont you?”</p>
-
-
-<p class='sb'>Daisy sat back in her wabbly chair to take mental account of
-stock.</p>
-
-<p>She was amazed at herself&#8212;amazed, and a bit displeased, though not as
-much so as she could have wished. All her ideas and ideals seemed to be
-as wabbly as the kitchen chair she sat in. Womanlike, she straightway
-began to justify herself. True, an hour earlier, she had been filled
-with contempt for these two. Equally true, she was now irresistibly
-drawn to them again&#8212;which most certainly called for a reason; so she
-supplied the reason:</p>
-
-<p>Madeline had been forced into a marriage, in mere childhood, with a
-man she did not love. And had she not said, “You know what my life with
-him has been, from the very beginning?” That alone told the story&#8212;the
-heartbreaking story of neglected wifehood, of ill-treatment, of a
-starved soul.</p>
-
-<p>Who was Daisy to blame this pathetic young wife if she had at last
-let love into her heart after years of bondage to a brute? Daisy
-recalled Phil’s husky voice. From it she built up a physique that was a
-blend of <i>Simon Legree’s</i> and <i>Falstaff’s</i>, with a tinge of
-<i>Bill Sikes</i>. And, her moral sense deserting her, she realized that
-right or wrong she was steadfastly on the side of the lovers.</p>
-
-<p>During the days that followed, she listened in again, with all her
-old-time hero-and-heroine-worship. Now she understood the strain of
-melancholy in these two people’s love. It was the hopelessness of that
-love which made them so sad, in the midst of their stolen
-happiness.</p>
-
-<p>Once, in a free moment, Daisy slipped from her cubby-hole and into
-the superintendent’s office, to ask for a stronger light-bulb. There on
-the wall hung a typed list of the house’s tenants. Stealing a glance at
-it while the superintendent’s back was turned, Daisy ran her eye down
-the list until she came to the number she wanted:</p>
-
-<p>Apartment 60&#8212;Mr. and Mrs. Philip Caleb Vanbrugh.</p>
-
-<p><i>Caleb!</i> Yes, that was the sort of middle name her ugly-tempered
-clod of a husband would have been likely to own. The names
-<i>Madeline</i> and <i>Caleb</i> could no more blend than could violets
-and prunes. Doubly, now, Daisy’s heart was with the lovers.</p>
-
-<p>One qualm, only, marred her sympathy. From the fact that Karl always
-spoke of Vanbrugh by his first name, the men apparently were friends.
-And to woo one’s friend’s wife is black vileness. Even Daisy knew that.
-So she readjusted matters in her elastic mind, and decided the men were
-merely close business acquaintances, and that friendship did not enter
-into their relations. Daisy felt better about it, after that&#8212;much
-better.</p>
-
-
-<p class='sb'>One morning when Daisy connected the wire for the lovers and
-prepared for her daily feast of listening in, a sharp whir from another
-apartment in the house drew her back to earth. In her nervous haste to
-make the new connection and get back to her listening, she awkwardly
-knocked out a plug or two. Absent-mindedly she readjusted them, trying
-meantime to catch what the second caller was trying to say to
-her.</p>
-
-<p>This caller was a fussy woman in Apartment 12, who first wanted to
-know the correct time and then asked for a wire to Philadelphia. A full
-minute elapsed before Daisy could get back to the lovers. And as she
-turned again to their talk, she realized with a guilty start that in the
-mix-up of the various plugs she had left the switch open.</p>
-
-<p>Have you ever called up a telephone number and been let in on a
-conversation already going on between the person you called up and
-somebody else? It gives one an absurdly guilty feeling. And it means the
-switch has carelessly been left open, so that anybody calling up can tap
-the wire. That is the condition in which Daisy had chanced to leave the
-switch to Apartment 60. Eagerly she stretched forth her hand to repair
-the error. As she did so, three sentences struck her ear. They were
-spoken in quick succession by three people&#8212;as follows:</p>
-
-<p>“Good-by, darling,” said Karl. “I’ll be there at one.”</p>
-
-<p>“Good-by, boy dear,” answered Madeline. “I’ll call you up again
-before then.”</p>
-
-<p>“Who in hell are <i>you</i>?” bellowed a third and huskier
-voice. “And what do you mean by calling my wife darling?”</p>
-
-<p><i>Click!</i> All three wires were shut off by one lightning swirl of
-Daisy’s fingers.</p>
-
-
-<p class='sb'>She sat aghast. The third voice had most assuredly been
-Phil’s&#8212;Philip Caleb Vanbrugh’s. What had she done? What <i>hadn’t</i> she done?
-Then she became aware of a buzzing call.</p>
-
-<p>“Clavichord Arms,” she said primly in reply as she sought to rally
-her shaky nerves.</p>
-
-<p>“That the house operator?” harshly demanded the husky voice. “I
-called up my apartment&#8212;Apartment 60&#8212;a minute ago, and my wife was
-talking over the phone. What number was she talking to?”</p>
-
-<p>“What apartment did you say?” asked Daisy.</p>
-
-<p>“Sixty!”</p>
-
-<p>“Apartment 60 hasn’t had a call this morning,” solemnly answered
-Daisy, her throat tightening under the grip of outraged conscience. “Nor
-it hasn’t sent in one, either.”</p>
-
-<p>“I’d swear that was my wife’s voice,” growled the man. “I couldn’t
-place the man’s. But it was my wife’s, all right. And&#8212;”</p>
-
-<p>“It may ’a’ been Sarah Bernhardt’s voice, for all I know,” snapped
-Daisy. “But it didn’t come from Apartment 60. Not any calls have been
-turned in from there since I came on.”</p>
-
-<p>“You’re sure?” he asked in sour doubt.</p>
-
-<p>“You can look at my slip here on the desk,” pertly retorted Daisy.
-“All the calls are marked on that.”</p>
-
-<p>“No,” said the man slowly, “I wont do that&#8212;because, if you’ve lied,
-you wouldn’t be past altering the slip. What I’m going to do is to ask
-the building’s superintendent for an itemized list of all the calls from
-my apartment for the past month or two. He’s obliged to furnish it on
-demand. That ought to tell me something.”</p>
-
-
-<p class='sb'>He hung up. Daisy sat gasping. Before her mental gaze ranged the
-memory of forty-odd calls a month to Worth 9999-Z. Then she came to a
-decision. Out into the marble-lined hallway she went. There she
-corralled the second elevator-boy and bribed him with twenty-five cents
-to take charge of the switchboard for a few minutes. A moment or so
-later, a colored maid was ushering her into Apartment 60.</p>
-
-<p>In the middle of a garish living-room stood Daisy, trying desperately
-to think straight. The curtains parted, and a woman came into the room.
-Daisy blinked at her in bewilderment&#8212;then said:</p>
-
-<p>“I should like to speak to Mrs. Vanbrugh, please. It’s very
-important.”</p>
-
-<p>“I’m Mrs. Vanbrugh,” answered the woman, eying the girl with
-curiosity.</p>
-
-<p>“I&#8212;I mean Mrs. Madeline Vanbrugh,” faltered the girl.</p>
-
-<p>“I am Mrs. Madeline Vanbrugh,” was the answer, and now Daisy
-recognized the voice, “&#8212;Mrs. Philip C. Vanbrugh. What can I do for you?”</p>
-
-<p>Daisy could not answer at once. Around her dumfounded head the
-bubbles were bursting like a myriad Roman-candle balls.</p>
-
-<p>This woman framed in the doorway was Madeline&#8212;<i>her</i> Madeline?
-This woman whose dumpy figure was swathed in a bedraggled negligee that
-had once been clean! This woman whose scalp was haloed by a crescent of
-kid-curlers that held in hard lumps her brass-hued front hair! This
-woman with the hard, light eyes and sagging mouth-lines and beaklike
-nose&#8212;this woman whose face was sallow and coarse, because it had not
-yet received its daily dress of make-up! This&#8212;<i>this</i> was
-Madeline!</p>
-
-<p>“What can I do for you?” the woman was saying for the second time,
-her early air of curiosity merging into one of dawning hostility.</p>
-
-<p>“I am the switchboard operator downstairs,” said Daisy faintly.</p>
-
-
-<p class='sb'>A look of terror that had all along lurked in the hard eyes now
-sprang to new light.</p>
-
-<p>“What do you want of me?”</p>
-
-<p>“I want to tell you your husband heard the last part of your
-phone-talk just now,” returned Daisy conscientiously, though her heart
-was no longer in her mission of rescue. “He called me up about it. I&#8212;”</p>
-
-<p>“You told him?” blithered the woman in panic.</p>
-
-<p>“I told him your apartment hadn’t had a call all morning.”</p>
-
-<p>“You <i>did</i>?” cried the woman, her sweet voice sharpening to
-a peacock screech of relief. “Good for you! Good for <i>you</i>! And you
-were perfectly right to come directly up here for your pay. What do you
-think would be fair reward? Don’t be afraid to say. You’ve done me a
-great service, and&#8212;”</p>
-
-<p>“I don’t understand you,” stammered Daisy. “I don’t understand you at
-all. If you think I did this for money&#8212;”</p>
-
-<p>“My dear,” laughed the woman nervously, “we do everything for money.
-So you needn’t be ashamed. We don’t always <i>say</i> it’s for money.
-But it is. That’s why I got into this scrape. My husband is the
-stingiest man in New York. He pretends his business is on such a ragged
-edge that he can’t give me any extra cash. But I know better. That’s why
-I let myself get interested in Mr. Schreiner. He is a widower, and he
-has more money than he can&#8212;”</p>
-
-<p>“Oh!” cried Daisy in sick horror.</p>
-
-<p>“So he’ll make it good to you for all that you’ve done for us,”
-prattled on the woman, without noticing. “He’ll&#8212;”</p>
-
-<p>“That isn’t why I came up here!” broke in Daisy angrily. “And I don’t
-want your filthy money, either. I wont touch it. I came up here to warn
-you that your husband is going to&#8212;”</p>
-
-
-<p class='sb'>The buzz of the flat’s front-door bell interrupted her. The woman,
-too, turned nervously to look. They heard the maid fumble with the knob.
-Then some one brushed past the servant and into the living-room.</p>
-
-<p>The intruder was a chunky and yellowish man, of late middle
-years&#8212;incredibly bald of head and suspiciously black of eyebrows. He
-caught sight of Mrs. Vanbrugh, who chanced to be standing between him
-and Daisy. And he exclaimed:</p>
-
-<p>“I jumped into a taxi and hustled here, as soon as I left the phone.
-I didn’t dare call up again. Do you suppose he recognized me?”</p>
-
-<p>Yes, the voice was indubitably the voice of Karl. But the fat and
-elderly swain was in anything but a loverly mood. He was a-quake with
-terror. Beads of sweat trickled down on his brows and mustache. His
-yellowish complexion was blotchy from fear. He was not a pretty
-sight.</p>
-
-<p>Daisy by this time should have been past surprise. Yet her
-preconceived vision of Karl&#8212;of young, athletic, hero-featured Karl&#8212;died
-hard and in much and sudden pain. Poor Daisy! Until he spoke, she had
-mistaken him for the husband.</p>
-
-<p>“If he knew my voice,” babbled the man, “we’re up against it. I’d
-better get out of town for a while, I suppose. Maybe he&#8212;”</p>
-
-<p>“Don’t worry!” interposed Madeline acidly. “You wont have to run away
-from town and leave me to face it all. This girl has gotten us out of
-it. She is the operator downstairs. Phil called up and asked her all
-sorts of questions. And she told him the apartment hadn’t had a call all
-morning. Isn’t she a brick?”</p>
-
-<p>A sound like the exhaust of an empty soda-siphon broke from between
-Karl’s puffy lips&#8212;a sound of pure if porcine reaction from
-dread.</p>
-
-<p>“Good girl!” he croaked, still hoarse with recent fright.
-“<i>Dandy</i> girl!”</p>
-
-<p>He sought to pat Daisy approvingly on the shoulder with one pudgy
-hand. She recoiled.</p>
-
-<p>“How much?” he asked jovially, not observing the stark repulsion in
-her face and gesture as she shrank away. “How much, little girl? You’ve
-done a mighty big stroke of business this day. What do you say I owe
-you? Or will you leave it to me to do the right thing by you?”</p>
-
-<p>He juggled a bloated wad of bills from his trousers pocket as he
-spoke. And at his motion something in Daisy’s taut brain seemed to
-snap.</p>
-
-
-<p class='sb'>The girl did not “see red.” She saw only two fat
-and greasy creatures who thought she was as vile as they&#8212;who took it
-for granted that she had done this thing to extort a rich tip from them,
-for covering up their sin. And wrath gave her back her momentarily lost
-power of speech.</p>
-
-<p>“<i>Oh!</i>” she cried in utter loathing, “you’d dare <i>pay</i> me
-for trying to help you? If I’d known what you both are, all the money in
-New York wouldn’t have gotten me to lift a finger for you. You
-horrible&#8212;”</p>
-
-<p>“There, there, my dear!” oilily soothed Karl. “You’re a little bit
-excited. Calm down and tell us how much&#8212;”</p>
-
-<p>“If you don’t want pay,” shrilled Madeline, “what did you come here
-for?”</p>
-
-<p>“What did I come here for?” echoed Daisy, white with rage. “To make a
-fool of myself, of course. To warn you that your husband is going to get
-the call-lists for the past month from the super, and find out from them
-what numbers you’ve been calling up. That’s&#8212;”</p>
-
-<p>“Good Lord!” gabbled the woman in crass horror.</p>
-
-<p>Karl’s fat jaw dropped upon his fatter throat. He tried to speak.
-He could only gargle.</p>
-
-<p>“That’s why I came here!” finished Daisy, striding past them toward
-the door. “To warn you. And now I’ve done it. Your husband’s liable to
-be streaking back home any minute now. And I’m going. And if either of
-you says any more about money, I’ll&#8212;”</p>
-
-<p>She was making for the outer door. But for all her start, Karl
-reached it three lengths ahead of her. He banged it shut after him as he
-darted out. Through the panel Daisy could hear him ringing frantically
-for the elevator.</p>
-
-<p>Daisy was following, when a choking sound made her turn back. The
-woman still stood in the middle of the living-room. Her hard, light eyes
-were dark and dilated. Her sallow face was haggard and ghastly. Yet her
-features were unmoved. There was about her bearing and expression a
-certain hopeless courage that lent dignity to the squat figure.</p>
-
-
-<p class='sb'>Daisy hesitated&#8212;then turned back into the room. The woman
-stared dully past her toward the doorway through which Karl had
-vanished. She acknowledged the girl’s presence by muttering, in a
-curiously dead voice, more to herself than to Daisy:</p>
-
-<p>“Men are queer animals, aren’t they? He has sworn to me, time and
-again, that he’d stand by me to the end.”</p>
-
-<p>“Yes,” assented Daisy in perfect simplicity, “I’ve heard him say it
-to you myself&#8212;twice.”</p>
-
-<p>“He’s gone,” went on the woman in that same dead voice so unlike her
-own. “He’s gone. And I’m left to hold the bag. I&#8212;I think I’m cured.
-There are worse things than a husband who loves you&#8212;even if he can’t
-give you all the money you want to spend. Phil would never have run away
-like that, from <i>anything</i>&#8212;not that the lesson is likely to do me
-any good, now.”</p>
-
-<p>“Here!” exclaimed the girl, shaking the dazed Madeline roughly
-by the shoulder. “I’m going to get you out of this. I don’t know why,
-but I am. Maybe I’ve a bill of my own to pay, as well as you have. We’ve
-all done some learning to-day, I guess. And learning isn’t on the
-free-list.”</p>
-
-<p>“But&#8212;”</p>
-
-<p>“Go to the phone right away,” commanded Daisy, “and call up the
-super. Tell him you’ve got to see him, up here, in a hurry. Act scared.
-Tell him it can’t wait a single minute. Get him up here. That’s the main
-thing. Then&#8212;then tell him you want new faucets in the bathroom. Or tell
-him anything at all. Do as I say. Jump! There isn’t much time to waste.
-Hubby’s sure to be hotfooting it home. And when hubby comes, deny
-everything. <i>Deny!</i> And keep on denying. He wont have any proof,
-remember that. <i>He’ll have no proof.</i> Pay for the lie by being a
-whole lot decenter to him, forever-after-amen.”</p>
-
-
-<p class='sb'>Moving away from the dumfounded woman, Daisy bolted out of the
-flat and was lucky enough to catch a down-going elevator. She reached
-the ground floor just as the building’s perplexed superintendent came to
-the shaft on his way to answer Madeline’s urgent summons.</p>
-
-<p>Into the superintendent’s deserted office sped Daisy. Going directly
-to his unlocked desk, she rummaged feverishly amid its drawers until she
-found what she wanted.</p>
-
-<p>Crumpling and pocketing the telephone-sheets for the past two months,
-she crossed to the file cabinet, hunted through a stack of dusty papers
-and drew forth the sheaf of penciled telephone-slips for the preceding
-year.</p>
-
-<p>Selecting from these the slips for the two corresponding months, she
-put back the rest of the Sheaf. Then, changing with eraser and pencil
-the date of the year on the two slips she had abstracted from the
-cabinet, she put them in the drawer. After which, feeling oddly weak
-about the knees, she started out of the office.</p>
-
-<p>At the door she almost collided with the returning superintendent.
-Vexed at having been called upstairs in such haste on an utterly trivial
-errand, he very naturally wreaked his ill-temper on the first
-subordinate he chanced to meet&#8212;which was Daisy.</p>
-
-<p>“What are you doing away from your switchboard?” he snarled. “I won’t
-stand for any loafing. Get that into your mind, once and for all. What
-did you want in here, anyhow?”</p>
-
-<p>“I came in to see you, sir,” was the girl’s demure reply.</p>
-
-<p>“What do you want of me?” he rasped.</p>
-
-<p>“I wanted to tell you I’m leaving here to-morrow,” said Daisy. “I’m
-going back to work at the Exchange. I’m lonesome on this job. There
-aren’t enough things happening at the Clavichord Arms. It’s too slow&#8212;not
-enough excitement for a live wire like me. That’s all, sir.”</p>
-
-<div class="tn">
-  <p>Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in
-  the October 1917 issue of <i>Blue Book</i> magazine.</p>
-</div>
-
-<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GIRL IN THE CROWD ***</div>
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