“I’m sick and I haven’t any money.”
“You’re sick all right,” said the man.
“A charity ward is pretty bad,” said the woman. “Haven’t you any friends or relatives in the city? Do you know what it is that’s wrong?”
“Please don’t make me talk,” Lora pleaded. “Just send me to the nearest hospital. I have no friends.”
“I can’t do that till I know what’s wrong with you. Were you on a train?”
“Yes. I had a miscarriage on a train. Please hurry. Please let me sit down. The charity ward’s all right.”
“Have you got enough money to pay for a taxi?”
“Yes. Please hurry.”
The man had come through the desk gate and was standing beside her. “I’ll run her up to Presbyterian,” he said.
“I’ll have to phone first,” said the woman.
“You can phone after we’re gone. If you phone now they’ll say take her to Bellevue. She don’t want to go to Bellevue.”
“Ha, I know, it doesn’t matter about the old ugly ones,” said the woman.
“Please,” Lora said.
The man took her arm. “This way, the taxis are this way,” he said.
She was in the hospital three weeks. It was an acute inflammation, they told her, and that was all she ever learned about it, for she didn’t want to ask questions. Nor would she answer any: at first she refused even to give her name, then when they insisted on that and other details she invented one, Mary Scott she told them, but that was as far as she would go. Her home? Was she married? What train had she been on? Who was to be notified in case of emergency? Not bothering to argue, she merely smiled and shook her head until officially they gave it up. Thus without identity, invulnerable to official curiosity, she became mysterious: obviously either criminal or sublime. The nurses glanced at her speculatively as they passed, and the internes on their rounds lingered at her bedside. There she was, a perverse fish on a bank, flopped by her own will out of the soothing oblivious stream of history; it was at once offensive and fascinating. There were no more princesses, but she might be almost anything else. The petty and desperate insistence of society that no one under any circumstances shall lose his tag kept her on the defense up to the very minute she walked out of the hospital doors.
Even Dr. Nielsen, who saw her every day for the first week because her condition required it, and thereafter because she had aroused his interest, joined mildly in the hunt. “Come,” he said, “we know you haven’t told the truth. You couldn’t have had a miscarriage on the train. I’m discreet and it needn’t go on the records; you’d better tell me. In fact, Hornsby suggests that the circumstances require a report to the police. I’m not trying to frighten you; I talked him out of it.”
“Thank you, thank you so much,” Lora smiled. But she told Dr. Nielsen no more of her past than any of the others.
It was he who solved her immediate and pressing problem, when she was well enough to leave, by getting a job for her through a friend of his who was a high official in the export sales department of the Federal Oil Company. Later, presumably, through that friend, if he was still curious, he learned at least her true name, for she decided to use it on the application form that was given her to fill out; but she never saw Dr. Nielsen again. From her brief local eminence as an insolent rebel against the demands of social responsibility, she was swallowed into the churning amorphous mass of a metropolitan digestive apparatus that assimilates daily much tougher and more unlikely material than a redheaded good-looking girl.
From nine till twelve-thirty and from one-thirty till five she sat at a telephone switchboard, and twice each month received the sum of fifty-five dollars. That was on account of the war, the other girls told her; three years before it would have been only forty. She had a room on West Thirty-fourth Street, a neat clean little room with a view of the river from the window. She ate breakfast there, an apple and a roll and milk; lunch was provided for its employees by the company, at cost they said with dignity; and for dinner she went usually to a little place not far from her room where they had good soup and plenty of bread and butter.
Five evenings a week she went to a business school. Dr. Nielsen’s friend, Mr. Pitkin, the high official, had said that if she learned stenography he would see that she was given a chance to get ahead; that offered the best opportunity, he explained. His secretary, who had been a stenographer only twelve years, got twenty-eight hundred a year. Good god, twelve years, Lora thought. Twelve years! Incredible; even more incredible that the secretary, a plump efficient person with intelligent brown eyes, looked contented, lively, and not at all decrepit. In twelve years, Lora reflected, she would be thirty-two. Well. At any rate she might as well learn it; she had to acquire some sort of competence beyond sticking brass pegs in little holes.
She did not at all know, that spring and summer, what she was looking forward to. But forward she must and would look, there was to be no glancing backward, no examination of that scar. Sometimes at night before she went to sleep it would be suddenly upon her like a flood, overwhelming her; her father’s presence and voice, her mother’s pallor and tears, Pete Halliday’s irresistible smile, all in a jumble, defying chronology, merging into a thick vapor of misery that for the moment overpowered her brain and stifled her. She would not fight it, feeling it was useless. She would lie on her back in the dark, perfectly still, her arms straight at her sides, thinking, it will go away, it might as well go away, for I’m not afraid of it and I’m not going to think about it. Some day someone is going to pay for it, that’s all. You’ll see.
Pete was dead probably. She had heard nothing, but he had been in the war over a year — angrily she stopped herself, What did it matter whether Pete was dead or not? No more of that.
Jostled by a passerby on the sidewalk one August evening, walking home from the office, to her astonishment she became suddenly aware that the daydream she had been bumped out of was a baby cradled in her arms. For ten blocks she had been carrying a baby, now in her arms, now inside of her, now beside her in bed nestling against her. Tommyrot! she exploded. Imbecile! That’s a swell idea, that is. Oh, grand. You damn fool. But before she got home the baby was back again, and this time she merely smiled at herself. Why not, if it’s fun, she thought. Sure it’s silly, but anything to amuse a poor girl alone in a great city. After that she accepted it whenever it came, and it came more and more often; rarely did she walk home without it. Idle at the switchboard she would sometimes be startled by the buzzer out of that dream; once at school in the evening the instructor asked her a question three times before she heard it.
Partly it was the evenings at school that kept her from seeing more of the other girls outside of the office, but even when some of them arranged a Saturday night movie party or a Sunday trip to the seashore she usually did not care to go. They decided she was snooty, but she was scarcely aware of it, and certainly was unconcerned. She liked to sew, and made most of her clothes; the movies bored her. Her chief diversions were sewing and reading and automobile riding; the last she loved, but she got more invitations than she cared to accept. She went now and then on a Sunday trip with a handsome youth who was Mr. Pitkin’s assistant, once or twice with a man named Gilstairs, an office manager from the floor below, and somewhat oftener with Steve Adams, one of the field men who had been called in from Canada a year after the war started and was now at the desk of one of the department heads who had enlisted. Around thirty, erect and slender, not much taller than Lora, personable and well-featured save for a nose slightly too flat and muddy brown eyes that never quite opened, he continuously smoked cigarettes and carried in his watch case a photograph of his mother taken many years before; this he had shown to Lora at their second meeting.