Mrs. Moorehouse had to write for help from her father to save the house, but his answer took so long that the bank foreclosed before it came and it wouldn’t have done much good anyway because it was only a hundred dollars in ten dollar bills in a registered envelope and just about paid the cost of moving to a floor in a fourfamily frame house down by the Pennsylvania freightyards. Ben left highschool and got a job as assistant freightagent and Johnny went into the office of Hillyard and Miller, Real Estate. Myrtle and her mother baked pies evenings and made angelcake to send to the Woman’s Exchange and Mr. Moorehouse sat in an invalid chair in the front parlor cursing shyster lawyers and the lawcourts and the Pennsylvania Railroad.
This was a bad year for Johnny Moorehouse. He was twenty and didn’t drink or smoke and was keeping himself clean for the lovely girl he was going to marry, a girl in pink organdy with golden curls and a sunshade. He’d sit in the musty little office of Hillyard and Miller, listing tenements for rent, furnished rooms, apartments, desirable lots for sale, and think of the Boer war and the Strenuous Life and prospecting for gold. From his desk he could see a section of a street of frame houses and a couple of elmtrees through a grimy windowpane. In front of the window was in summer a conical wiremesh flytrap where caught flies buzzed and sizzled, and in winter a little openface gas-stove that had a peculiar feeble whistle all its own. Behind him, back of a groundglass screen that went part way to the ceiling Mr. Hillyard and Mr. Miller sat facing each other at a big double desk, smoking cigars and fiddling with papers. Mr. Hillyard was a sallowfaced man with black hair a little too long who had been on the way to making a reputation for himself as a criminal lawyer when, through some scandal that nobody ever mentioned as it was generally agreed in Wilmington that he had lived it down, he had been disbarred. Mr. Miller was a little roundfaced man who lived with his elderly mother. He had been forced into the realestate business by the fact that his father had died leaving him building lots scattered over Wilmington and the outskirts of Philadelphia and nothing else to make a living from. Johnny’s job was to sit in the outer office and be polite to prospective buyers, to list the properties, attend to advertising, type the firm’s letters, empty the wastebaskets and the dead flies out of the flytrap, take customers to visit apartments, houses and buildinglots and generally make himself useful and agreeable. It was on this job that he found out that he had a pair of bright blue eyes and that he could put on an engaging boyish look that people liked. Old ladies looking for houses used to ask specially to have that nice young man show them round, and business men who dropped in for a chat with Mr. Hillyard or Mr. Miller would nod their heads and look wise and say, “Bright boy, that.” He made eight dollars a week.
Outside of the Strenuous Life and a lovely girl to fall in love with him there was one thing Johnny Moorehouse’s mind dwelt on as he sat at his desk listing desirable five and sevenroom dwelling-houses, drawingroom, diningroom, kitchen and buder’s pantry, three master’s bedrooms and bath, maid’s room, water, electricity, gas, healthy location on gravelly soil in restricted residential area: He wanted to be a songwriter. He had a fair tenor voice and could carry Larboard Watch Ahoy or I Dreamed I Dwelt in Marble Halls or Through Pleasures and Palaces Sadly I Roam very adequately. Sunday afternoons he took music lessons with Miss O’Higgins, a shriveled little Irishwoman, unmarried, of about thirtyfive, who taught him the elements of the piano and listened with rapture to his original compositions that she took down for him on musicpaper that she had all ready ruled when he came. One song that began
Oh, show me the state where the peaches bloom
Where maids are fair… It’s Delaware
she thought good enough to send to a music publisher in Philadelphia, but it came back, as did his next composition that Miss O’Higgins — he called her Marie by this time and she declared she couldn’t take any money from him for her lessons, at least not until he was rich and had made a name for himself — that Marie cried over and said was as beautiful as MacDowell. It began
The silver bay of Delaware
Rolls through peachblossoms to the sea
And when my heart is bowed with care
Its memory sweet comes back to me.
Miss O’Higgins had a little parlor with gilt chairs in it where she gave her music lessons. It was very heavily hung with lace curtains and with salmoncolored brocaded portieres she had bought at an auction. In the center was a black walnut table piled high with worn black leather albums. Sunday afternoons after the lesson was over she’d bring out tea and cookies and cinnamon toast and Johnny would sit there sprawled in the horsehair armchair that had to have a flowered cover over it winter and summer on account of its being so worn and his eyes would be so blue and he’d talk about things he wanted to do and poke fun at Mr. Hillyard and Mr. Miller and she’d tell him stories of great composers, and her cheeks would flush and she’d feel almost pretty and feel that after all there wasn’t such a terrible disparity in their ages. She supported by her music lessons an invalid mother and a father who had been a wellknown baritone and patriot in Dublin in his younger days but who had taken to drink and she was madly in love with Johnny Moorehouse.
Johnny Moorehouse worked on at Hillyard and Miller’s sitting in the stuffy office, chafing when he had nothing to do until he thought he’d go mad and run amok and kill somebody, sending songs to the music publishers that they always sent back, reading the Success Magazine, full of sick longing for the future: to be away from Wilmington and his father’s grumbling and pipesmoking and the racket his little brothers and sisters made and the smell of corned beef and cabbage and his mother’s wrinkled crushed figure and her overworked hands.
But one day he was sent down to Ocean City, Maryland, to report on some lots the firm had listed there. Mr. Hillyard would have gone himself only he had a carbuncle on his neck. He gave Johnny the return ticket and ten dollars for the trip.
It was a hot July afternoon. Johnny ran home to get a bag and to change his clothes and got down to the station just in time to make the train. The ride was hot and sticky down through peachorchards and pinebarrens under a blazing slaty sky that flashed back off sandy patches in scraggly cornfields and whitewashed shacks and strips of marshwater. Johnny had taken off the jacket of his gray flannel suit and folded it on the seat beside him to keep it from getting mussed and laid his collar and tie on top of it so that they’d be fresh when he got in, when he noticed a darkeyed girl in a ruffled pink dress and a wide white leghorn hat sitting across the aisle. She was considerably older than he was and looked like the sort of fashionably dressed woman who’d be in a parlorcar rather than in a daycoach. But Johnny reflected that there wasn’t any parlorcar on this train. Whenever he wasn’t looking at her, he felt that she was looking at him.
The afternoon grew overcast and it came on to rain, big drops spattered against the car windows. The girl in pink ruffles was struggling to put her window down. He jumped over and put it down for her. “Allow me,” he said. “Thanks.” She looked up and smiled into his eyes. “Oh, it’s so filthy on this horrid train.” She showed him her white gloves all smudged from the windowfastenings. He sat down again on the inside edge of his seat. She turned her full face to him. It was an irregular brown face with ugly lines from the nose to the ends of the mouth, but her eyes set him tingling. “You won’t think it’s too unconventional of me if we talk, will you?” she said, “I’m bored to death on this horrid train, and there isn’t any parlorcar though the man in New York swore that there was.”