The Nine-Tenths | Page 4

a breathless eagerness. He turned pale, and yet at the same time there was a whirl of fire in his heart. She had come to him; he wanted to gather her close and bear her off through the wild autumn weather, off to the wilderness. He reached out a hand and inclosed a very cold and very little one.
"Why, you're frozen!" he said, with a queer laugh.
"Oh--not much!" she gasped. She held her leather bag under her arm and took off her gloves. Then she loosened her coat, and gave a sigh.
He gazed at her warm-tinted cheek, almost losing himself, and then murmured, suddenly:
"More school stuff?"
She made a grimace and tried to speak lightly, but her voice almost failed her.
"Class 6-B, let me tell you, is giving the 'Landing of the Pilgrims,' and every blessed little pilgrim is Bohemian. Here's the programme!"
With trembling fingers she opened her bag and handed him some loose sheets. He bent over them at once.
"Now make it cheap, Mr. Blaine," she said, severely. "Rock bottom! Or I'll give the job to some one else."
Joe laughed strangely.
"How many copies?"
"One thousand."
He spoke as if in fear.
"Fifty cents too much?"
Myra laughed.
"I don't want the school to ruin you!"
He said nothing further, and in the awkward silence she began pitifully to button her coat. There was no reason for staying.
Then suddenly he spoke, huskily:
"Don't go, Miss Craig...."
"You want ..." she began.
He leaned very close.
"I want to take a walk with you. May I?"
She became dead white, and the terror of nature's resistless purpose with men and women, that awful gravitation, that passion of creation that links worlds and uses men and women, went through them both.
"I may?" he was whispering.
Her "Yes" was almost inaudible.
So Joe put on his coat, and slapped over his head a queer gray slouch hat, and called over Marty.
"I won't be back to-night, Marty!" he said.
Then at the door he gave one last glance at his life-work, the orderly presses, the harnessed men, and left it all as if it must surely be there when he returned. He was proud at that moment to be Joe Blaine, with his name in red letters on the glass door, and under his name "Power Printer." His wife would be able to hold her head high.
The frail elevator took them clanking, bumping, slipping, down, down past eight floors, to the street level. The elevator boy, puffing at his cigarette, remarked, amiably:
"Gee! it's a windy day. It's gittin' on to winter, all right.... Good-night, Mr. Blaine!"
"Good-night, Tom," said Joe.

II
THE EAST EIGHTY-FIRST STREET FIRE
They emerged in all the magic wildness of an autumn night and walked east on Eighty-first Street. The loft building was near the corner of Second Avenue. They passed under the elevated structure, cutting through a hurrying throng of people.
"Take my arm," cried Joe.
She took it, trembling. They made an odd couple passing along between the squalid red-brick tenements, now in shadow, now in the glow of some little shop window, now under a sparkling lamp. At Avenue A they went south to Seventy-ninth Street, and again turned east, passing a row of bright model tenements, emerging at last at the strange riverside.
Down to the very edge of the unpaved waste they walked, or rather floated, so strange and uplifted and glorious they felt, blown and carried bodily with the exultant west wind, and they only stopped when they reached the wooden margin, where an old scow, half laden with brick, was moored fast with ropes. This scow heaved up and down with the motion of the rolling waters; the tight ropes grated; the water swashed melodiously.
The man and woman seemed alone there, a black little lump in the vast spaces, for behind them the city receded beyond empty little hill-sides and there was nothing some distance north and south.
"Look," said Joe, "look at the tide!"
It was running north, a wide expanse of rolling waters from their feet to Blackwells Island in the east, all hurling swiftly like a billowing floor of gray. Here and there whitecaps spouted. On Blackwells Island loomed the gray hospitals and workhouses, and at intervals on the shore sparkled a friendly light.
"But see the bridge," exclaimed Myra.
She pointed far south, where across the last of the day ran a slightly arched string of lights, binding shore with shore. On the New York side, and nearer, rose the high chimneys of mills, and from these a purplish smoke swirled thickly, melting into the gray weather.
And it seemed to Joe at that wild moment that nothing was as beautiful as smoking chimneys. They meant so much--labor, human beings, fire, warmth.
And over all--river, bridge, chimneys, Blackwells Island, and the throbbing city behind them--rose the immense gray-clouded heavens. A keen smell of the far ocean came to their nostrils and the air was clear and exhilarant.