‘Let them come.’
‘But what am I to say to them? What explanation can I give? What story can I tell them? Can’t you see what a hole you’ve put me in?’
Something seemed to click inside Mr. Birdsey’s soul. It was the berserk mood vanishing and reason leaping back on to her throne. He was able now to think calmly, and what he thought about filled him with a sudden gloom.
‘Young man,’ he said, ‘don’t worry yourself. You’ve got a cinch. You’ve only got to hand a story to the police. Any old tale will do for them. I’m the man with the really difficult job—I’ve got to square myself with my wife!’
Black for Luck
He was black, but comely. Obviously in reduced circumstances, he had nevertheless contrived to retain a certain smartness, a certain air—what the French call the tournure. Nor had poverty killed in him the aristocrat’s instinct of personal cleanliness; for even as Elizabeth caught sight of him he began to wash himself.
At the sound of her step he looked up. He did not move, but there was suspicion in his attitude. The muscles of his back contracted, his eyes glowed like yellow lamps against black velvet, his tail switched a little, warningly.
Elizabeth looked at him. He looked at Elizabeth. There was a pause, while he summed her up. Then he stalked towards her, and, suddenly lowering his head, drove it vigorously against her dress. He permitted her to pick him up and carry him into the hallway, where Francis, the janitor, stood.
‘Francis,’ said Elizabeth, ‘does this cat belong to anyone here?’
‘No, miss. That cat’s a stray, that cat is. I been trying to locate that cat’s owner for days.’
Francis spent his time trying to locate things. It was the one recreation of his eventless life. Sometimes it was a noise, sometimes a lost letter, sometimes a piece of ice which had gone astray in the dumbwaiter—whatever it was, Francis tried to locate it.
‘Has he been round here long, then?’
‘I seen him snooping about a considerable time.’
‘I shall keep him.’
‘Black cats bring luck,’ said Francis sententiously.
‘I certainly shan’t object to that,’ said Elizabeth. She was feeling that morning that a little luck would be a pleasing novelty. Things had not been going very well with her of late. It was not so much that the usual proportion of her manuscripts had come back with editorial compliments from the magazine to which they had been sent—she accepted that as part of the game; what she did consider scurvy treatment at the hands of fate was the fact that her own pet magazine, the one to which she had been accustomed to fly for refuge, almost sure of a welcome—when coldly treated by all the others—had suddenly expired with a low gurgle for want of public support. It was like losing a kind and open-handed relative, and it made the addition of a black cat to the household almost a necessity.
In her flat, the door closed, she watched her new ally with some anxiety. He had behaved admirably on the journey upstairs, but she would not have been surprised, though it would have pained her, if he had now proceeded to try to escape through the ceiling. Cats were so emotional. However, he remained calm, and, after padding silently about the room for awhile, raised his head and uttered a crooning cry.
‘That’s right,’ said Elizabeth, cordially. ‘If you don’t see what you want, ask for it. The place is yours.’
She went to the icebox, and produced milk and sardines. There was nothing finicky or affected about her guest. He was a good trencherman, and he did not care who knew it. He concentrated himself on the restoration of his tissues with the purposeful air of one whose last meal is a dim memory. Elizabeth, brooding over him like a Providence, wrinkled her forehead in thought.
‘Joseph,’ she said at last, brightening; ‘that’s your name. Now settle down, and start being a mascot.’
Joseph settled down amazingly. By the end of the second day he was conveying the impression that he was the real owner of the apartment, and that it was due to his good nature that Elizabeth was allowed the run of the place. Like most of his species, he was an autocrat. He waited a day to ascertain which was Elizabeth’s favourite chair, then appropriated it for his own. If Elizabeth closed a door while he was in a room, he wanted it opened so that he might go out; if she closed it while he was outside, he wanted it opened so that he might come in; if she left it open, he fussed about the draught. But the best of us have our faults, and Elizabeth adored him in spite of his.
It was astonishing what a difference he made in her life. She was a friendly soul, and until Joseph’s arrival she had had to depend for company mainly on the footsteps of the man in the flat across the way. Moreover, the building was an old one, and it creaked at night. There was a loose board in the passage which made burglar noises in the dark behind you when you stepped on it on the way to bed; and there were funny scratching sounds which made you jump and hold your breath. Joseph soon put a stop to all that. With Joseph around, a loose board became a loose board, nothing more, and a scratching noise just a plain scratching noise.
And then one afternoon he disappeared.
Having searched the flat without finding him, Elizabeth went to the window, with the intention of making a bird’s-eye survey of the street. She was not hopeful, for she had just come from the street, and there had been no sign of him then.
Outside the window was a broad ledge, running the width of the building. It terminated on the left, in a shallow balcony belonging to the flat whose front door faced hers—the flat of the young man whose footsteps she sometimes heard. She knew he was a young man, because Francis had told her so. His name, James Renshaw Boyd, she had learned from the same source.
On this shallow balcony, licking his fur with the tip of a crimson tongue and generally behaving as if he were in his own backyard, sat Joseph.
‘Jo-seph!’ cried Elizabeth—surprise, joy, and reproach combining to give her voice an almost melodramatic quiver.
He looked at her coldly. Worse, he looked at her as if she had been an utter stranger. Bulging with her meat and drink, he cut her dead; and, having done so, turned and walked into the next flat.
Elizabeth was a girl of spirit. Joseph might look at her as if she were a saucerful of tainted milk, but he was her cat, and she meant to get him back. She went out and rang the bell of Mr. James Renshaw Boyd’s flat.
The door was opened by a shirt-sleeved young man. He was by no means an unsightly young man. Indeed, of his type—the rough-haired, clean-shaven, square-jawed type—he was a distinctly good-looking young man. Even though she was regarding him at the moment purely in the light of a machine for returning strayed cats, Elizabeth noticed that.
She smiled upon him. It was not the fault of this nice-looking young man that his sitting-room window was open; or that Joseph was an ungrateful little beast who should have no fish that night.
‘Would you mind letting me have my cat, please?’ she said pleasantly. ‘He has gone into your sitting room through the window.’
He looked faintly surprised.
‘Your cat?’
‘My black cat, Joseph. He is in your sitting room.’
‘I’m afraid you have come to the wrong place. I’ve just left my sitting room, and the only cat there is my black cat, Reginald.’
‘But I saw Joseph go in only a minute ago.’
‘That was Reginald.’
For the first time, as one who examining a fair shrub abruptly discovers that it is a stinging nettle, Elizabeth realized the truth. This was no innocent young man who stood before her, but the blackest criminal known to criminologists—a stealer of other people’s cats. Her manner shot down to zero.
‘May I ask how long you have had your Reginald?’
‘Since four o’clock this afternoon.’
‘Did he come in through the window?’
‘Why, yes. Now you mention it, he did.’
> ‘I must ask you to be good enough to give me back my cat,’ said Elizabeth, icily.
He regarded her defensively.
‘Assuming,’ he said, ‘purely for the purposes of academic argument, that your Joseph is my Reginald, couldn’t we come to an agreement of some sort? Let me buy you another cat. A dozen cats.’
‘I don’t want a dozen cats. I want Joseph.’
‘Fine, fat, soft cats,’ he went on persuasively. ‘Lovely, affectionate Persians and Angoras, and—’
‘Of course, if you intend to steal Joseph—’
‘These are harsh words. Any lawyer will tell you that there are special statutes regarding cats. To retain a stray cat is not a tort or a misdemeanour. In the celebrated test-case of Wiggins v. Bluebody it was established—’
‘Will you please give me back my cat?’
She stood facing him, her chin in the air and her eyes shining, and the young man suddenly fell a victim to conscience.
‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I’ll throw myself on your mercy. I admit the cat is your cat, and that I have no right to it, and that I am just a common sneak-thief. But consider. I had just come back from the first rehearsal of my first play; and as I walked in at the door that cat walked in at the window. I’m as superstitious as a coon, and I felt that to give him up would be equivalent to killing the play before ever it was produced. I know it will sound absurd to you. You have no idiotic superstitions. You are sane and practical. But, in the circumstances, if you could see your way to waiving your rights—’
Before the wistfulness of his eye Elizabeth capitulated. She felt quite overcome by the revulsion of feeling which swept through her. How she had misjudged him! She had taken him for an ordinary soulless purloiner of cats, a snapper-up of cats at random and without reason; and all the time he had been reluctantly compelled to the act by this deep and praiseworthy motive. All the unselfishness and love of sacrifice innate in good women stirred within her.
‘Why, of course you mustn’t let him go! It would mean awful bad luck.’
‘But how about you—’
‘Never mind about me. Think of all the people who are dependent on your play being a success.’
The young man blinked.
‘This is overwhelming,’ he said.
‘I had no notion why you wanted him. He was nothing to me—at least, nothing much—that is to say—well, I suppose I was rather fond of him—but he was not—not—’
‘Vital?’
‘That’s just the word I wanted. He was just company, you know.’
‘Haven’t you many friends?’
‘I haven’t any friends.’
‘You haven’t any friends! That settles it. You must take him back.’
‘I couldn’t think of it.’
‘Of course you must take him back at once.’
‘I really couldn’t.’
‘You must.’
‘I won’t.’
‘But, good gracious, how do you suppose I should feel, knowing that you were all alone and that I had sneaked your—your ewe lamb, as it were?’
‘And how do you suppose I should feel if your play failed simply for lack of a black cat?’
He started, and ran his fingers through his rough hair in an overwrought manner.
‘Solomon couldn’t have solved this problem,’ he said. ‘How would it be—it seems the only possible way out—if you were to retain a sort of managerial right in him? Couldn’t you sometimes step across and chat with him—and me, incidentally—over here? I’m very nearly as lonesome as you are. Chicago is my home. I hardly know a soul in New York.’
Her solitary life in the big city had forced upon Elizabeth the ability to form instantaneous judgements on the men she met. She flashed a glance at the young man and decided in his favour.
‘It’s very kind of you,’ she said. ‘I should love to. I want to hear all about your play. I write myself, you know, in a very small way, so a successful playwright is Someone to me.’
‘I wish I were a successful playwright.’
‘Well, you are having the first play you have ever written produced on Broadway. That’s pretty wonderful.’
‘’M—yes,’ said the young man. It seemed to Elizabeth that he spoke doubtfully, and this modesty consolidated the favourable impression she had formed.
The gods are just. For every ill which they inflict they also supply a compensation. It seems good to them that individuals in big cities shall be lonely, but they have so arranged that, if one of these individuals does at last contrive to seek out and form a friendship with another, that friendship shall grow more swiftly than the tepid acquaintanceships of those on whom the icy touch of loneliness has never fallen. Within a week Elizabeth was feeling that she had known this James Renshaw Boyd all her life.
And yet there was a tantalizing incompleteness about his personal reminiscences. Elizabeth was one of those persons who like to begin a friendship with a full statement of their position, their previous life, and the causes which led up to their being in this particular spot at this particular time. At their next meeting, before he had had time to say much on his own account, she had told him of her life in the small Canadian town where she had passed the early part of her life; of the rich and unexpected aunt who had sent her to college for no particular reason that anyone could ascertain except that she enjoyed being unexpected; of the legacy from this same aunt, far smaller than might have been hoped for, but sufficient to send a grateful Elizabeth to New York, to try her luck there; of editors, magazines, manuscripts refused or accepted, plots for stories; of life in general, as lived down where the Arch spans Fifth Avenue and the lighted cross of the Judson shines by night on Washington Square.
Ceasing eventually, she waited for him to begin; and he did not begin—not, that is to say, in the sense the word conveyed to Elizabeth. He spoke briefly of college, still more briefly of Chicago—which city he appeared to regard with a distaste that made Lot’s attitude towards the Cities of the Plain almost kindly by comparison. Then, as if he had fulfilled the demands of the most exacting inquisitor in the matter of personal reminiscence, he began to speak of the play.
The only facts concerning him to which Elizabeth could really have sworn with a clear conscience at the end of the second week of their acquaintance were that he was very poor, and that this play meant everything to him.
The statement that it meant everything to him insinuated itself so frequently into his conversation that it weighed on Elizabeth’s mind like a burden, and by degrees she found herself giving the play place of honour in her thoughts over and above her own little ventures. With this stupendous thing hanging in the balance, it seemed almost wicked of her to devote a moment to wondering whether the editor of an evening paper, who had half promised to give her the entrancing post of Adviser to the Lovelorn on his journal, would fulfil that half-promise.
At an early stage in their friendship the young man had told her the plot of the piece; and if he had not unfortunately forgotten several important episodes and had to leap back to them across a gulf of one or two acts, and if he had referred to his characters by name instead of by such descriptions as ‘the fellow who’s in love with the girl—not what’s-his-name but the other chap’—she would no doubt have got that mental half-Nelson on it which is such a help towards the proper understanding of a four-act comedy. As it was, his précis had left her a little vague; but she said it was perfectly splendid, and he said did she really think so. And she said yes, she did, and they were both happy.
Rehearsals seemed to prey on his spirits a good deal. He attended them with the pathetic regularity of the young dramatist, but they appeared to bring him little balm. Elizabeth generally found him steeped in gloom, and then she would postpone the recital, to which she had been looking forward, of whatever little triumph she might have happened to win, and devote herself to t
he task of cheering him up. If women were wonderful in no other way, they would be wonderful for their genius for listening to shop instead of talking it.
Elizabeth was feeling more than a little proud of the way in which her judgement of this young man was being justified. Life in Bohemian New York had left her decidedly wary of strange young men, not formally introduced; her faith in human nature had had to undergo much straining. Wolves in sheep’s clothing were common objects of the wayside in her unprotected life; and perhaps her chief reason for appreciating this friendship was the feeling of safety which it gave her.
Their relations, she told herself, were so splendidly unsentimental. There was no need for that silent defensiveness which had come to seem almost an inevitable accompaniment to dealings with the opposite sex. James Boyd, she felt, she could trust; and it was wonderful how soothing the reflection was.
And that was why, when the thing happened, it so shocked and frightened her.
It had been one of their quiet evenings. Of late they had fallen into the habit of sitting for long periods together without speaking. But it had differed from other quiet evenings through the fact that Elizabeth’s silence hid a slight but well-defined feeling of injury. Usually she sat happy with her thoughts, but tonight she was ruffled. She had a grievance.
That afternoon the editor of the evening paper, whose angelic status not even a bald head and an absence of wings and harp could conceal, had definitely informed her that the man who had conducted the column hitherto having resigned, the post of Heloise Milton, official adviser to readers troubled with affairs of the heart, was hers; and he looked to her to justify the daring experiment of letting a woman handle so responsible a job. Imagine how Napoleon felt after Austerlitz, picture Colonel Goethale contemplating the last spadeful of dirt from the Panama Canal, try to visualize a suburban householder who sees a flower emerging from the soil in which he has inserted a packet of guaranteed seeds, and you will have some faint conception how Elizabeth felt as those golden words proceeded from that editor’s lips. For the moment Ambition was sated. The years, rolling by, might perchance open out other vistas; but for the moment she was content.