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.