The girl in the crowd

Stretch an invisible cord knee-high across the sidewalk at Broadway and Forty-second Street, and in five minutes a hundred prettier girls than Daisy Reynolds will stumble over it. (A hundred homelier girls too, for that matter!)

Daisy was just the Girl in the Crowd. Look down the aisle of your subway- or surface- or L-car on the way home to-night, and you will see her. You will see her by the dozen.

But you will not observe her, unless you look hard. She is not the type of girl to make you murmur fatuously: “Gee, but I wish she was my stenographer!” Nor is she the sort that excites pity for her plainness. She is--yes, my term “the Girl in the Crowd” best fits her.

For three years, after she left high school, Daisy occupied twenty-eight inches of space along one of the two sides of a room whose walls were wainscoted in honeycombed metal. At shelves in front of the honeycombing sat double lines of girls with ugly steel appliances over their frizzed or lanky hair. Their hands were ever flitting from spot to spot in the perforated wainscoting, deftly shifting plugs from hole to hole.

An excrescence, like a misshapen black-rubber lily, jutted forth from the wall facing each girl. Into these lily-mouths the damsels were wont to croon such airy sentiments as these:

“Schuyler 9051 don’t answer. --Yes, I’m ringing Aud’bon 2973. --Beekman 4000 is busy. --I’ll give you Inf’ma-tion. --’Xcuse it, please. --No’m, I didn’t cut you off. What number was you talking to? --Schuyler 4789 is still busy. --It’s just twelve-forty-two, by the c’rect time. --Number, please.”

Up and down the double rank marched a horribly efficient woman who discouraged repartee and inter-desk conversation. The long room buzzed with the rhythmic droning of fifty voices and with the purring of countless plugs clicked into innumerable sockets.

To end, once and for all, the killing suspense, the room wherein Daisy Reynolds toiled for the first three years of her business career was a telephone exchange.

And at the three years’ end, she was assigned to the job of day-operator at the Clavichord Arms.

The pay at the hotel was no larger than at the exchange; but there was always the possibility of tips, and the certainty of Christmas-money. Besides, there were chances to rest or to read between calls. On the whole, Daisy rejoiced at the change--as might a private who is made corporal.

The Clavichord Arms is a glorious monument to New York’s efforts at boosting the high cost of living. The building occupies nearly a third of a city block, in length and depth, and it towers to the height of nine stories. Its facade and main entrance and cathedral-like lobby are rare samples of an architecture whose sacred motto is, “Put all your goods in the show-window.”

When the high cost of living first menaced our suffering land, scores of such apartment-houses sprang into life, in order that New Yorkers might do their bit toward the upkeep of high prices. Here, at a rental ranging from fifteen hundred to five thousand dollars a year, one may live in quarters almost as commodious as those for which a suburbanite or smaller city’s dweller pays fifty dollars a month.

And nobly did New York rally to the aid of the men who sought thus to get its coin. So quickly did the new apartments fill with tenants that more and yet more and more such buildings were run up.

Men who grumbled right piteously at the advance of bread from five to six cents a loaf eagerly paid three thousand dollars a year for the privilege of living in the garish-fronted abodes, and they sneered at humbler friends who, for the same sum, rented thirty-room mansions in the suburbs.

And this, by prosy degrees, brings us back to Daisy Reynolds.

The Clavichord Arms’ interior decorator had used up all his ingenuity and his appropriation before he came to the cubby-hole behind the gilded elevators--the cubby-hole that served as the telephone-operator’s quarters. The cubby-hole was airless, windowless, low and sloped of ceiling, calcimined of wall, and equipped with no furniture at all except the switchboard-desk, a single kitchen chair, one eight-candle-power electric light and an iron clothes-hook.

Here, for eight hours a day, sat Daisy Reynolds. Here, with stolid conscientiousness, she manipulated the plugs, that the building’s seventy tenants might waste their own and their friends’ time in endless phone-chats.

It was dull and uninspiring and lonely in the dark cubby-hole, after the lights and the constant work and companionship of the Exchange. There was much more leisure, too, than at the Exchange.

Daisy at first tried to enliven this leisure by reading. She loved to read; book or magazine--it was all the same to Daisy, so long as the hero and heroine at last outwitted the villain and came together at the altar.

But there are drawbacks to reading all day--even to reading union-made love stories, by eight-candle-power light and with everlasting interruption from the switchboard. So Daisy, by way of amusement, began to “listen in.”

“Listening in” is a plug-shifting process whereby the telephone-operator may hear any conversation over the wire. In some States, I understand, it is a misdemeanor. But perhaps there is no living operator who has not done it. In some private exchanges it is so common a custom that the cry of “Fish!” warns every other operator in the room that a particularly listenable talk is going on. This same cry of “Fish” is an invitation for all present to listen in.

(Yes, your telephonic love-talk, your fierce love-spats and your sacredest love-secrets have been avidly heard--and possibly repeated--again and again, by Central. Remember that, next time. When you hear a faint click on the wire during your conversation,--and sometimes when you don’t,--an operator is pretty certain to be listening in.)

At first Daisy was amused by what she heard. The parsimonious butcher-order of the house’s richest woman, the hiccoughed excuses of a husband whom business detained downtown, the vapid chatter of lad and lass, the scolding of slow dressmakers, the spicy anecdotes told by half-hour phone-gabblers--all these were a pleasant variation on the day’s routine. But at last, they began to pall. And just as they waxed tiresome--romance began.

The voice in Apartment 60--a clear voice, girlish and vibrant--called up 9999-Z Worth. And Worth 9999-Z replied in a tone that fairly throbbed with eager longing. That was the beginning. Shamelessly--soon rapturously--Daisy Reynolds listened in.

The voice in Apartment 60 belonged to a girl named Madeline. And Worth 9999-Z (whose first name, by the way, was Karl) spoke that foreign-sounding name Madeline as though it were a phrase of hauntingly sweet church music. He and Madeline had known each other, it appeared, for some months; but only recently had they made the divine discovery of their mutual love. It was then that the phone talks had begun--the talks that varied in number from three to seven a day, and in length from three to thirty minutes.

Always, now, promptly at nine o’clock in the morning, Karl called up his sweetheart. And always, an hour or so later, she called him up for a return-dialogue. Their talk was not mushy; it was beautiful. It thrilled with a love as deathless as the stars, a love through whose longing ran a current of unhappiness that Daisy could not understand.

Daisy grew to live for those talks. They became part of her very life--the loveliest part. She was curt, almost snappish, when other calls interfered with the bliss of listening-in. More than once she shamelessly broke off the connection when Madeline chanced to be talking to some old bore at a time when Karl sought to speak to her.

Karl, it seemed, was a downtown business man. As scientists reconstruct an entire fossil animal from a single bone of its left hind leg, so Daisy Reynolds built up a vision of Karl from his deep and powerful voice. He was tall, slender, graceful, yet broad of shoulder and deep of chest. Brown curls crisped above his white Greek forehead. His eyes were somber yet glowing. His age was from twenty-eight to thirty. He dressed like a collar advertisement.

Madeline was still easier to reconstruct, from her voice. She too was tall. She was willowy and infinitely graceful--gold-brown of hair, dark blue of eye, with soft-molded little features and long jetty lashes. With such a voice, she could not have been otherwise.

Daisy gathered from their earlier talks that Madeline’s family disapproved the match. She even learned, from something Karl said, that there was another suitor--one Phil--on whom the family smiled and whom Madeline cordially detested. Once or twice, too, Phil called up Apartment 60. He had a husky voice and spoke brief commonplaces. Madeline answered him listlessly and still more briefly. But he seldom phoned to her. And she never, by any chance, phoned to him.

So the ardent, tenderly melancholy love-story wore on. The lovers would make appointments for clandestine meetings--would speak in joyous retrospect of luncheons or motor-drives of the preceding day. Evidently, Madeline’s cruel family kept stern watch upon her movements. Daisy used to smile in joyous approval at the girl’s dainty cleverness in outmaneuvering them and meeting her sweetheart.

Ever through the glory of their love ran that black thread of melancholy. Apparently all the glad secret meetings and the adoring phone-talks could not make up to them for the family’s opposition. Daisy had to bite her lips, sometimes, to keep from breaking in on the conversation and demanding:

“Why don’t you two run off and get married? They’d have to come around, then. And if they didn’t, why should you care?”

To a girl cooped up alone all day in a stuffy cubby-hole, imagination is ten times stronger than to the girl whose thoughts can be distracted by outside things. To Daisy, immured in her dim-lighted cupboard behind the elevators, this romance of Karl and Madeline was fast becoming the very biggest thing in her drab life.

These two lovers were as romantic, as poetical, as yearningly adoring as Romeo and Juliet. Karl was as desperately jealous as Othello or as the hero of one of Laura Jean Libbey’s greatest books. Madeline was the Captive Maid come to life again. Oh, it was all very, very wonderful!

Then came the day of jarring disillusionment, a day which Daisy followed by sobbing until midnight on her none-too-soft boarding-house bed, three blocks to westward.

Promptly at nine that morning, as usual, Karl called up Apartment 60.

“Sweetheart,” he joyfully hailed Madeline, “I’ve just bought the new car. It’s a beauty. And you’re going to be the very first person to ride in it--to consecrate it.”

“That’s darling of you!” replied Madeline in evident delight. “I’d rather ride in a wheelbarrow with you than in a Rolls-Royce with--with--”

“With Phil?” asked Karl almost savagely.