“See it this way, Davenport. Take a spot on the literary magazine here, make your name, then you’ll find your place in Boston or New York later.”
“That’s a head on your shoulders, Flowers,” Bailey said, applauding.
Davenport shook his head. He had not told them that the faculty had voted for him to leave for at least a year, and that he had decided he would never come back. “No, men. I shall not wait. Not a month, not a year, not another day. Writing, Lank, is about living—not living in luxury. Flowers, literature is about now. Its pulse comes from today, not yesterday or even tomorrow.”
His fellow sophs stared glumly.
“Here, Lank, we merely kick our feet, hands in pockets, watching the active world move around us. I wish to move with it, from this point on.”
“That’s Emersonian enough,” Bailey began. “See here, Davenport. If this is about what that fop Alexander said you did—”
“Not at all,” Davenport interrupted, and waved all other objections away with his hand.
Once in Boston, Davenport waited patiently to hear when the stories he had sent ahead to The Atlantic Monthly would be published. After nearly a month, he received a letter from the editor.
He marched over to the famous bookshop that back then housed the magazine’s offices. He described his business there to no fewer than four different people with vague positions of influence, and after what seemed to be an hour, he was ushered through a curtain to the messy chamber occupied by James T. Fields, the very man who had rejected his submissions. The big-bearded man was disarmingly enthusiastic as he explained the ways in which Davenport might tinker with his piece to make it more suitable for publication.
Before Davenport stepped out of the room, he saw something that sickened him. He was watching a man in an apron remove manuscripts from a large pile, glance through them, and discard them—all in a swift, almost unified motion. The apron made him look like a butcher and in the collegian’s eyes he might have been covered in blood instead of ink. Davenport had felt reassured by what Fields had said to him and about his prospects, but now he realized it was a conversation the editor had ten times a week. He would never be published in The Atlantic. He knew all this the moment he laid eyes on the butcher.
Before he could think of it, Davenport watched himself as though from a distance, as his own fingers swiftly pulled some papers from a nearby desk and folded them neatly into the inside pocket of his raggedy coat. He felt unaccountably happier. His eyes turned to a small woman in a cream-colored bonnet, her eyes challenging him with their own accidental glance before she seemed to glide away.
He should have been contemplating the rote dismissal by the literary man and his own inexplicable theft, but instead he thought for hours about that face. Her eyes were certain, strong, wild. She seemed to be some mythological being whose gaze might transform you into some base animal, or disable your senses, or suit you in magical armor that would repel enemies.
In the days that followed his encounter at the publishing office, Davenport wandered. Gone was the sense of purpose and destiny he had brought to Boston. Every day he loitered in another place in this Athens of America. Every day he saw her. First, at the coffeehouse. Then inside the horse cars. And in the Common applauding a procession of Union soldiers who had returned home. She never looked at him directly, yet he was dismayed by the fact that she was everywhere. He lay awake at night. In those sleepless hours he came to believe that James T. Fields suspected him of his theft and had sent this pretty woman to spy on him before calling in the police.
Then a day passed without sight of her, and the fear flew right out of his mind. But still he could not sleep, and he walked the streets at night. To be a stranger in New York is to be like everyone else; to be a stranger in Boston is to feel what it is to be a stranger. It gives a man an unsubdued craving. He had worn out his only shoes. He stopped at a well-lit spot where he could study the face of some heroic and aloof soldier of the Revolution—he had not bothered to read the name on the base of the statue.
“You are a dull man.”
He turned at the voice to see whom she was addressing. It would never have occurred to him that the words could have been directed at him; that was how far from dull he believed himself. Of course, it was the mythological woman from the publishing firm.
“You see me following you for days and instead of attempting to discover who I am, you try to escape. I suspect you escaped to Boston, too.”
Davenport wanted to prove he knew more than she thought. “You were at Ticknor and Fields when I met with that cold-blooded liar, Mr. Fields. You believe I committed some wrong there, and hope that under your spell I will confess it.”
“You fancy yourself important but you’re not. You have never done anything in your life that would make you worthy of being followed. But that could change right now. I want you to do something for me.”
“That’s brash, miss.” The truth was, the eighteen-year-old young man would have done anything she asked.
“Don’t bother resenting the Boston literati. This city did not earn its place as a publishing center; it inherited it. That is why New York readies to overtake it, because it is craftier and more determined. I need a set of plates stolen from Houghton, The Atlantic’s printer.”
“Why would you think I would help with such a thing?” He acted disgusted, though, for a reason he could not understand, he was not. Maybe because the writers printed in The Atlantic did not deserve to be, not like he did.
“The plates will be made and protected by the printers’ devils. Women cannot be employed among those peculiar scum, which makes it difficult for me to gain entrance.”
“But I can be one of the scum.”
“You must be hired as a devil and then follow my instructions.”
He shuffled his feet as though to get out of the trap she was setting.