CHAPTER IV
The thought of Paul was the one clear reality in Helen's life while she blundered through the bewilderments of the first months in Sacramento. It was the only thing that warmed her in the midst of the strangeness that surrounded her like a thin, cold fog.
There was the school. She did not know what she had expected, but she felt vaguely that she had not found it. Faithfully every morning at eight o'clock she was at her table in the dingy back room, struggling to translate the dots and dashes of the Morse alphabet into crisp, even clicks of the sounder. There were three other pupils, farm boys who moved their necks uncomfortably in stiff collars and reddened when they looked at her.
There was a wire from that room into the front office. Sometimes its sounder opened, and they knew that Mr. Weeks was going to send them something to copy. They moved to that table eagerly. There were days when the sounder did not click again, and after a while one of the boys would tiptoe to the office and report that Mr. Weeks was asleep. On other days the sounder would tap for a long time meaninglessly, while they looked at each other in bewilderment. Then it would make a few shaky letters and stop and make a few more.
Then for several days Mr. Weeks would not come to the school at all. They sank into a kind of stupor, sitting in the close, warm room, while flies buzzed on the window-pane. Helen's moist finger-tips stuck to the hard rubber of the key; it was an effort to remember the alphabet. But she kept at work doggedly, knowing how much depended upon her success. Always before her was the vision of the station where she would work with Paul, a little yellow station with housekeeping rooms up-stairs. She thought, too, of the debt she owed her father, and the help she could give him later when she was earning money.
Bit by bit she learned a little about the other pupils. Two of them had come down from Mendocino County together. They had worked two summers to earn the money, and yet they had been able to save only seventy-five dollars for the tuition. However, they had been sharp enough to persuade Mr. Weeks to take them for that sum. They lived together in one room, and cooked their meals over the gas-jet. It was one of them who asked Helen if she knew that gas would kill a person.
"If you turned it on for a long time and set fire to it, I suppose it would burn you up," she said doubtfully.
"I don't mean that way," he informed her, excited. "It kills you if you just breathe it long enough. It's poison." After that she looked with terrified respect at the gas-jet in her room, and was always very careful to turn it off tightly.
The other boy had a more knowing air and smoked cigarettes. He swaggered a little, giving them to understand that he was a man of the world and knew all the wickedness of the city. He looked at Helen with eyes she did not like, and once asked her to go to a show with him. Although she was very lonely and had never seen a show in a real theater, she refused. She felt that Paul would not like her to go. At the end of three months in Sacramento these were the only people she knew, except Mrs. Brown.
She felt that she would like Mrs. Brown if she knew her better. Her shyness kept her from saying more than "Good evening," when she handed her meal-ticket over the restaurant counter to be punched, and for some inexplicable reason Mrs. Brown seemed shy with her. It was her own fault, Helen thought; Mrs. Brown laughed and talked gaily with the men customers, cajoling them into buying cigars and chewing-gum from her little stock.
Helen speculated about Mr. Brown. She never saw him; she felt quite definitely that he was not alive. Yet Mrs. Brown often looked at her wide wedding-ring, turning it on her finger as if she were not quite accustomed to wearing it. A widow, and so young! Helen's heart ached at the thought of that brief romance. Mrs. Brown's thin figure and bright yellow hair were those of a girl; only her eyes were old. It must be grief that had given them that hard, weary look. Helen smiled at her wistfully over the counter, longing to express her friendliness and sympathy. But Mrs. Brown's manner always baffled her.
These meetings were not frequent. Helen tried to make her three-dollar meal ticket last a month, and that meant that only five times a week she could sit in state, eating warm food in an atmosphere thick with smells of coffee and stew and hamburger steak. She had learned that cinnamon rolls could be bought for half price on Saturday nights, and she kept a bag of them in her room, and some fruit. This made her a little uneasy when she saw Mrs. Brown's anxious eye on the vacant tables; she felt that she was defrauding Mrs. Brown by eating in her room.
Mrs. Brown worked very hard, Helen knew. It was she who swept the hall and kept the rooms in order. She did not do it very well, but Helen saw her sometimes in the evenings working at it. She swept with quick, feverish strokes. Her yellow hair straggled over her face; her high heels clicked on the floor; her petticoats made a whisking sound. There was something piteous about her, as there is about a little trained animal on the stage, set to do tasks for which it is not fitted. Helen stole down the hallway at night, taking the broom from its corner as if she was committing a theft, and surreptitiously swept and dusted her own room, so that Mrs. Brown would not have to do it.
She wished that it took more time. When she had finished there was nothing to do but sit at her window and look down at the street. People went up and down, strolling leisurely in the warm summer evening. She saw girls in dainty dresses, walking about in groups, and the sight increased her loneliness. Buggies went by; a man with his wife and children out driving, a girl and her sweetheart. At the corner there was the clanging of street-cars, and she watched to see them passing, brightly lighted, filled with people. Once in a while she saw an automobile, and her breath quickened, she leaned from the window until it was out of sight. She felt then the charm of the city, with its crowds, its glitter, its strange, hurried life.
Two young men passed often down that street in an automobile. They looked up at her window when they went by and slowed the machine. If she were leaning on the sill, they waved to her and shouted gaily. She always pretended that she had not seen them, and drew back, but she watched for the machine to pass again. It seemed to be a link between her and all that exciting life from which she was shut out. She would have liked to know those young men.
She sat at the window one evening near the end of the three months that she had planned to spend in the telegraph school. Paul's picture was in her hand. He had had it taken for her in Ripley. It was a beautiful, shiny picture, cabinet size, showing him against a tropical background of palms and ferns. He had taken off a derby hat, which he held self-consciously; his stocky figure wore an air of prosperity in an unfamiliar suit.
She brooded upon the firm line of his chin, the clean-cut lips, the smooth forehead from which the hair was brushed back slickly. His neck was turned so that his eyes did not quite meet hers. It was baffling, that aloof gaze; it hurt a little. She wished that he would look at her. She felt that the picture would help her more if he would, and she needed help.
Mr. Weeks had returned from one of his long absences that day, and she had taken courage to ask him about a job. He had listened while she stood beside his desk, stammering out her worry and her need. Her money was almost gone; she thought she telegraphed pretty well, she had studied hard. She watched his shaking hand fumbling with some papers on his desk, and felt pityingly that she should not bother him when he was sick. But desperation drove her on. She did not suspect the truth until he looked up at her with reddened eyes and answered incoherently. Then she saw that he was drunk.
Her shock of loathing came upon her in a wave of nausea. She trembled so that she could hardly get down the stairs, and she had walked a long time in the clean sunshine before the full realization of what it meant chilled her. She sat now confronting that realization.
She had only two dollars, a half-used meal-ticket, and a week's rent paid in advance. She saw clearly that she could hope for nothing from the telegraph school. It did not occur to her to blame anybody. Her mind ran desperately from thought to thought, like a caged creature seeking escape between iron bars.
She could not go home. She could not live there again, defeated, knowing day by day that she had added a hundred dollars to the mortgage. She had told Paul so confidently that she could do as well as a boy if she had the chance, and she had had the chance. He could not help her. The street below was full of happy people going by, absorbed in their own concerns, careless of hers.
She had not seen the automobile with the two young men in it until it stopped across the street. Even then she saw it dimly with dull eyes. But the two young men were looking up at her window, talking together, looking up again. They were getting out. They crossed the street. She heard their voices below, and a moment later her heart began to thump. They were coming up the stairs.
Something was going to happen. At last something was going to break the terrible loneliness and deadness. She stood listening, one hand at her throat, alert, breathless.
They were standing half-way up the stairs, talking. She felt indecision in the sound of their voices. One of them ran down again. There was an aching silence. Then she heard footsteps and the high, gay voice of Mrs. Brown. They were laughing together. "Oh, you Kittie!" one of the young men said. The three came up the stairs, and she heard their clattering steps and caught a word or two as they went past her room. Then the scratch of a match, and light gleamed through the crack of Mrs. Brown's door.
They went on talking. It appeared that they were arguing, coaxing, urging something. Mrs. Brown's voice put them off. There was a crash and laughter. She gathered that they were scuffing playfully. Later she heard Mrs. Brown's voice at the head of the back stairs, calling down to some one to send up some beer.
Her tenseness relaxed. She felt herself falling into bottomless depths of depression. The bantering argument was going on again. Meaningless scraps of it came to her while she undressed in the dark and crept into bed.
"Aw, come on, Kittie, be a sport! A stunning looker like that! What're you after anyhow—money?"
"Cut that out. No, I tell you. What's it to you why I won't?"
She crushed her face into the pillow and wept silently. It seemed the last unkindness of fate that Mrs. Brown should give a party and not ask her.