CHAPTER VIII
Cooped in a narrow space at the end of a long corridor, Helen sat gazing at the life of a great San Francisco hotel. Every moment the color and glitter shifted under the brilliant light of mammoth chandeliers. Tall, gilded elevator-doors opened and closed; women passed, wrapped in satins and velvets, airy feathers in their shining hair; men in evening dress escorted them; bell-boys went by, carrying silver trays and calling unintelligibly, their voices rising above the continuous muffled stir and the faint sounds of music from the Blue Room.
Helen had choked the telegraph-sounder with a pencil, so that she might hear the music. But the tones of the violins came to her blurred by a low hum of voices, by the rustle of silks, by the soft movement of many feet on velvet carpets. Nothing was clear, simple, or distinct in the medley. Her ears were baffled, as her eyes were dazzled and her thoughts confused, by a multiplicity of sensations. San Francisco was a whirlpool, an endless roaring circle, stupendous and dizzying.
This had been her sick impression of it on that first morning, when she struggled through the eddying crowds at the ferry building, lugging her telescope-bag with one hand and with the other trying to hold her hat in place against gusts of wind. Beneath the uproar of street-car gongs, of huge wagons rumbling over the cobbles, of innumerable hurrying feet, whistles, bells, shouts, she had felt a great impersonal current, terrifying in its heedlessness of all but its own mighty swirl, and she had had the sensation of standing at the brink of a maelstrom.
After ten months the impression still remained. But now she seemed to have been drawn into the motionless vertex. The city roared around her, still incomprehensible, still driven by its own breathless speed, but in the heart of it she was alien and untouched. She had found nothing in it but loneliness.
Her first terrors had vanished, leaving her with a frustrated sense of having been ridiculous in having them. She had gathered her whole strength for a great effort, and she had found nothing to do. Far from lying in wait with nameless dangers and pitfalls for the unwary stranger, the city apparently did not know she was there.
At the main telegraph-office Mr. Bryant had received her indifferently. He was a busy man; she was one detail of his routine work. He directed her to the St. Francis, asked her to report there at five o'clock, and, looking at her again, inquired whether she knew any one in San Francisco or had arranged for a place to live. Three minutes later he handed her over to a brisk young woman, who gave her an address and told her what car to take to reach it.
She had found a shabby two-story house on Gough Street, with a discouraged palm in a tub on the front porch. A colorless woman showed her the room. It was a small, neat place under the eaves, furnished with an iron bed, a wash-stand, a chair, and a strip of rag carpet. The bathroom was on the lower floor, and the rent was two dollars and a half a week. Helen set down her bag with a sigh of relief.
Thus simply she found herself established in San Francisco. Her first venture into the St. Francis had been no more exciting. After a panic-stricken plunge into its magnificence she was accepted noncommittally by the day-operator, a pale girl with eye-glasses, who was already putting on her hat. She turned over a few unsent messages, gave Helen the cash-box and rate-book, and departed.
Thereafter Helen met her daily, punctually at five o'clock, and saw her leave. Helen rather looked forward to the moment. It was pleasant to say, "Good evening," once a day to some one.
In the afternoon she walked about, looking at the city, and learned to know many of the streets by name. She discovered the public library and read a great deal. The library was also a pleasant place to spend Sundays, being less lonely than the crowded parks, and if the librarian were not too busy one might sometimes talk to her about a book.
The dragging of the days, as much as her need for more money, had driven her to asking for extra work at the main office. But here, too, she had been dropped into the machine and put down before her telegraph-key, with barely a hurried human touch. A beginner, rated at forty-five dollars, she replaced a seventy-five-dollar operator on a heavy wire, and the days became a nerve-straining tension of concentration on the clicking sounder at her ear, while the huge room with its hundreds of instruments and operators faded from her consciousness.
Released at four o'clock, she ate forlornly in a dairy lunch-room and hurried to the St. Francis. Here, at least, she could watch other people's lives. Gazing out at the changing crowd in the hotel corridor she let her imagination picture the romances, the adventures, at her finger-tips. A man spoke cheerfully to the cigar-boy while he lighted his cigarette at the swinging light over the news-stand counter. He was the center of a scandal that had filled the afternoon papers, and under her hand was the message he had sent to his wife, denying, appealing, swearing loyalty and love. A little, soft-eyed woman in clinging laces, stepping from the elevator to meet a plump man in evening dress, was there to put through a big mining deal with him. The ends of the intrigue stretched out into vagueness, but her telegrams revealed its magnitude.
Helen's cramped muscles stirred restlessly. There was barely room to move in the tiny office, crowded with table and chair and wastebasket. Spaciousness was on the other side of the counter.
She snatched the pencil from the counter and began a letter to Paul. Her imagination, at least, was released when she wrote letters.
Dear Paul:I wonder what you are doing now! It's eight o'clock and of course you've had your supper. Your mother's probably finishing up the kitchen work and putting the bread to rise, and you haven't anything to do but sit on the porch and look at the stars and the lighted windows here and there in the darkness, and listen to the breeze in the trees. And here I am, sitting in a place that looks just like a hothouse with all the flowers come to life. There's a ball up-stairs, and a million girls have gone through the corridors, with flowers and feathers and jewels in their hair, and dresses and evening cloaks as beautiful as petals. How I wish you could see them all, and the men, too, in evening dress. They're the funniest things when they're fat, but some of the slim ones look like princes or counts or something.What kind of new furniture was it your mother got? You've never told me a word about the place you're living since you moved, and I'm awfully interested. Do please tell me what color the wall-paper is and the carpets, and the woodwork, and what the kitchen is like, and if there are rose-bushes in the yard. Did your mother get new curtains, too? There is a lovely new material for curtains just out—sort of silky, and rough, in the loveliest colors. I see it in the store windows, and if your mother wants me to I'd love to price it, and get samples for her.A little boy's just come in with a toy balloon, and it got away from him and it's bumping up around on the gilded ceiling, and I wish you could hear him howl. It must be fun for the balloon, though, after being dragged around for hours, tugging all the time to get away, to escape at last and go up and up and up—I felt just like that this morning. Just think, Paul, I sent the last of the hundred dollars home, and another fifty besides! Isn't that gorgeous? I'm making over ninety dollars a month now, with my extra work at SF office, and my salary here—
Dear Paul:
I wonder what you are doing now! It's eight o'clock and of course you've had your supper. Your mother's probably finishing up the kitchen work and putting the bread to rise, and you haven't anything to do but sit on the porch and look at the stars and the lighted windows here and there in the darkness, and listen to the breeze in the trees. And here I am, sitting in a place that looks just like a hothouse with all the flowers come to life. There's a ball up-stairs, and a million girls have gone through the corridors, with flowers and feathers and jewels in their hair, and dresses and evening cloaks as beautiful as petals. How I wish you could see them all, and the men, too, in evening dress. They're the funniest things when they're fat, but some of the slim ones look like princes or counts or something.
What kind of new furniture was it your mother got? You've never told me a word about the place you're living since you moved, and I'm awfully interested. Do please tell me what color the wall-paper is and the carpets, and the woodwork, and what the kitchen is like, and if there are rose-bushes in the yard. Did your mother get new curtains, too? There is a lovely new material for curtains just out—sort of silky, and rough, in the loveliest colors. I see it in the store windows, and if your mother wants me to I'd love to price it, and get samples for her.
A little boy's just come in with a toy balloon, and it got away from him and it's bumping up around on the gilded ceiling, and I wish you could hear him howl. It must be fun for the balloon, though, after being dragged around for hours, tugging all the time to get away, to escape at last and go up and up and up—
I felt just like that this morning. Just think, Paul, I sent the last of the hundred dollars home, and another fifty besides! Isn't that gorgeous? I'm making over ninety dollars a month now, with my extra work at SF office, and my salary here—
She paused, biting her pencil. That would give him a start, she thought. He had been so self-satisfied when he got his raise to being day-operator and station-agent. She had not quite got over the hurt of his taking it without letting her know that the night-operator's place would be vacant. He had explained that a girl couldn't handle the job, but she knew that he did not want her to be working with him.
In the spring, she thought, she would be able to get some beautiful new clothes and go home for a visit. Paul would come, too, when he knew she would be there. He would see then how well she could manage on a very little money. In a few months more she would be able to save enough for a trousseau, tablecloths, and embroidered towels—
"Blank, please!" A customer leaned on the counter. She gave him the pad and watched him while he wrote. His profile was handsome; a lock of fair hair beneath the pushed-back hat, a straight forehead, an aquiline nose, a thin, humorous mouth. He wrote nervously, dashing the pencil across the paper, tearing off the sheet and crumpling it impatiently, beginning again. When he finished, shoving the message toward her with a quick movement, he looked at her and smiled, and she felt a charm in the warm flash of his eyes. His nervous vitality was magnetic.
She read the message. "'G. H. Kennedy, Central Trust Company, Los Angeles. Drawing on you for five hundred. Must have it. Absolutely sure thing this time. Full explanations follow by letter.Gilbert.' Sixty-seven cents, please," she said. She wished that she could think of something more to say; she would have liked to talk to him. There was about him an impression of something happening every instant. When, turning away, he paused momentarily, she looked at him quickly. But he was speaking to the rival operator.
"Hello, kid!"
"On your way," the girl replied imperturbably. Her eyes laughed and challenged. But with an answering smile he went past, and only his hat remained visible in glimpses through the crowd. Then it turned a corner and was gone.
"Fresh!" the girl murmured. "But gee, he can dance!"
Helen looked at her with interest. She was a new girl, on relief duty. The regular operator for her company was a sober, conscientious woman of thirty, who studied German grammar in her leisure moments. This one was not at all like her.
"Do you know him?" said Helen, smiling shyly. This was an opening for conversation, and she met it eagerly. The other girl had a friendly and engaging manner, which obviously included all the world.
"Sure I do," she answered, though there was uncertainty under the round tones. She ran a slim forefinger through the blond curl that lay against her neck, smiling at Helen with a display of even, white teeth. Helen thought of pictures on magazine covers. It must be wonderful to be as pretty as that, she thought wistfully. "Who's he wiring to?"
Helen passed the message across the low railing that separated the offices. She noticed the shining of the girl's fingernail as she ran it along the lines.
"Well, what do you know about that? Hewasgiving me a song and dance about being Judge Kennedy's son. You never can tell about men," she commented sagely, returning the telegram. "Sometimes they tell you the absolute truth."
A childlike quality made her sophistication merely piquant. Her comments on the passing guests fascinated Helen, and an occasional phrase revealed glimpses of a world of gaiety in which she seemed to flutter continually, like a butterfly in the sunshine. She worked, it appeared, only at irregular intervals.
"Momma supports me, of course on her alimony. Papa certainly treated her rotten, but his money's perfectly good," she said artlessly. Her frankness also was childlike, and her calm acceptance of the situation made it necessary to regard it as commonplace. Helen, in self-defense, could not be shocked.
"She's lot of fun, momma is. Just loves a good time. She's out dancing now. Gee! I wish I was! I'm just crazy about dancing, aren't you? Listen to that music! All I want is just to dance all night long. That's what I really love."
"Do you ever—often, I mean—do it? Dance all night long?" Helen asked, wide-eyed.
"Only once a night." She laughed. "About five nights a week."
Helen thought her entertaining, and warmed to her beauty and charm. In an hour she was asking Helen to call her Louise, and although she made no attempt to conceal her astonishment at the barrenness of Helen's life, her generous desire to share her own good times took the sting from her pity. Why, Helen didn't know the city at all, she cried, and Helen could only assent. They must go out to some of the cafés together; they must have tea at Techau's; Helen must come to dinner and meet momma. Louise jumbled a dozen plans together in a rush of friendliness. It was plain that she was genuinely touched in her butterfly heart by Helen's loneliness.
"And you're a brunette!" she cried. "We'll be stunning together. I'm so blonde." The small circle of her thought returned always to herself. Helen, dimly seeing this, felt an amused tolerance, which saved her pride while she confessed to herself her inferiority in cleverness to this sparkling small person. Louise would never have drifted into dull stagnation; she would have found some way to fill her life with realities instead of dreams.
Midnight came before Helen realized it. Tidying her desk for the night, she found the unfinished letter to Paul and tucked it into her purse. She had not been forced to feed upon her imagination that evening.
Louise walked to the car-line with her, and it was settled that the next night Helen should come to dinner and meet momma. It meant cutting short her extra work and paying the day-operator to stay late at the St. Francis, but Helen did not regret the cost. This was the first friend the city had offered her.
Three weeks later she was sharing the apartment on Leavenworth Street with Louise and her momma.
The change had come with startling suddenness. There had been the dinner first. Helen approached it diffidently, doubtful of her self-possession in a strange place, with strange people. She fortified herself with a new hat and a veil with large velvet spots, yet at the very door she had a moment of panic and thought of flight and a telephone message of regrets. Only the thought of her desperate loneliness gave her courage to ring the bell.
The strain disappeared as soon as she met momma. Momma, slim in a silk petticoat and a frilly dressing-sack, had taken her in affectionately. Momma was much like Louise. Helen thought again of pictures on magazine covers, though Louise suggested a new magazine, and her mother did not. Even Helen could see that Momma's pearly complexion was liberally helped by powder, and her hair was almost unnaturally golden. But the eyes were the same, large and blue, fringed with black lashes, and both profiles had the same clear, delicate outlines.
"Yes, dear, most people do think we're sisters," Mrs. Latimer said complacently, when Helen spoke of the resemblance.
"We have awful good times together, don't we, Momma?" Louise added, her arm around her mother's waist, and Helen felt a pang at the fondness of the reply. "We certainly do, kiddie."
It was a careless, happy-go-lucky household. Dinner was scrambled together somehow, with much opening of cans, in a neglected, dingy kitchen. Helen and Louise washed the dishes while momma stirred the creamed chicken. It was fun to wash dishes again and to set the table, and Helen could imagine herself one of the family while she listened to their intimate chatter. They had had tea down town; there was mention of some one's new car, somebody's diamonds; Louise had seen a lavallière in a jeweler's shop; she teased her mother to buy it for her, and her mother said fondly, "Well, honey-baby, we'll see."
They had hardly begun to eat when the telephone-bell rang, and momma, answering it, was gone for some time. They caught scraps of bantering talk and Louise wondered, "Who's that she's jollying now?" She sprang up with a cry of delight when momma came back to announce that the crowd was going to the beach.
There was a scramble to dress. Helen, hooking their gowns in the cluttered bedroom, saw dresser drawers overflowing with sheer underwear, silk stockings, bits of ribbon, crushed hat-trimmings, and plumes. Louise brushed her eyebrows with a tiny brush, rubbed her nails with a buffer, dabbed carefully at her lips with a lip-stick Helen hoped that she did not show her surprise at these novel details of the toilet. They had taken it for granted she was going to the beach with them. Their surprise and regret were genuine when she said she must go to work.
"Oh, what do you want to do that for?" Louise pouted. "You look all right." She said it doubtfully, then brightened. "I'll lend you some of my things. You'd be perfectly stunning dressed up. Wouldn't she be stunning, Momma? You've got lovely hair and that baby stare of yours. All you need's a dress and a little—Isn't it, Momma?"
Her mother agreed warmly. Helen glowed under their praise and was deeply grateful for their interest in her. She wanted very much to go with them, and when she stood on the sidewalk watching them depart in a big red automobile, amidst a chorus of gay voices, she felt chilled and lonely.
They were lovely to be so friendly to her, she thought, while she went soberly to work. She felt that she must in some way return their kindness, and after discarding a number of plans she decided to take them both to a matinée.
It was Louise, at their third meeting, who suggested that she come to live with them. "What do you know, Momma, Helen's living in some awful hole all alone. Why couldn't she come in with us? There's loads of room. She could sleep with me. Momma, why not?"
Her mother, smiling lazily, said:
"Well, if you kids want to, I don't care." Helen was delighted by the prospect. It was arranged that she should pay one third of the expenses, and Louise cried joyfully: "Now, Momma, you've got to get my lavallière!"
The next afternoon Helen packed her bag and left the room on Gough Street. Her feet wanted to dance when she went down the narrow stairs for the last time and let herself out into the windy sunshine.
It was maddening to find herself so tied down by her work. In the early mornings, dragging herself from bed, she left Louise drowsy among the pillows and saw while she dressed the tantalizing signs of last night's gaiety in the dress flung over a chair, the scattered slippers and silk stockings. She came home at midnight to a dark, silent apartment, letting herself in with a latch-key to find the dinner dishes still unwashed and spatterings of powder on the bedroom carpet, where street shoes and a discarded petticoat were tangled together. She enjoyed putting things in order, pretending the place was her own while she did it, but she was lonely. Later she awoke to blink at Louise, sitting half undressed on the edge of the bed, rubbing her face with cold-cream, and to listen sleepily to her chatter.
"You'll be a long time dead, kiddie," momma said affectionately. "What's the use of being a dead one till you have to?" Helen's youth cried that momma was right. But she knew too well the miseries of being penniless; she dared not give up a job. A chance remark, flung out on the endless flow of Louise's gossip, offered the solution. "What do you know about that boob girl at MX office? She's picked a chauffeur in a garden of millionaires, and she's going to quit work andmarryhim!"
Helen's heart leaped. It was her chance. When she confronted Mr. Bryant across the main-office counter the next morning her hands trembled, but her whole nature had hardened into a cold determination. She would get that job. It paid sixty dollars a month; the hours were from eight to four. Whether she could handle market reports or not did not matter; she would handle them.
She scored her first business triumph when she got this job, although she did not realize until many years later what a triumph it had been. She settled into her work at the Merchants' Exchange wires with only one thought. Now she was free to live normally, to have a good time, like other girls.
The first day's work strained her nerves to the breaking point The shouts of buyers and sellers on the floor, the impatient pounding on the counter of customers with rush messages, the whole breathless haste and excitement of the exchange, blurred into an indistinct clamor through which she heard only the slow, heavy working of the Chicago wire, tapping out a meaningless jumble of letters and fractions. She concentrated upon it, with an effort which made her a blind machine. The scrawled quotations she flung on the counter were wrought from an agony of nerves and brain.
But it was over at last, and she hurried home. The dim stillness of the apartment was an invitation to rest, but she disregarded it, slipping out of her shirt-waist and splashing her face and bare arms with cold water. A new chiffon blouse was waiting in its box, and a thrill of anticipation ran through her when she lifted it from its tissue wrappings.
She fastened the soft folds, pleased by the lines of her round arms seen through the transparency, and her slender neck rising from white frills. In the hand-glass she gazed at the oval of her face reflected in the dressing-table mirror, and suddenly lifting her lids caught the surprising effect of the sea-gray eyes beneath black lashes, an effect she had never known until Louise spoke of it.
She was pretty. She was almost—she caught her breath—beautiful. The knowledge was more than beauty itself, for it brought self-assurance. She felt equal to any situation the evening might offer, and she was smiling at herself in the mirror when Louise burst in, a picture in a dashing little serge suit and a hat whose black line was like the stroke of an artist's pencil.
"The alimony's come!" she cried. "We're going to have a regular time! Momma'll meet us down town. Look, isn't it stunning?" She displayed the longed-for lavallière twinkling against her smooth young neck. "I knew I'd get it somehow Momma—the stingy thing!—she went and got her new furs. But we met Bob, and he bought it for me." She sat down before the mirror, throwing off her hat and letting down her hair. "I don't know—it's only a chip diamond." Her moods veered as swiftly as light summer breezes. "I wish momma'd get me a real one. It's nonsense, her treating me like a baby. I'm seventeen."
Helen felt her delight in the new waist evaporate. Louise's chatter always made her feel at a disadvantage. There was a distance between them that they seemed unable to bridge, and Helen realized that it was her fault. Perhaps it was because she had been so long alone that she often felt even more lonely when she was with Louise.
The sensation returned, overpowering, when they joined the crowd in the restaurant. She could only follow Louise's insouciant progress through a bewildering medley of voices, music, brilliant lights, and stumble into a chair at a table ringed with strange faces. Momma was there, her hat dripping with plumes, white furs flung negligently over her shoulders, her fingers a blaze of rings. There was another resplendent woman, named Nell Allan; a bald-headed fat man called Bob; a younger man, with a lean face and restless blue eyes, hailed by Louise as Duddy. They were having a very gay time, but Helen, shrinking unnoticed in her chair, was unaccountably isolated and lonely. She could think of nothing to say. There was no thread in the rapid chatter at which she could clutch. They were all talking, and every phrase seemed a flash of wit, since they all laughed so much.
"I love the cows and chickens, but this is the life!" Duddy cried at intervals. "Oh, you chickens!" and "This is the life!" the others responded in a chorus of merriment. Helen did not doubt that it all meant something, but her wits were too slow to grasp it, and the talk raced on unintelligibly. She could only sit silent eating delicate food from plates that waiters whisked into place and whisked away again, and laughing uncertainly when the others did.
Color and light and music beat upon her brain. About her was a confusion of movement, laughter, clinking glasses, glimpses of white shoulders and red lips, perfumes, hurrying waiters, steaming dishes, and over and through it all the quick, accented rhythm of the music, swaying, dominating, blending all sensations into one quickening vibration.
Suddenly, from all sides, hidden in the artificial foliage that covered the walls, silvery bells took up the melody. Helen, inarticulate and motionless, felt her nerves tingle, alive, joyful, eager.
There was a pushing back of chairs, and she started. But they were only going to dance. Duddy and momma, Bob and Mrs. Allan, swept out into a whirl of white arms and dark coats, tilted faces and swaying bodies. "Isn't it lovely!" Helen murmured.
But Louise was not listening. She sat mutinous, her fingers tapping time to the music, her eyes beneath the long lashes searching the room. "I can't help it. I just got to dance!" she muttered, and suddenly she was gone. Some one met her among the tables, put his arms around her, and whirled her away. Helen, watching for her black hat and happy face to reappear, saw that she was dancing with the man whose telegram had introduced them. Memory finally gave her his name. Gilbert Kennedy.
Louise brought him to the table when the music ceased. There were gay introductions, and Helen wished that she could say something. But momma monopolized him, squeezing in an extra chair for him beside her, and saying how glad she was to meet a friend of her little girl's.
Helen could only be silent, listening to their incomprehensible gaiety, and feeling an attraction for him as irresistible as an electric current. She did not know what it was, but she thought him the handsomest man she had ever seen, and she felt that he did whatever he wanted to do with invariable success. He was not like the others. He talked their jargon, but he did not seem of them, and she noticed that his hazel eyes, set in a network of tiny wrinkles, were at once avid and weary. Yet he could not be older than twenty-eight or so. He danced with momma, when again the orchestra began a rag, but coming back to the table with the others, he said restlessly:
"Let's go somewhere else. My car's outside. How about the beach?"
"Grand little idea!" Duddy declared amid an approving chorus. Helen, following the others among the tables and through the swinging doors to the curb where the big gray car stood waiting, told herself that she must make an effort, must pay for this wonderful evening with some contribution to the fun. But when they had all crowded into the machine and she felt the rush of cool air against her face and saw the street lights speeding past, she forgot everything but joy. She was having a good time at last, and a picture of the Masonville girls flashed briefly through her mind. How meager their picnics and hay rides appeared beside this!
She half formed the phrases in which she would describe to Paul their racing down the long boulevard beside the beach, the salty air, and the darkness, and the long white lines of foam upon the breakers. This, she realized with exultation, was a joy-ride. She had read the word in newspapers, but its aptness had never before struck her.
It was astounding to find, after a rush through the darkness of the park, that the car was stopping. Every one was getting out. Amazed and trying to conceal her amazement, she went with them through a blaze of light into another restaurant where another orchestra played the same gay music and dancers whirled beyond a film of cigarette smoke. They sat down at a round bare table, and Helen perceived that one must order something to drink.
She listened to the rapid orders, hesitating. "Blue moons" were intriguing, and "slow gin fizz" was fascinating, with its suggestion of fireworks. But beside her Mr. Kennedy said, "Scotch high-ball," and the waiter took her hesitation for repetition. The glass appeared before her, there was a cry of "Happy days!" and she swallowed a queer-tasting, stinging mouthful. She set the glass down hastily.
"What's the matter with the high-ball?" Mr. Kennedy inquired. He had paid the waiter, and she felt the obligation of a guest.
"It's very good really. But I don't care much for drinks that are fizzy," she said. She saw a faint amusement in his eyes, but he did not smile, and his order to the waiter was peremptory. "Plain high-ball here, no seltzer." The waiter hastened to bring it.
Mr. Kennedy's attention was still upon her, and she saw no escape. She smiled at him over the glass. "Happy days!" she said, and drank. She set down the empty glass and the muscles of her throat choked back a cough. "Thank you," she said, and was surprised to find that the weariness was no longer in his eyes.
"You're all right!" he said. His tone was that of the vanquished greeting the victor, and his next words were equally enigmatic. "I hate a bluffer that doesn't make good when he's called!" The orchestra had swung into a new tune, and he half rose. "Dance?"
It was hard to admit her deficiency and let him go.
"I can't. I don't know how."
He sat down.
"You don't know how to dance?" His inflection said that this was carrying a pretense too far, that in overshooting a mark she had missed it. His keen look at her suddenly made clear a fact for which she had been unconsciously groping while she watched these men and women, the clue to their relations. Beneath their gaiety a ceaseless game was being played, man against woman, and every word and glance was a move in that game, the basis of which was enmity. He thought that she, too, was playing it, and against him.
"Why do you think I'm lying to you, Mr. Kennedy? I would like to dance if I could—of course."
"I don't get you," he replied with equal directness. "What do you come out here for if you don't drink and don't dance?"
It would be too humiliating to confess the extent of her inexperience, her ignorance of the city in which she had lived for almost a year. "I come because I like it," she said. "I've worked hard for a long time and never had any fun. And I'm going to learn to dance. I don't know about drinking. I don't like the taste of it much. Do people really like to drink high-balls and things like that?"
It startled a laugh from him.
"Keep on drinking 'em, and you'll find out why people do it," he answered. Over his shoulder he said to the waiter, "Couple of rye high-balls, Ben."
The others were dancing. They were alone at the table, and when, resting an elbow on the edge of it, he concentrated his attention upon her, the crowded room became a swirl of color and light about their isolation. Her breath came faster, the toe of her slipper kept time to the music, exhilaration mounted in her veins, and her success in holding his interest was like wine to her. But a cold, keen inner self took charge of her brain.
The high-balls arrived. She felt that she must be rude, and did not drink hers. When he urged she refused as politely as she could. He insisted.
"Drink it!" She felt the clash of an imperious, reckless will against her impassive resistance. There was a second in which neither moved, and their whole relation subtly changed. Then she laughed.
"I'd really rather not," she said lightly.
"Come on—be game," he said.
"The season's closed," Louise's flippancies had not been without their effect on her. It was easier to drop back into her own language. "No, really—tell me, why do people drink things that taste like that?"
He met her on her own ground. "You've got to drink, to let go, to have a good time. It breaks down inhibitions." She noted the word. The use of such words was one of the things that marked his difference from the others. "God knows why," he added wearily. "But what's the use of living if you don't hit the high spots? And there's a streak of—perversity—depravity in me that's got to have this kind of thing."
Their group swooped down about the table, and the general ordering of more drinks ended their talk. There was a clamor when Helen said she did not want anything. Duddy swept away her protests and ordered for her, but momma came to the rescue.
"Let the kid alone; she's not used to it. You stick to lemon sours, baby. Don't let them kid you," she said. The chatter swept on, leaving her once more unnoticed, but when the music called again Mr. Kennedy took her out among the dancers.
"You're all right," he said. "Just let yourself go and follow me. It's only a walk to music." And unaccountably she found herself dancing, felt the rhythm beat through blood and nerves, and stiffness and awkwardness drop away from her. She felt like a butterfly bursting from a chrysalis, like a bird singing in the dawn. She was so happy that Mr. Kennedy laughed at the ecstacy in her face.
"You look like a kid in a candy-shop," he said, swinging her past a jam with a long, breathless swooping glide and picking up the step again.
"I'm—per-fect-ly-happy!" she cried, in time to the tune. "It's awfully good—of you-ou!"
He laughed again.
"Stick to me, and I'll teach you a lot of things," he said.
She found, when she went reluctantly back to the table with him, that the others were talking of leaving. It hurt to hear him enthusiastically greeting the suggestion. But after they were in the machine it appeared that they were not going home. There was an interval of rushing through the cool darkness, and then another restaurant just like the others, and more dancing.
The hours blurred into a succession of those swift dashes through the clean night air, and recurring plunges into light and heat and smoke and music. Helen, faithfully sticking to lemon sours as momma had advised, discovered that she could dance something called a rag, and something else known as a Grizzly Bear; heard Duddy crying that she was some chicken; felt herself a great success. Bob was growing strangely sentimental and talked sorrowfully about his poor old mother; momma's cheeks were flushed under the rouge, and she sang part of a song, forgetting the rest of the words. The crowd shifted and separated; somewhere they lost part of it, and a stranger appeared with Louise.
Helen, forced at last to think of her work next morning, was horrified to find that it was two o'clock. Momma agreed that the best of friends must part. They sang while they sped through the sleeping city, the stars overhead and the street-lights flashing by. Drowsily happy, Helen thought it no harm to rest her head on Mr. Kennedy's shoulder, since his other arm was around momma, and she wondered what it would be like if a man so fascinating were in love with her. It would be frightfully thrilling and exciting, she thought, playing daringly with the idea.
"See you, again!" they all cried, when she alighted with momma and Louise before the dark apartment-house. The others were going on to more fun somewhere. She shook hands with Mr. Kennedy, feeling a contraction of her heart. "Thank you for a very pleasant time." She felt that he was amused by the stilted words.
"Don't forget it isn't the last one!" he said.
She did not forget. The words repeated themselves in her mind; she heard his voice, and felt his arm around her waist and the music throbbing in her blood for a long time. The sensations came back to her in the pauses of her work next day, while she dragged through the hours as if she were drugged, hearing the noise of the exchange and the market quotations clicking off the Chicago wire, now very far and thin, now close and sickeningly loud.
She was white and faint when she got home, and Momma suggested a bromo-seltzer and offered to lend her some rouge. But Mr. Kennedy had not telephoned, and she went to bed instead of going out with them that evening. It was eleven days before he did telephone.