CHAPTER X
In March Paul came to see her.
It had been a hard day at the office. A mistake had been made in a message, and a furious broker, asserting that it had cost him thousands of dollars, that she was at fault, that he was going to sue the telegraph company, had pounded the counter and refused to be quieted. All day she was overwhelmed with a sense of disaster. It would be months before the error was traced, and alternately she recalled distinctly that she had sent the right word and remembered with equal distinctness that she had sent the wrong one.
Dots and dashes jumbled together in her mind. She was exhausted at four o'clock, and thought eagerly of a hot bath and the soothing softness of a pillow. Slumped in the corner of a street-car, she doggedly endured its jerks and jolts, keeping a grip on herself with a kind of inner tenseness until the moment when she could relax.
Louise was hanging over the banister on the upper landing when she entered the hall of the apartment-house. Her excited stage-whisper met Helen on the stairs.
"Sh-sh-sh! Somebody's here to see you."
"Who?" The event was unusual, but Louise's manner was even more so. Vague pictures of her family and accident and death flashed through Helen's startled mind.
He said his name was Masters. He was an awful stick. Momma'd sent Louise out to give her the high sign. Louise's American Beauty man was in town, and there was going to be a party at the Cliff House. They could sneak in and dress and beat it out the back way. Momma had the guy in the living-room. He'd simply spoil the party.
"Aw, have a heart, Helen. Momma'll get rid of him somehow. You can fix it up afterward."
Helen's first thought was that Paul must not see her looking like this, disheveled, her hair untidy, and her fingers ink-stained. Her heart was beating fast, and there was a fluttering in her wrists. It was incredible that he was really near, separated from her only by a partition. The picture of him sitting there a victim of momma's efforts to entertain him was ghastly and at the same time hysterically comic. She tip-toed in breathless haste past the closed door and gained the safety of the bedroom, Louise's kimono rustling behind her. The first glance into the mirror was sickening. She tore off her hat and coat and let down her hair with trembling fingers.
"He's—an awful good friend. I must see him. Heavens! what a fright! Be an angel and find me a clean waist," she whispered. The comb shook in her hand; hairpins slipped through her fingers; the waist she found lacked a button, and every pin in the room had disappeared. It was an eternity before she was ready, and then, leaning for one last look in the glass, she was dissatisfied. There was no color in her face; even her lips were only palely pink. She bit them; she rubbed them with stinging perfume till they reddened; then with a hurried resolve she scrubbed her cheeks with Louise's rouge pad. That was better. Another touch of powder!
"Do I look all right?"
"Stunning! Aw, Helen, come through. Who is he? You've never told me a word." Louise was wild with curiosity.
"Sh-sh!" Helen cautioned. She drew a deep breath at the living-room door. Her little-girl shyness had come back upon her. Then she opened the door and walked in.
Momma, in her kimono, was sitting in the darkest corner of the room, with her back toward the window. Only a beaded slipper toe and some inches of silk stocking caught the light. She was obviously making conversation with painful effort. Paul sat facing her, erect in a stiff chair, his eyes fixed politely on a point over her shoulder. He rose with evident relief to meet Helen.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Masters," she said, embarrassed.
"Good afternoon." They shook hands.
"I'm very glad to see you. Won't you sit down?" she heard herself saying inanely.
Momma rose, clutching her kimono around her.
"Well, I'll be going, as I have a very important engagement, and you'll excuse me, Mr. Masters, I'm sure," she said archly. "So charmed to have met you," she added with artificial sweetness.
The closing of the door behind her left them facing each other with nothing but awkwardness between them. He had changed indefinably, though the square lines of his face, the honest blue eyes, the firm lips were as she remembered them. Under the smooth-shaven skin of his cheeks there was the blue shadow of a stubborn beard. He appeared prosperous, but not quite sure of himself, in a well-made broadcloth suit, and he held a new black derby hat in his left hand.
"I'm awfully glad to see you," she managed to say. "I'm—so surprised. I didn't know you were coming."
"I sent you a note on the wires," he replied. "I wasn't sure till last night I could get off."
"I didn't get it," she said. Silence hung over them like a threat. "I'm sorry I didn't know. I hope you didn't have to wait long. I'm glad you're looking so well. How is your mother?"
"She's all right. How is yours?"
"She's very well, thank you." She caught her laugh on a hysterical note. "Well—how do you like San Francisco weather?"
His bewilderment faded slowly into a grin.
"It is rather hard to get started," he admitted. "You look different than I thought you would, somehow. But I guess we haven't changed much really. Can't we go somewhere else?"
She read his dislike of momma in the look he cast at her living-room. It was natural, no doubt. But a quick impulse of loyalty to these people who had been so kind to her illogically resisted it. This room, with its close air, its film of dust over the table-tops, its general air of neglect emphasized by the open candy box on the piano-stool and the sooty papers in the gas grate, was nevertheless much pleasanter than the place where she had been living when she met Louise.
"I don't know just where," she replied. "Of course, I don't know the city very well because I work all day. But we might take a walk."
There was a scurry in the hallway when she opened the door; she caught a glimpse of Louise in petticoat and corset-cover dashing from the bathroom to the bedroom. She hoped that Paul had not seen it, but his cheeks were red. It was really absurd; what was there so terrible about a petticoat? He should have known better than to come to the house without telephoning, anyway. She cast about quickly for something to say.
No, he answered, he could not stay in town long, only twenty-four hours. He wanted to see the superintendent personally about the proposition of putting in a spur-track at Ripley for the loading of melons. There were—her thoughts did not follow his figures. She heard vaguely something about irrigation districts and water-feet and sandy loam soil. So he had not come to see her!
Then she saw that he, too, was talking only to cover a sense of strangeness and embarrassment as sickening as her own. She wished that they were comfortably sitting down somewhere where they could talk. It was hard to say anything interesting while they walked down bleak streets with the wind snatching at them.
"Whew! You certainly have some wind in this town!" he exclaimed. At the top of Nob Hill its full force struck them, whipping her skirts and tugging at her hat while she stood gazing down at the gray honeycomb of the city and across it at masses of sea fog rolling over Twin Peaks. "It gives me an appetite, I tell you! Where'll we go for supper?"
She hesitated. She could not imagine his being comfortable in any of the places she knew. Music and brilliant lights and cabaret singers would be another barrier between them added to those she longed to break down. She said that she did not know the restaurants very well, and his surprise reminded her that she had written him pages about them. She stammered over an explanation she could not make.
There were so many small, unimportant things that were important because they could not be explained, and that could not be explained without making them more important than they were. It seemed to her that the months since they had last met were full of them.
She took refuge in talking about her work. But she saw that he did not like that subject. He said briefly that it was a rotten shame she had to do it, and obviously hoped to close the theme with that remark.
They found a small restaurant down town, and after he had hung up his hat and they had discussed the menu, she sat turning a fork over and over and wondering what they could talk about. She managed to find something to say, but it seemed to her that their conversation had no more flavor than sawdust, and she was very unhappy.
"Look here, Helen, why didn't you tell those folks where you live that we're engaged?" There was nothing but inquiry in his tone, but the words were a bombshell. She straightened in her chair.
"Why—" How could she explain that vague feeling about keeping it from Louise and momma? "Why—I don't know. What was the use?"
"What was the use? Well, for one thing, it might have cleared things up a little for some of these other fellows that know you."
What had momma told him? "I don't know any men that would be interested," she said.
"Well, you never can tell about that," he answered reasonably. "I was sort of surprised, that's all. I had an idea girls talked over such things."
She was tired, and in the dull little restaurant there was nothing to stimulate her. The commonplace atmosphere, the warmth, and the placidity of his voice lulled her to stupidity.
"I suppose they do," she said. "They usually talk over their rings." She was alert instantly, filled with rage at herself and horror. His cheeks grew dully red. "I didn't mean—" she cried, and the words clashed with his. "If that's it I'll get you a ring."
"Oh, no! No! I don't want you to. I wouldn't think of taking it."
"Of course you know I haven't had money enough to get you a good one. I thought about it pretty often, but I didn't know you thought it was so important. Seems to me you've changed an awful lot since I knew you."
The protest, the explanation, was stopped on her lips. It was true. She felt that they had both changed so much that they might be strangers.
"Do you really think so?" she asked miserably.
"I don't know what to think," he answered honestly, pain in his voice. "I've been—about crazy sometimes, thinking about—things, wanting to see you again. And now—I don't know—you seem so different, sitting there with paint on your face—" Her hand went to her cheek as if it stung her—"and talking about rings. You didn't use to be like this a bit, Helen," he went on earnestly. "It seems to me as if you'd completely lost track of your better self somehow. I wish you'd—"
This struck from her a spark of anger.
"Please don't begin preaching at me! I'm perfectly able to take care of myself. Really, Paul, you just don't understand. It isn't anything, really, a little bit of rouge. I only put it on because I was tired and didn't have any color. And I didn't mean it about the ring. I just didn't think what I was saying. But I guess you're right. I guess neither of us knows the other any more."
She felt desolate, abandoned to dreariness. Everything seemed all wrong with the world. She listened to Paul's assurances that he knew she was all right, whatever she did, that he didn't care anyhow, that she suited him. But they sounded hollow in her ears, for she knew that beneath them was the same uncertainty she felt. When, flushing, he said again that he would get her a ring, she answered that she did not want one, and they said no more about it. The abyss between them was left bridged only by the things they had not said, fearing to make it forever impassable by saying them.
He left her at her door promptly at the proper hour of ten. There was a moment in which a blind feeling in her reached out to him; she felt that they had taken hold of the situation by the wrong end somehow, that everything would be all right if they had had a chance.
He supposed she couldn't take the morning off. He had to see the superintendent, but maybe they could manage an hour or two. No, she had to work. With the threat of that missent message hanging over her she dared not further spoil her record by taking a day off without notice. And she knew that one or two hours more could not possibly make up the months of estrangement between them.
"Well, good-night."
"Good-night." Their hands clung a moment and dropped apart. If only he would say something, do something, she did not know what. But awkwardness held him as it did her.
"Good-night." The broad door swung slowly shut behind her. Even then she waited a moment, with a wild impulse to run after him. But she climbed the stairs instead and went wearily to bed, her heart aching with a sense of irreparable loss.
In the morning she was still very tired, and while she drove herself through the day's work she told herself that probably she had never really loved him. "Unless you can love as the angels may, with the breadth of heaven betwixt you," she murmured, remembering the volume of poetry she had found on a library shelf. She had thrilled over it when she read it, dreaming of him; now it seemed to her a grim and almost cynical test. Well, she might as well face a lifetime of work. Lots of women did.
She managed to do this, seeing years upon years of lonely effort, during which she would accumulate money enough to buy a little home of her own. There would be no one in it to criticise her choice of friends or say that she painted. That remark clung like a bur in her mind. Yes, she could face a lifetime in which no one would have the right to say things like that!
But when she went home she found that she could not endure an evening of loneliness. Louise and momma were going out, and she was very gay while she dressed to go with them. They said they had never seen her in better spirits.
Unaccountably, the lights, the music, the atmosphere of gaiety, did not get into her blood as usual. At intervals she had moments of depression that they did not touch. She sat isolated in the crowd, sipping her lemonade, feeling that nothing in the world was worth while.
However, she went again the next night. She began to go almost as frequently as momma and Louise, and to understand the unsatisfied restlessness which drove Mrs. Latimer and her friends. She was tired in the morning, and there were more complaints of her work at the office, but she did not care. She felt recklessly that nothing mattered, and she went back to the beach resorts as a thirsty person will tip an emptied glass in which perhaps a drop remains.
"What's the matter, little one? Got a grouch?" said Louise's American Beauty man one night He was jovial and bald; his neck bulged over the back of his collar, and he wore a huge diamond on his little finger. Helen did not like him, but it was his party. He owned the big red car in which they had come to the beach, and she felt that his impatient reproach was justified. She was not paying her way.
"Not a bit!" she laughed. "Only for some reason I feel like a cold plum-pudding."
"What you need's brandy sauce," Duddy said, appreciating his own wit.
"You mean you want me to get lit up!"
"That's the idea! Bring on the booze, let joy be unrefined! Waiter, rye high-balls all around!"
She did not object; that did not seem worth while, either. When the glasses came she emptied hers with the rest, and her spirits did seem to lighten a little. "It removes inhibitions," Gilbert Kennedy had said. And he was gone, too. If he were only there the sparkle of life would come back; she would be exhilarated, witty, alive to her finger-tips once more—
The crowd was moving on again. She went with them into the cool night, and it seemed to her that life was nothing but a moving on from dissatisfaction to dissatisfaction. Squeezed into a corner of the tonneau, she relapsed into silence, and it was some time before she noticed the altered note in the excitement of the others.
"Give 'er the gas! Let 'er out! Damn it, if you let 'em pass—!" the car's owner was shouting, and the machine fled like a runaway thing. Against a blur of racing sand dunes Helen saw a long gray car creeping up beside them. "You're going to kill us!" momma screamed, disregarded. Helen, on her feet, clinging to the back of the front seat, yelled with the others. "Beat 'im! Beat 'im! Y-a-a-ah!"
Her hat, torn from her head, disappeared in the roaring blur behind them. Her hair whipped her face. She was wildly, gloriously alive. "Faster—faster, oh!" The gray car was gaining. Inch by inch it crawled up beside them. "Can't you gofaster?" she cried in a bedlam of shouts. Oh, if only her hands were on the wheel! It was unbearable that they should lose. "Give 'er more gas—she'll make eighty-five!" the owner yelled.
Everything in Helen narrowed to the challenge of that plunging gray car. Its passing was like an intolerable pulling of something vital from her grip. Pounding her hand against the car-door she shrieked frantic protests. "Don't let him do it! Go on! Go on!" The gray car was forging inexorably past them. It swerved. Momma's scream was torn to ribbons by the wind. It was ahead now, and one derisive yell from its driver came back to them. Their speed slowed.
"He's turning in at The Tides. Stop there?" the chauffeur asked over his shoulder.
"Yes, damn you! Wha'd yuh think you're driving, a baby-carriage? You're fired!" his employer raged, and he was still swearing when Helen, gasping and furious, stumbled from the running-board against Gilbert Kennedy.
"Good Lord, was it you?" he cried. "Some race!" he exulted and swinging her off her feet, he kissed her gayly. Something wild and elemental in her rushed to meet its mate in him. He released her instantly, and in a chorus of greetings, "Drinks on me, old man!" "Some little car you've got!" "Come on in!" she found herself under a glare of light in the swirl and glitter of The Tides. He was beside her at the round table, and her heart was pounding.
"No—no—this is on me!" he declared. "Only my money's good to-night. I'm going to Argentine to-morrow on the water-wagon. What'll you have?"
They ordered, helter-skelter, in a clamor of surprise and inquiry. "Argentine, what're you giving us!" "What's the big idea?" "You're kidding!"
"On the level. Argentine. To-morrow. Say, listen to me. I've got hold of the biggest proposition that ever came down the pike. Six million acres of land—good land, that'll raise anything from hell to breakfast. Do you know what people are paying for land in California right now? I'll tell you. Five hundred, six hundred, a thousand dollars an acre. And I've got six million acres of land sewed up in Argentine that I can sell for fifty cents an acre and make—listen to what I'm telling you—and make a hundred per cent. profit. The Government's backing me—they'd give me the whole of Argentine. I tell you there's millions in it!"
He was full of radiant energy and power. Her imagination leaped to grasp the bigness of this project. Thousands of lives altered, thousands of families migrating, cities, villages, railroads built. She felt his kiss on her lips, and that old, inexplicable, magnetic attraction. The throbbing music beat in her veins like the voice of it. He smiled at her, holding out his arms, and she went into them with recklessness and longing.
They were carried together on waves of rhythm, his arms around her, her loosened hair tumbling backward on her neck.
"I'm mad about you!"
"And you're going away?"
"Sorry?"
"Sorry? Bored. You always do!"
He laughed.
"Not on your life! This time I'm taking you with me."
"Oh, but I wouldn't take you—seriously!"
"I mean it. You're coming."
"I'm dreaming."
"I mean it." His voice was almost savage. "I want you."
Fear ran like a challenge through her exultation. She felt herself a small fluttering thing against his breast, while the intoxicating music swept them on through a whirling crowd. His face so close to her was keen and hard, his eyes were reckless as her own leaping blood. "All I've ever needed is a girl like you. You're not going to get away this time."
"Oh, but I'm perfectly respectable!"
"All right! Marry me."
Behind the chaos of her mind there was the tense, suffocating hesitation of the instant before a diver leaves the spring-board—security behind him, ecstasy ahead. His nearness, his voice, the light in his eyes, were all that she had been wanting, without knowing it, all these months. The music stopped with a crash.
He stood, as he had stood once before, his arm still tight around her, and in a flash she saw that other time and the dreary months that had followed.
"All right. It's settled?" There was the faintest question in his confident voice.
"You really do—love me?"
"I really do." His eyes were on hers, and she saw his confidence change to certainty. "You're game!" he said, and kissed her triumphantly, in the crowded room, beneath the glaring lights and crepe-paper decorations. She did not care; she cared for nothing in the world now but him.
"Let's—go away—a little while by ourselves, out where it's dark and cool," she said hurriedly as they crossed the floor.
"Not on your life! We're going to have the biggest party this town ever saw!" he answered exultantly over his shoulder, and she saw his enjoyment of the bomb he was about to drop upon the unsuspecting group at the table. "The roof is off the sky to-night. This is a wedding-party!"
Louise and momma were upon her with excited cries and kisses, and Helen, flushed, laughing, trying not to be hysterical, heard his voice ordering drinks, disposing of questions of license, minister, ring, rooms at the St. Francis, champagne, supper, flowers. She was the beggar maid listening to King Cophetua.