CHAPTER XI
At ten o'clock on a bright June morning Helen Kennedy tip-toed across a darkened bedroom and closed its door softly behind her. Her tenseness relaxed with a sigh of relief when the door shut with the tiniest of muffled clicks and the stillness behind its panels remained unbroken.
Sunlight streamed through the windows of the sitting-room, throwing a quivering pattern of the lace curtains on the velvet carpet and kindling a glow of ruddy color where it touched mahogany chairs and a corner of the big library table. She moved quickly to one of the broad windows and carefully raised a lower sash. The low roar of the stirring city rushed in like the noise of breakers on a far-away beach, and clean, tingling air poured upon her. She breathed it in deeply, drawing the blue silk negligée closer about her throat.
The two years that had whirled past since she became Bert Kennedy's wife had taught her many things. She had drawn from her experience generalities on men, women, life, which made her feel immeasurably older and wiser. But there were problems that she had not solved, points at which she felt herself at fault, and they troubled her vaguely while she stood twisting the cord of the window-shade in her hand and gazing out at the many-windowed buildings of San Francisco.
She had learned that men loved women for being beautiful, gay, unexacting, sweet-tempered always, docile without being bores. She had learned that men were infuriated by three things; questions, babies, and a woman who was ill. She had learned that success in business depended upon "putting up a front" and that a woman's part was to help in that without asking why or for what end. She had learned that the deepest need of her own nature was to be able to look up to the man she loved, even though she must go down on her own knees in order to do it. She knew that she adored her husband blindly, passionately, and that she dared not open her eyes for fear she would cease to do so.
But she had not quite been able to fit herself into a life with him. She had not learned what to do with these morning hours while he was asleep; she had not learned to occupy all her energies in useless activities while he was away; in a word, she did not know what to do with the part of her life he did not want, and she could not compel herself to be satisfied in doing nothing with it.
Gathering up the trailing silks of her nightgown and negligée she went back to the pile of magazines and books on the table. She did not exactly want to read; reading seemed to her as out of place in the morning as soup for breakfast. But she could not go out, for at any moment Bert might wake and call to her, and she could not dress, for he saw a reproach in that, and was annoyed. She turned over the books uncertainly, selecting at last a curious one called "Pragmatism," which had fascinated her when she dipped into its pages in the library. She had it in her hand when the door-bell rang loudly.
She stood startled, clutching the book against her breast. Her heart beat thickly, and the color faded from her face and then poured back in a burning flush. The bell rang again more imperatively. The very sound of it proclaimed that it was rung by a collector. Was it the taxi-cab man, the tailor, the collection agency? She could not make herself go to the door, and the third long, insistent peal of the bell wrung her like the tightening of a rack. It would waken Bert, but what further excuse could she make to the grimly insulting man she visualized on the other side of the door? The bell continued to ring.
After a long time it was silent, and she heard the slam of the automatic elevator's door. A second later she heard Bert's voice.
"Helen! Helen! What the devil?"
She opened the bedroom door and stood smiling brightly on the threshold. "'Morning, Bert dear! Behold, the early bird's gone with his bill still open!"
"Well, why the hell didn't you open the door and tell him to stop that confounded noise? Were you afraid of disturbing him?"
He knew how it hurt her, but she was trained not to show it. It appeared to her now that she had been criminally selfish in not guarding Bert's sleep. She saw herself a useless incumbrance to her husband's career, costing him a great deal and doing nothing whatever to repay him.
"That's the trouble—it wouldn't have disturbed him a bit!" she laughed bravely. "Somebody ought to catch a collector and study the species and find out what will disturb 'em. I think they're made of cast-iron. I wonder does collecting run in families, or do they just catch 'em young and harden them."
Sometimes even in the mornings talk like this made him smile. But this morning he only growled unintelligibly, turning his head on the pillow. She went softly past the bed into the dressing-room.
Bert had scouted her idea of getting an apartment with a kitchenette. He said he had not married a cook, and he hated women with burned complexions and red hands. He made her feel plebeian and common in preferring a home to a hotel. But she had found when she interviewed the apartment-house manager and had spent a happy morning buying a coffee percolator and dainty cups and napkins, that he did not mind her giving him coffee in bed. She found a deep pleasure in doing it.
The percolator stood behind a screen in the dressing-room. She turned on the electric switch and, sitting down before the mirror, took off her lace cap and released her hair from its curlers. Bert liked her hair curled. Its dark mist framed a face that she regarded anxiously in the mirror. The features had sharpened a little, and her complexion had lost a shade of its freshness. Bert would insist on her drinking with him, and she knew she must do it to keep her hold on him. A sense of the unreasonableness of men in loving women for their beauty and then destroying it came into her mind, nebulous, almost a thought. But she disregarded it, from a habit she had formed of disregarding many things, and began combing and coiling her hair, carefully inspecting the result from all angles with a hand mirror.
A few minutes later she came into the bedroom, carrying a tray and kicking the trailing lengths of her negligée before her. She held the tray in one hand while she cleared the bedside table with the other, and when she had poured the coffee she went through the sitting-room and brought in the morning paper. It had been the taxi-cab man. His bill, stuck in the crack of the door, fluttered down when she opened it, and after glancing at the figures hastily, she thrust it out of sight.
Bert was sitting up in bed, drinking his coffee, and the smile he threw at her made her happy. She curled on the bed beside his drawn-up knees and, taking her own cup from the tray, smiled at him in turn. She never loved him more than at such moments as this, when his rumpled hair and the eyes miraculously cleared and softened by sleep made him seem almost boyish.
"Good?"
"You're some little chef when it comes to coffee!" he replied. "It hits the spot." He yawned. "Good Lord, we must have had a time last night! Did I fight a chauffeur or did I dream it?"
"It was only a—rather a—dispute," she said hurriedly.
"That little blond doll was some baby!"
He could not intend to be so cruel, not even to punish her for letting the bell waken him. It was only that he liked to feel his own power over her. He cared only for women that he could control, and she knew that it was the constant struggle between them, in which he was always victorious, that gave her her greatest hold on him. But it did hurt her cruelly in this moment of security to be reminded of the dangers that always threatened that hold.
"Oh, stunning!" she agreed, keeping her eyes clear and smiling. She would not fall into the error and the confession of being catty. But she felt that he perceived her motive, and she knew that in any case he held the advantage over her. She was in the helpless position of the one who gives the greater love.
They sipped their coffee in silence broken only by the crackling of the newspaper. Then, pushing it away, he set down his cup and leaned back against the pillows, his hands behind his head. A moment had arrived in which she could talk to him, and behind her carefully casual manner her nerves tightened.
"It was pretty good coffee," she remarked. "You know, I think it would be fun if we had a real place, with a breakfast-room, don't you? Then we'd have grape-fruit and hot muffins and all that sort of thing, too. I'd like to have a place like that. And then we'd have parties," she added hastily. "We could keep them going all night long if we wanted to in our own place."
He yawned.
"Dream on, little one," he said. But his voice was pleasant.
"Now listen, dear. I really mean it. We could do it. It wouldn't be a bit more trouble to you than a hotel, really. I'd see that it wasn't. I really want it awfully badly. I know you'd like it if you'd just let me try it once. You don't know how nice I'd make it for you."
His silence was too careless to be antagonistic, but he was listening. She was encouraged.
"You don't realize how much time I have when you're gone. I could keep a house running beautifully, and you'd never even see the wheels go round. I—"
"A house!" He was aroused. "Great Scott, doesn't it cost enough for the two of us to live as it is? Don't you make my life miserable whining about bills?"
The color came into her cheeks, but she had never risked letting herself feel resentment at anything he chose to say. She laughed quite naturally. "My goodness!" she said. "You're talking as if I were a puppy! I've never whined a single whine; it's the howling of the collectors you've heard. Let 'em howl; it's good enough for 'em! No, but really, sweetheart, please just let me finish. I've thought it all out. You don't know what a good manager I am." She hurried on, forestalling the words on his lips. "You don't know how much I want to be just a little bit of help. I can't be much, I know. But I'm sure I could save money—"
"Old stuff!" he interrupted. "It isn't the money you save; it's the money you make that counts."
"I know!" she agreed quickly. "But we could get a house, we could buy a house, for less than we're paying here in rent. A very nice house. I wouldn't ask you to do it, if it cost any more than we're spending now. But—of course I don't know anything about such things—but I should think it would give you an advantage in business if you owned some property. Wouldn't—wouldn't it—make people put more confidence—" She faltered miserably at the look in his eyes, and before he could speak she had changed her tactics, laughing.
"I'm just trying to tease you into giving me something I want, and I know I'm awfully silly about it." She nestled closer to him, slipping an arm under his neck. "Oh, honey, it wouldn't cost anything at all, and I do so want to have a house to do things to. I feel so—so unsettled, living this way. I feel as if I were always sitting on the edge of a chair waiting to go somewhere else. And I'm used to working and—and managing a little money. I know it wasn't much money, but I liked to do it. You're letting a lot of perfectly good energy go to waste in me, really you are."
He laughed, tightening his arm about her shoulders, and for one deliriously happy moment she thought she had won. Then he kissed her, and before he spoke she knew she had lost.
"I should worry! You're giving me all I want," he said, and there was different delight in the words. She was satisfying him, and for the moment it was enough. He made the mistake of overconfidence in emphasizing a point already won and so losing it.
"And as long as I'm giving you three meals a day and glad rags, it isn't up to you to worry. I'll look after the finances if you'll take care of your complexion. It's beginning to need it," he added with brutality that defeated its own purpose. Even in her pain she had an instant of seeing him clearly and feeling that she hated him.
She slipped to her feet and stood trembling, not looking down at him.
"Well, that's settled, then," she said in a clear, hard little voice. "I'll go and dress. It's nearly noon."
She felt that her own anger was threatening the most precious thing in her life; she felt that she was two persons who were tearing each other to pieces. With a blind instinct of reaching out to him for help she turned at the dressing-room door. "I know you don't realize what you're doing to me—you don't realize—what you're throwing away," she said.
There was a cool amusement in his eyes.
"Well, but why the melodrama?" he asked reasonably. She stood convicted of hysteria and stupidity, and she felt again his superiority and his mastery over her.
When she came from the dressing-room to find him, careless, good-humored, handsome, tugging his tie into its knot before the mirror, she knew that nothing mattered except that she loved him and that she must hold his love for her. She came close to him, longing for a reassurance that she would not ask. Unless he gave it to her, left her with it to hold in her heart, she would be tortured by miserable doubts and flickering jealousies until he came back. She would be tied to the telephone, waiting for a call from him, trying to follow in her imagination the intricate business affairs from which she was shut out, telling herself that it was business and nothing else that kept him from her.
"Well, bye-bye," he said, putting on his hat.
"Good-by." Her voice was like a detaining hand. "You—you won't be gone long?"
He relented.
"I'm going down to see Clark & Hayward. I'm going to put through a deal with them that'll put us on velvet," he declared.
"Clark & Hayward? They're the real-estate people?"
"You're some little guesser. They certainly are. We're going to be millionaires when I get through with them! Farewell!"
The very door seemed to click triumphantly behind him, and she heard him whistling while he waited for the elevator. When he appeared on the sidewalk below, she was leaning from the window, and she would have waved to him if he had looked up. Her occupation for the day vanished when he swung into a street-car and was carried out of sight.
She picked up the pragmatism book again and read a few paragraphs, put it down restlessly. The untidy bedroom nagged at her nerves, but Bert was paying for hotel service, and once when she had made the bed he had told her impatiently that there was no sense in letting the very servants know she was not used to living decently.
She would go for a walk. There might be something new to see in the shop windows. She would take the book with her and read it in the dairy lunch-room where she ate when alone. It seemed criminal to her to spend money unnecessarily when they owed so much, and she could not help trying to save it, though all her efforts seemed to make no difference.
If she could have only a small amount of money regularly, she could manage so much better. Even the salary she had earned as a telegraph-operator sometimes seemed like riches to her, because she had known that she would have it every month and had managed it herself. But every attempt to establish regularity and stability in her present life ended always in the same failure, and she hurriedly turned even her slightest thoughts from the memory of conversations like that just ended.
In the dressing-room she snapped on all the lights and under their merciless glare critically inspected every line of her face. The carefully brushed arch of the eyebrows was perfect; the slightest trace of rouge was spread skillfully on her cheeks, the round point of her chin, the lobes of her ears. She coaxed loose a tendril of dark hair and, soaking it with banderine, plastered it against her cheek in a curve that was the final touch of striking artificiality. She did not like it, but Bert did.
She took time in adjusting her hat. Everything depended on that, she knew. She tied her veil with meticulous care. Then, slowly turning before the long mirror set in the door, she critically inspected every detail of her costume, the trim little boots, the crisp, even edges of her skirt, the line of the jacket, the immaculate gloves. A tremendous amount of thought and effort had gone into the making of that smart effect, and she felt that she had done a good job. She would still compare favorably with any of the women Bert might meet. A tiny spark of cheerfulness was kindled by the thought. She tried to nourish it, but it went out in dreariness.
What kind of deal was Bert putting through with Clark & Hayward? It was the first time he had mentioned real estate since the unexplained failure of his plan to go to Argentine. That was another memory from which she hastily turned her thoughts, a memory of his alternate moodiness and wild gaiety, of his angry impatience at her most tentative show of interest or sympathy, of their ending an ecstatic, miserable honeymoon by sneaking out of the hotel leaving an unpaid bill behind them. She still avoided the hotel, though he must long since have paid the bill. She had not dared ask him, but he had made a great deal of money since then.
There had been the flurry of excitement about the mining stocks, which were selling like wild-fire and promised millions until something happened. And then the scheme for floating a rubber plantation in Guatemala—his long eastern trip and her diamond ring had come out of that—and then the affair of the patent monkey-wrench. He had said again that there were millions in it, and had derided her dislike of the inventor. She wondered what had become of that enterprise, and secretly thought that she had been right and that the man had tried to swindle Bert.
Now it was real estate again. She did not doubt that her clever husband would succeed in it; she was sure that he would be one of America's biggest business men some day, when he turned his genius to one line and followed it with a little more steadiness. But she would have liked to know more about his business affairs. Since they could not have a home yet, she would like to be doing something interesting.
She stopped such thoughts with an impatient little mental shake. Perhaps she would feel better when she had eaten luncheon. With the book tucked under her arm she walked briskly down the sunny, wind-swept streets, threading her way indifferently through the tangle of traffic at the corners with the sixth sense of the city dweller, seeing without perceiving them the clanging street-cars, the silent, shining limousines, the streams of cleverly dressed women, preoccupied men, fluffy dogs on chains, and the panorama of shop-windows filled with laces, jewels, gowns, furs, hats. She walked surrounded by an isolation as complete as if she were alone in a forest, and nothing struck through it until she paused before a window-display of hardware.
She came to that window frequently, drawn by an irresistible attraction. With a pleasant sense of dissipation she stood before it, gazing at glittering bathroom fixtures, rank on rank of shining pans, rows of kitchen utensils, electric flat-irons. To-day there was a glistening white kitchen cabinet, with ingenious flour-bin and built-in sifter, hooks for innumerable spoons, sugar and spice jars, an egg-beater, a market-memorandum device. A tempting yellow bowl stood on a white shelf.
Some day, she thought, she would have a yellow kitchen. She had in mind the shade of yellow, a clear yellow, like sunshine. There would be cream walls and yellow woodwork, at the windows sheer white curtains, which would wash easily, and on the window-sill a black jar filled with nasturtiums. The breakfast-room should be a glassed-in porch, and its curtains should be thin yellow silk, through which the sunshine would cast a golden light on the little breakfast table spread with a white embroidered cloth and set with shining silver and china. The coffee percolator would be bubbling, and the grape-fruit in place, and when she came from the kitchen with the plate of muffins Bert would look up from his paper and say, "Muffins again? Fine! You're some little muffin-maker!"
She dimpled and flushed happily, standing before the unresponsive sheet of plate glass. Then, with a shrug and a half laugh at herself, she came back to reality and went on. But the display held her as a candy-shop holds a child, and she must stop again to look at the next window, filled with color-cards and cans of paint. Her mind was still busy with color combinations for a living-room when she entered the dairy lunch-room and carried her tray to a table.
For a moment she looked at the crowd about her, clerks and shopgirls and smartly dressed stenographers hurriedly drinking coffee and eating pie. Then she propped her book against the sugar bowl and began slowly to eat, turning a page from time to time. This was an astonishing book. It was not fiction, but it was even more interesting. She read quickly, skipping the few words she did not understand, grasping their meaning by a kind of intuition, wondering why she had never before considered ideas of this kind.
She was so deeply absorbed that she merely felt, without realizing, the presence of some one hesitating at her elbow, some one who moved past her to draw out a chair opposite her and set down his tray. She moved her coffee-cup to make room for it, and apologetically lifted the book from the sugar bowl, glancing across it to see Paul.
The shock was so great that for an instant she did not move or think. He stood motionless and stared at her with eyes wiped blank of any expression. Her cup rattled as the book dropped against it and the sound roused her. With the sensation of a desperate twist, like that of a falling cat righting itself in the air, she faced the situation.
"Why—Paul!" she said, and felt that the old name struck the wrong note. "How you startled me. But of course I'm very glad to see you again. Do sit down."
In his face she saw clearly his chagrin, his rage at himself for blundering into this awkwardness, his resolve to see it through. He put himself firmly into the chair and though his face and even his neck were red, there was the remembered determination in the set of his lips and the lift of his chin.
"I'm certainly surprised to see you," he said. "From all I've been hearing about you I had a notion you never ate in places like this any more. They tell me you're getting along fine. I'm mighty glad to hear it." With deliberation he dipped two level spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee and attacked the triangle of pie.
"Oh, I come in sometimes for a change," she said lightly. "Yes, everything's fine with me. You're looking well, too."
There was an undeniable air of prosperity about him. His suit was tailor-made, and the hat on the hook above his head was a new gray felt of the latest shape. His face had changed very slightly, grown perhaps a bit fuller than she remembered, and the line of the jaw was squarer. But he looked at her with the same candid, straight gaze. Of course, she could not expect warmth in it.
"Well, I can't complain," he said. "Things are going pretty well. Slow, of course, but still they're coming."
"I'm awfully glad to hear it. Your mother's well?" The situation was fantastic and ghastly, but she would not escape from it until she could do so gracefully. She formed the next question in her mind while he answered that one.
"Do you often get up to the city?"
"Oh, now and then. I only come when I have to. It's too windy and too noisy to suit me. I just came up this morning to see a real-estate firm here about a house they've got in Ripley. I'm going back to-night."
"You're buying a house?" she cried in the tone of a child who sees a toy taken from it. Her anger at her lack of self-control was increased when she saw that he had misinterpreted her feeling.
"Just to rent," he said hastily. "I'm not thinking of—moving. Mother and I are satisfied where we are, and I expect it'll be some time before I get that place paid for. This other house—" It seemed to her unbearable that he should have two houses. But he went on doggedly, determined, she saw, to give no impression of a prosperity that was not his. "I expect you wouldn't think much of it. But there's a big real-estate firm up here that's going to boom Ripley, and I wanted to get in on as much of it as I could. They're buying up half the land in the county, and I had an option on a little piece they wanted, so I traded it in for this house. I figure I can fix it up some and make a good thing renting it pretty soon."
She saw that her momentary envy had been absurd. He might have two houses, but he was only one of the unnumbered customers of a big real-estate firm. At that moment her husband was dealing as an equal with the heads of such a firm. There was, of course, no comparison between the two men, and she made none. The stirring of remembered affection that she felt for Paul registered in her mind only a pensive realization of the decay of everything under the erosion of time.
She felt that she was managing the interview very well, and when she saw Paul resugaring his coffee from time to time, with the same deliberate measuring of two level spoonfuls, she felt a complex gratification. She told herself that she did not want Paul to be still in love with her and unhappy, but there was a pleasure in seeing this evidence that his agitation was greater than hers. Being ashamed of the emotion did not kill it.
He told her, with an attempt to control his pride, that he was no longer with the railroad company. The man who "just about owned Ripley" had given him a better job. He was in charge of the ice-plant and lumber-yard now, and he was getting a hundred and fifty a month. He mentioned the figures diffidently, as one who does not desire to be boastful.
"That's fine!" she said, and thought that they paid nearly half that sum for rent, and that the very clothes she was wearing had cost more than his month's salary. She would have liked him to know these things, so that he might see how wonderful Bert was, though they did not have a house, and the cruelty of even thinking this made her hate herself. "Why, you're doing splendidly," she said. "I'm so glad!"
Paul, though conscientiously modest, agreed with her, and was deeply pleased by her applause. After an evident struggle between two opposing impulses, he began to ask questions about her. She found there was very little to tell him. Yes, she was having a very good time. Yes, she was very well. His admiration of her rosy color threw her into a strangling whirlpool of emotions, from which she rescued herself by the sardonic thought that her technic with rouge had improved since their last meeting. She told him vaguely that business was fine, and that they had a lovely apartment on Bush Street.
There was nothing else to tell about herself, and both of them avoided directly mentioning her husband. She had never more keenly realized the emptiness of her life, except for Bert, than when she saw Paul's mind circling about it in an effort to find something there.
He turned at last, baffled, to the book beside her plate.
"Still keeping on reading, I see. I re—" he stopped short. They both remembered the small book-case with the glass doors that had stood in his mother's parlor in Masonville, and how they had lingered before it on the pretext that she was borrowing a book. "Something good?" he asked hastily. When she showed him the title, he repeated it doubtfully: "Pragmatism? Well, it's all right, I suppose. I don't go much for these Oriental notions about religion, myself."
"It isn't a religion, exactly," she said uncertainly. "It's a new way of looking at things. It's about truth—sort of. I mean, it says there isn't any, really—not absolutely, you know," she floundered on before the puzzled question in his eyes. "It says there isn'tabsolutetruth—truth, you know, like a separate thing. Truth's only a sort of quality, like—well, like beauty, and it belongs to a thing if the thing works out right. I've got it clear in my head, but I don't express it very well, I know."
"I don't see any sense to it, myself," he commented. "Truth is just simply truth, that's all, and it's up to us to tell it all the time."
She knew that an attempt to explain further would fail, and she felt that her mind had a wider range than his; but she had an impression of his standing sure-footed and firm on the rock of his simple convictions, and she saw that his whole life was as secure and stable as hers was insecure and precarious. She felt about that as she did about his house, envying him something which she knew was not as valuable as her own possessions.
A strange pang—a pain she could not understand—struck her when he stopped at the cashier's grating and paid her check with his own in the most matter-of-fact way.
They parted at the door of the lunch-room; for seeing his hesitation she said brightly: "Well, good-by. I'm going the other way." She held out her hand, and when he took it she added quickly, "I'm so glad to have seen you looking so well and happy."
"I'm not so blamed happy," he retorted gruffly, as if her words jarred the exclamation from him. He covered it instantly with a heavy, "So'm I—I'm glad you are. Good-by."
That exclamation remained in her mind, repeating itself at intervals like an echo. She had been more deeply stirred than she had realized. Fragments of old emotions, unrealized hopes, unsatisfied longings, rose in her, to be replaced by others, to sink, and come back again. "I'm not so blamed happy." It might have meant anything or nothing. She wondered what her life would be if she were living in a little house in Ripley with him, and rejected the picture, and considered it again.
Looking back, she saw all the turnings that had taken her from the road to a life like that—the road that she had once unquestioningly supposed that she would take. If she had stayed at home in Masonville, if she had given up the struggle in Sacramento; if she had been able to live in San Francisco with nothing to fill her days but work and loneliness—she saw as a series of merest chances the steps which had brought her at last to Bert.
One could not have everything. She had him. He was not a man who would work slowly, day by day, toward a petty job and a small house bought on the instalment plan. He was brilliant, clever, daring. He would one day do great things, and she must help him by giving him all her love and faith and trust. Suddenly it appeared monstrous that she should be struggling against him, troubling him with her commonplace desires for a commonplace thing like a home, at the very moment when he needed all his wit and skill to handle a big deal. She was ashamed of the thoughts with which she had been playing; they seemed to her an infidelity of the spirit.