CHAPTER XVII
On a hot July afternoon three years later she drove a dusty car through the traffic on Santa Clara Street in San José, and stopped it at the curb. When she had jumped to the sidewalk she walked around the car and thoughtfully kicked a ragged tire with a stubby boot. The tire had gone flat on the Cupertino road, and it was on her mind that she had put too much air into the patched tube. For two miles she had been expecting to hear the explosion of another blow-out, and had been too weary to stop the car and unscrew the air valve.
"Darn thing's rim-cut, anyway," she said under her breath. "I'll have to get a new one." She dug her note-book and wallet from the mass of dusty literature in the tonneau and walked into the building.
Hutchinson was telephoning when she entered their office on the fourth floor. A curl of smoke rose from his cigar-end on the flat-topped desk and drifted through the big open window. There were dusty footprints on the ingrain rug, and the helter-skelter position of the chairs showed that prospects had come in during her absence. Hutchinson chuckled when he hung up the receiver.
"Ted's going to catch it when he gets home!" he remarked, picking up the cigar.
"Stalling his wife again?" Helen was running through her mail. "I suppose there isn't a man on earth who won't joyfully lie to another man's wife for him," she added, ripping an envelope.
"Well, Holy Mike! What would you tell her?"
Helen looked up quickly from the letter.
"I'd tell her the—" she began hotly, and stopped. "Oh, I don't know. I suppose he's got that red-headed girl out in the machine again? He makes me tired. If you ask me, I think we'd better get rid of him. That sort of thing doesn't make us any sales."
There was silence while she ripped open the other letters and glanced through them. Her momentary anger subsided. She reflected that there were men on whom one could rely. Her thoughts returned to Paul as to a point of security. His appearance in San José a few months earlier had been like the sight of a cool spring in a desert. She had not realized the scorn for all men that had grown in her until she met him again and could not feel it for him.
She glanced from the window at the clock in the tower of the Bank of San José building. Half-past four. He would still be at the ice-plant. This thought, popping unexpectedly into her mind, startled her with the realization that all day she had been subconsciously dwelling on the fact that it was the day on which he usually came to San José since his firm had acquired its interests there.
The clock suggested simultaneously another thought, and she snatched the telephone-receiver from its hook. "Am I too late for the afternoon delivery?" she anxiously asked the groceryman who answered the call. "Oh, thank you. Two heads of lettuce, a dozen eggs, half a pound of butter. How much are tomatoes? Well, send me a pound. Yes, H. D. Kennedy, 560 South Green Street. Thank you!" As the receiver clicked into place, she asked, "Any live ones to-day?"
"Six callers. Two good prospects and a couple that may work up into something," Hutchinson answered. "Say, the Seals are certainly handing it to the Tigers. Won in the fifth inning."
"That's good," she said absently. "Closed the Haas sale yet?"
"Oh, he's all right. Tied up solid." Hutchinson yawned. "How's your man?"
"Dated him for the land next Wednesday. He's live, but hard to handle. Taking him down in the machine."
"Machine all right?"
"Engine needs overhauling, and we've got to get a new rear tire and some tubes. Two blow-outs to-day. Time's too valuable to spend it jacking up cars in this heat. I'm all in. But I can nurse the engine along till I get back from this trip." She felt that each sentence was a load she must lift with her voice. "I'm all in," she repeated. "Guess I'll call it a day."
However, she still sat relaxed in her chair, looking out at the quaint old red-brick buildings across the street. San José, she thought whimsically, was like a sturdy old geranium plant, woody-stemmed, whose roots were thick in every foot of the Santa Clara Valley. She felt an affection for the town, for the miles of orchard around it, interlaced with trolley-lines, for the thousands of bungalows on ranches no larger than gardens. Some day she would like to handle a sub-division of acre tracts, she thought, and build a hundred bungalows herself.
She brought her thoughts back to the Haas sale, and spoke of it tentatively. It was all right, Hutchinson assured her with some annoyance. The old man was tied up solid. He'd sign the final contract as soon as he got his money, and he had written for it. What did Helen want to crab about it for?
"I don't mean to be a crab," she smiled. "But—do you know the definition of a pessimist? He's a man who's lived too long with an optimist."
Hutchinson covered his bewilderment with a laugh.
"You know, I've often thought I'd look up that word. I see it every once in a while. Pessimist. But what's the use? You don't need words like that to sell land."
She had been stupid again, aiming over his head. He was right. You didn't need words like that to sell land. You didn't need any of the things she liked, to sell land. She was a fool. She was tired. But she returned to the Haas sale. The subject must be handled carefully, for Hutchinson was too good a salesman to offend, though he was lazy. Where was Haas's money? Hutchinson replied that it was banked in the old country, Germany.
"Germany! And he's written for it? For the love of—! You grab the machine and chase out there and make him cable. Pay for the cable. Send it yourself. Tell 'em to cable the money. Haven't you seen the papers?"
Hutchinson, surrounded by scattered sporting sheets, stared up at her in amazement.
"Don't you know Austria sent an ultimatum to Servia? Haven't you ever heard of the Balkan Wars? Don't you know if Russia—Good Lord, man! And you're letting that money lie in Germany waiting for a letter? Beat it out there. Make him cable. I'll pay for it myself. Good Lord, Hutchinson—a fifty acre sale! Don't stop to talk. The cable-office closes at six. Hurry! And look out for that rear left tire!" she opened the door to call after him.
The brief flurry of excitement had raised in her an exhilaration that vanished in a sense of futility and shame. "I'm getting so I swear like—like a land-salesman!" she said to herself, straightening her hat before the mirror. There was a streak of dust on her nose, and she wiped it off with a towel, and tucked up straggling locks of hair. In the dark strand over one temple a few white lines shone like silver. "I'm wearing out," she said, looking at them and at her skin, tanned to a smooth brown. Nobody cared. Why should she carefully save herself? She shut the closet door on her mirrored reflection, locked the office door, and went home.
The small, brown bungalow looked at her with empty eyes. The locked front door and the dry leaves scattered from the rose-vines over the porch gave the place a deserted appearance. At all the other houses on the street the doors were open; children played on the lawns, wicker tables and rocking-chairs and carelessly dropped magazines made the porches homelike. There was pity in her rush of affection for the little house; she felt toward it as she might have felt toward an animal she loved, waiting in loneliness for her coming to make it happy.
The door opened wide into the small square hall, and in the stirred air a few rose petals drifted downward from the bowl of roses on the walnut table. She unlatched and swung back the casement windows in the living-room. Then she dropped her hat and purse among the cushions on the window-seat, and straightening her body to its full height, relaxed again in a long, contented sigh. A weight slipped from her spirit. She was at home.
Her lingering glance caressed the rose-colored curtains rustling softly in the faint breeze, the flat cream walls, the brown rugs, the brick hearth on which piled sticks waited for a match. There was her wicker sewing-basket, and beyond it the crowded book shelves. Here was the quaint, walnut desk she had found at a second-hand store, and the big, mannish chair with the brown leather cushions. It was all hers, her very own. She had made it. She was at home, and free. The silence around her was like cool water on a hot face.
In the white-tiled bathroom, with its yellow curtains, yellow bath rug, yellow-bordered fluffy bath-towels, she washed the last memory of the office from her. She reveled in the daintiness of sheer, hand-embroidered underwear, in the crispness of the white dress she slipped over her head. She put on her feet the most frivolous of slippers, with beaded toes and high heels.
"You're a sybarite, that's what you are! You're a beastly sensualist!" she laughed at herself in the mirror. "And you're leading a double life. 'Out, damned spot!'" she added, to the brown triangle of tan on her neck.
For an hour she was happy. Aproned in blue gingham she watered the lawn and hosed the last swirling leaf from the front porch. She said a word or two about roses to the woman next door. They were not very friendly; all the women on that street looked at her across the gulf of uncomprehension between quiet, homekeeping women and the vague world of business. They did not quite know how to take her; they thought her odd. She felt that their lives were cozy and safe, but very small.
Then she went into the kitchen. She made a salad, broke the eggs for an omelet, debated with finger at her lip whether to make popovers. They were fun to make, because of the uncertainty about their popping, but somehow they were difficult to eat while one read. One could manage bread-and-butter sandwiches without lifting eyes from the page Odd, that she should be lonely only while she ate. The moment she laid down her book at the table the silence of the house closed around her coldly.
She would not have said that she was waiting for anything, but an obscure suspense prolonged her hesitation over the trivial question. When the telephone-bell pealed startlingly through the stillness it was like an awaited summons, and she ran to answer it without doubting whose voice she would hear.
As always, there was some excuse for Paul's telephoning,—a message from his mother, a bit of news from Ripley Farmland Acres,—some negligible matter which she heard without listening, knowing that to both of them it was unimportant. The nickel mouthpiece reflected an amused dimple in her cheek, and there was a lilt in her voice when she thanked him. She asked him to come to supper. His hesitation was a struggle with longing. She insisted, and when she hung up the receiver the house had suddenly become warmed and glowing.
She felt a new zest while she took her prettiest lunch cloth from its lavender-scented drawer and brought in a bunch of roses, stopping to tuck one in her belt. She felt, too, that she was pushing back into the depths of her mind many thoughts and emotions that struggled to emerge. She shut her eyes to them, and resisted blindly. It was better to see only the placid surface of the moment. She concentrated her attention upon the popovers, and the egg-beater was humming in her hands when she heard his step on the porch.
It was a quick, heavy step, masculine and determined, but always there was something boyishly eager in it.
She called to him through the open doors, and when he came in she gave him a floury hand, pushing a lock of hair back from her eyes with the back of it before she went on beating the popovers. He stood awkwardly about while she poured the mixture into the hot tins and quickly slid it into the oven, but she knew he enjoyed being there.
The table was set on the screened side porch. White passion flowers fluttered like moths among the green leaves that curtained it, and in an open space a great, yellow rose tapped gently against the screen. The twilight was filled with a soft, orange glow; above the gray roofs half the sky was yellow and the small clouds were like flakes of shining gold.
There came over Helen the strange, uncanny sensation that sometime, somewhere, she had lived through this moment once before. She ignored it, smiling across the white cloth at Paul. She liked to see him sitting there, his square shoulders sturdy in the gray business suit, his lips firm, tight at the corners, his eyes a little stern, but straight-forward and honest. He gave an impression of solidity and permanence; one would always know where to find him.
"You're certainly some cook, Helen!" he said. The omelet was delicious, and the popovers a triumph. She ate only one, that he might have the others, and his enjoyment of them gave her a deep delight.
Across the little table a subtle current vibrated between them, intoxicating her, making her a little dizzy with emotions she would not analyze.
"I certainly am!" she laughed. "The cook-stove lost a genius when I became a real-estate lady." She was not blind to the shadow that crossed his face, but part of her intoxication was a perverseness that did not mind annoying him just a little bit.
"I hate to think about it," he said. His gravity shattered the iridescent glamor, making her grave, too, and the prosaic atmosphere of the office and its problems surrounded her.
"Well, you may not have it to think about much longer. What do you think? Is there going to be real trouble in Europe?"
"How do you mean?"
"War?"
"Oh, I doubt it. Not in this day and age. We've got beyond that, I hope." His casual dismissal of the possibility was a relief to her, but not quite an assurance.
"I hope so." She stirred her coffee, thoughtfully watching the glimmer of the spoon in the golden-brown depths. "I'll be glad when it blows over. That Balkan situation—If Austria stands by her ultimatum, and Servia does pull Russia into it, there's Germany. I don't know much about world politics, but one thing's certain. If there is war, the bottom'll drop out of my business."
He was startled.
"I don't know what it's got to do with us over here."
"It hasn't anything to do with you or your affairs. But farmers are the most cautious class on earth. The minute there is a real storm cloud in Europe every one of 'em'll draw in his money and sit on it. The land game's entirely a matter of psychology. Let the papers begin yelling, 'War!' though it's eight thousand miles away, and every prospect I have will figure that good hard cash in hand is better than a mortgage with him on the wrong side of it. That means thumbs down for me. It's hard enough to keep up the office expenses and pay garage bills as it is."
Alarm was driven from his face by a chaos of emotions. He flushed darkly, his eyes on his plate. "You oughtn't to have to be worrying about such things."
"Oh, I won't mind if it does happen," she said quickly. "In a way, I'd be glad. I'd be out of business anyway; I'd find something else to do. Nobody knows how I hate business—nothing but an exploiting of stupid people by people just a little less stupid."
She caught at the impersonality of the subject, trying to control the intoxication that rose in her again, fed by his silence, by the currents it set vibrating between them once more. She threw her words into it as if their hard-matter-of-factness would break a growing spell.
"Six-tenths of our business can be wiped out without doing any harm. A real-estate salesman hasn't any real reason for existing. We're just a barrier between the land and the people who want it. We aren't needed a bit. The people would simply take the land if they weren't like horses, too stupid to know their own strength, letting us grow fat on their labor. Hoffman, owning the land and making a hundred per cent. on its sale; Clark & Hayward, with their fifty per cent. expenses and commissions; me, with my fifteen per cent, and the salesman under me—we're just a lot of parasites living off the land without giving anything in return. Oh, don't think I don't know how useless these last three years—"
She knew he was not listening. Nothing she was saying set his cup chattering against the saucer as he put it down. The twilight was prolonged by the first radiance of a rising moon, and in the strange, silver-gray light the white passion flowers, the green spray of the pepper-tree on the lawn, took on an unearthly quality, like beauty in a dream. Her voice wavered into silence. Through a haze she became aware that he was about to speak. Her own words forestalled him, still pleasantly commonplace.
"It's getting dark, isn't it? Let's go in and light the lamps."
His footsteps followed her through the ghostly dimness of the house. The floor seemed far beneath her feet, and through her quivering emotions shot a gleam of amusement. She was feeling like a girl in her teens! Her hand sought the electric light-switch as it might have clutched at a life-line.
"Helen, wait a minute!" She started, stopped, her arm out-stretched toward the wall "I've got to say something."
The tortured determination of his voice told her that the coming moment could not be evaded. A cool, accustomed steadiness of nerves and brain rose to meet it. She crossed the room, and switched on the tiny desk-lamp, the golden-shaded light of which only warmed the dusk. But her opened lips made no sound; she indicated the big, leather chair only with a gesture, settling herself on the cushioned window-seat. He remained standing, his hands in his coat-pockets, his gaze on the fingers interlaced on her knees.
"You're a married woman."
A shock ran through her. She had worn those old bonds so long without feeling them that she had forgotten they were there. Why—why, she was herself, H. D. Kennedy, salesman, office-manager, householder.
His voice went on stubbornly, hoarse.
"I haven't got any right to talk this way. But, Helen, what are you going to do? Don't you see I've got to know? Don't you see I can't go on? It isn't fair." He faltered, dragging out the words as though by muscular effort. "It isn't fair to—him. Or me or you. Helen, if—if things do go to pieces, as you said—can't you see I'll—just have to be in a position todosomething?"
The tremulous intoxication was gone. Her composed self-possession of the moment before seemed a cheap, smug attitude. She saw a naked, tortured soul, and the stillness of the room was reflected in the stillness within her.
"What do you want me to do?" she said at last.
He walked to the cold hearth and stood looking down at the piled sticks. His voice, coming from the shadows, sounded as though muffled by them. "Tell me—do you still care about him?"
All the wasted love and broken hopes, the muddied, miserable tangle of living, swept over her, the suffering that had been buried by many days, the memories she had locked away and smothered, Bert, and all that he had been to her. And now she could not remember his face. She could not see him clearly in her mind; she did not know where he was. When had she thought of him last?
"No," she said.
"Then—can't you?"
"Divorce, you mean?"
Paul came back to her, and she saw that he was even more shaken than she. He spoke thickly, painfully. He had never thought that he would do such a thing. God knew, he said without irreverence, that he did not believe in divorce. Not usually. But in this case—He had never thought he could love another man's wife. He had tried not to. But she was so alone. And he had loved her long ago. She had not forgotten that? It hadn't been easy to keep on all these years without her. And then when she had been treated so, and he couldn't do anything.
But it wasn't altogether that. Not all unselfish, "I—I've wanted you so! You don't know how I've wanted you. Nobody ever seems to think that a man wants to be loved and have somebody caring just about him, somebody that's glad when he comes home, and that—that cares when he's blue. We—we aren't supposed to feel like that. But we do. I do—terribly. Not just 'somebody.' It's always been you I wanted. Nobody else. Oh, there were girls. I even tried to think that maybe—but somehow, none of them were you. I couldn't help coming back."
"Oh, my dear, my dear!" she said, with tears on her cheeks.
Perhaps, after all, forgetting the past and the things that had been between them, they could come together again and be happy. But he was tortured by a dread of being unfair to Bert. If she did still care for him, if he had any rights.—"Of course he has rights. He's your—I never thought that I could talk like this to a woman who hadn't any right to listen to me."
"Hush! Of course I have a right to listen to you. I have every right to do as I please with myself."
The tragedy that shook her was that it was true, that all the passion and beauty of her old love for Bert was dead, lying like a corpse in her heart, never to be awakened and never utterly forgotten. "I will be free," she promised, knowing that she never would be. But in her deepest tenderness toward Paul she could shut her eyes to that.
The promise made him happy. Despite his doubts, his restless conscience not quite silenced, he was happy, and his happiness was reflected in her. Something of magic revived, making the moment glamorous. She need not think of the future; she need made no promises beyond that one. "I will be free." A year, a year at least. Then they would plan.
For the moment her tenderness enfolded him, who loved her so much, so much that she could never give him enough to repay him. It came to her in a clear flash of thought through one of their silences that the maternal quality in a woman's love is not so much due to the mother in the woman as to the child in the man.
"You dear!" she said.
He had to go at last. The morning train for Ripley, but he would write her every day. "And you'll see—about it—right away?"
"Yes, right away." The leaves of the rose-vines over the porch rustled softly; a scented petal floated down through the moon-light. "Good-by, dear."
"Good-by." He hesitated, holding her hand. "Oh, Helen,—sweetheart—" Then, quickly, he went without kissing her.
She entered a house filled with a silence that turned to her many faces, and switching out the little lamp she sat a long time in the darkness, looking out at the moonlit lawn. She was tired. It was good to be alone in the stillness, not to think, but to feel herself slowly growing quiet and composed again around a quietly happy heart.
Something of the glow went with her to the office next morning, stayed with her all day, while she talked sub-soils, water-depths, prices, terms, while she answered her letters, wrote her next week's advertising, corrected proofs. The news in the papers was disquieting; it appeared that the cloud over Europe was growing blacker. How long would it be if war did come before its effects reached her territory, slowly cut off her sales? Ted Collin's bill for gasoline was out of all reason; there was a heated discussion in the office, telephone messages to Clark in San Francisco. Business details engulfed her.
On Wednesday she took her difficult prospect to the Sacramento lands in the machine. He was hard to handle; salesmen for other tracts had clouded the clear issue. She fell back on the old expedient of showing him all those other tracts herself, with a fair-seeming impartiality that damned them by indirection. There was no time for dreaming during those hard three days; toiling over dusty fields with a soil-augur, skilfully countering objections before they took form, nursing an engine that coughed on three cylinders, dragging the man at last by sheer force of will power to the point of signing on the dotted line. She came exhausted into the Sacramento hotel late the third night, with no thought in her mind but a bath and bed.
Stopping at the telegraph counter to wire the firm that the sale was closed, she heard a remembered voice at her elbow, and turned.
"Mr. Monroe! You're up here too! How's it going?" She gave him a dust-grimed hand.
"Well, I'm not complaining, Mrs. Kennedy—not complaining. Just closed thirty-five acres. And how are you? Fortune smiling, I hope?"
"Just got in from the tract. Sold a couple of twenty-acre pieces."
"Well, well, is that so? Fine work, fine work! Keep it up. It's a pleasure to see a young lady doing so well. Well, well, and so you've been out on the tract! I wonder if you've seen Gilbert yet?" His shrewd old gossip-loving eyes were upon her. She turned to her message on the counter, and after a pause of gazing blindly at it, she scrawled, "H. D. Kennedy," clearly below it. "Send collect," she said to the girl, and over her shoulder, "Gilbert who? Not my husband?"
Yes. Monroe had run across him in San Francisco, and he was looking well, very well indeed. Had asked about her; Monroe had told him she was in San José. "But if you were on the tract, no doubt he failed to find you?"
"Yes," she said. "I've been lost to the world for three days. Showed my prospect every inch of land between here and Patterson. You know how it is. I'm all in. Well, good-by. Good luck." As she crossed the lobby to the elevator she heard her heels clicking on the mosaic floor, and knew she was walking with her usual quick, firm step.