CHAPTER XVIII
Sleep was impossible. Helen's exhausted nerves reacted in feverish tenseness to the shock of this unexpected news of Bert. From long experience she knew that in this half-delirious state she could not trust her reasoning, must not accept seriously its conclusions, but she could not stop her thoughts. They scurried uncontrolled through her brain as if driven by a life of their own. She could only endure them until her over-taxed body crushed them with its tired weight. To-morrow she would be able to think.
In the square hotel room, under the garish light that emphasized the ugliness of red carpet and varnished mahogany furniture, she moved about as usual, opening the windows, hanging up her hat and coat, unfastening her bag. She did not forget the customary pleasant word to the bell-boy who brought ice-water, and he saw nothing unusual in her white face and bright eyes. This hotel saw her only on her return trips from the tract, and she was always exhausted after making or losing a sale. She locked the door behind him, and began to undress.
Paul must not be involved. She must manage to shield him. A sensation of nausea swept over her. The vulgarity, the cheap coarseness of it! But she must not think. She was too tired. Why had she blundered into such a situation? What change had the years made in Bert? Her thoughts, touching him, recoiled. She would not think of Paul. To have the two in her mind together was intolerable, it was the essence of her humiliation. Married to one man, bound to him by a thousand memories that rushed upon her, and loving another, engaged to him! No fine, self-respecting woman could be in such a position. But she was. She must face that fact. No, she must not face it. Not until she was rested, in command of herself.
She bathed, scrubbing her skin until it glowed painfully. Cold-cream was not enough for her face and hands. She rubbed them with soap, with harsh towels. At midnight she was washing her hair. If only she could slip out of her body, run away from herself into a new personality, forget completely all that she was or had been!
This was hysteria, she told herself. "Only hold on, have patience, wait. The days will go past you. Life clears itself, like running water. It will be all right somehow. Don't try to think. You're too tired."
At dawn her eyelids were weary at last, and she fell asleep. She prolonged the sleep consciously, half waking at intervals as the day grew brighter, pulling oblivion over her head again to shield herself from living, as a child hides beneath a quilt to keep away darkness.
Outside the world had awakened, going busily about its affairs while the day passed over it. The noise of the streets, voices, automobile-horns, rumbling wheels, came through the open windows with the hot sunshine, running like the sound of a river through her sleep. She awoke in the late afternoon, heavy-lidded, with creased cheeks, but once more quietly self-controlled.
Refreshed by a cold plunge, crisply dressed, composed, she ate dinner in the big, softly lighted dining-room, nodding across white tables to the business men she knew. Then, led by an impulse she did not question, she went out into the crowded streets. With her walked the ghost of the girl who had come down from Masonville, dazzled, wide-eyed, so pitifully sure of herself, to learn to telegraph.
Sacramento had changed. It had been a big town; it was now a city, radiating interurban lines, thrusting tall buildings toward the sky, smudging that sky with the smoke of factories and canneries. Its streets were sluggishly moving floods of automobiles; its wharves were crowded with boats; across the wide, yellow river spans of new bridges were reaching toward each other.
All the statistics of the city's growth, of the great reclamation projects, of the rich farms spreading over the old grain lands, were at Helen's finger-tips. A hundred times she had gone over them, drawn conclusions from them, pounded home-selling arguments with them, since she had added Sacramento valley lands to the San Joaquin properties she handled. But more eloquently her reviving memories showed her the gulf between the old days and the new.
Mrs. Brown's little restaurant and the room where Helen had lived, were gone. In their place stood a six-story office building of raw new brick. That imposing street down which she had stumbled awkwardly after Mrs. Campbell was now a row of dingy boarding-houses. Mrs. Campbell's house itself, once so awe-inspiring, had become a disconsolate building with peeling paint, standing in a ragged lawn, and across the porch where she and Paul had said good-by in the dawn there was now a black and gold sign, "Ah Wong, Chinese Herb Doctor." She went quickly past it.
For the first time in the hurried years her thoughts turned inward, self-questioning, and she tried to follow step by step the changes that had taken place in her. But she could not see them clearly for the memory of the girl that she had been, a girl she saw now as a piteous young thing quite outside herself, a lovely, emotional, valiant young struggler against unknown odds. She felt an aching compassion, a longing to shield that girl from the life she had faced with such blind courage, to save her youth and sweetness. But the girl, of course, was gone, like the room from which she had looked so eagerly at the automobile.
It was eleven o'clock when she walked briskly through the groups in the hotel lobby, took her key from the room clerk and left a call for the early San Francisco train. She would reach the city in time to get the final contracts for the sale she had made yesterday, to take them to San José and get them signed the same day. The thought of Bert lay like a menace in the back of her mind, but she kept it there. She could not foresee what would happen; she would meet it when it occurred. Meantime she would go about her work as usual. Her attitude toward the future, her attitude toward even herself, was one of waiting. She fell quietly asleep.
On the train next morning she bought the San Francisco papers. The headlines screamed the news at her. It was war. She missed one train to San José in order to talk to Mr. Clark. The news had made no change in the atmosphere of Clark & Hayward's wide, clean-looking office, where salesmen lounged against the counters, their elbows resting on plate glass that covered surveyor's maps and photographs of alfalfa fields. The talk, as she stopped to speak to one and another, was the usual news of sales made and lost, quarrels over commissions, personal gossip. She waited her turn to enter Mr. Clark's office, and when it came she looked at him with a keenness hidden under the friendliness of her eyes.
She liked to talk to Mr. Clark. Three years of working with him had brought her an understanding of this nervous, quick-witted, harassed man. There was comradeship between them, a sympathy tempered by wariness on both sides. Neither would have lost the slightest business advantage for the other, but beyond that necessary antagonism they were friends. She watched with pleasure the quick play of his mind, managing hers as he would have handled the thoughts of a buyer; she was conscious that he saw the motives behind her method of counter-attack; a business interview between them was like a friendly bout between fencers. But he spoke to her sometimes of the wife and children whose pictures were on his desk; she knew how deeply he was devoted to them. And once, during an idle evening in a Stockton hotel, he had held her breathless with the whole story of his business career, talking to her as he might have talked to himself.
To-day there seemed to her an added shade of effort in his briskly cheerful manner. The lines around his shrewd eyes had deepened since she first knew him, and it struck her, as she settled into the chair facing his across the flat desk, that his hair was quite gray. With the alert, keen expression taken from his face he would appear an old man.
This expression was intensified when she spoke of the war, questioned its effect on the business. It would have no effect, he assured her. The future had never been brighter; Sacramento lands were booming; fifty new settlers were going into Ripley Farmland Acres that fall. Chaos on the stock market would make the solid investment values of land even more apparent. If the war lasted a year or longer the prices of American crops would rise.
"I was wondering about the psychological effect," she murmured. Mr. Clark ran a nervous hand through his hair.
"Oh, that's all right. High prices will take care of the buyer's psychology."
She laughed.
"While you take care of the salesman's." A twinkle in his eyes answered the smile in hers, but she spoke again before he replied. "Mr. Clark, I'd like to ask you something—rather personal. What do you really get out of business?"
A quizzical smile deepened the lines around his mouth.
"Well, I got two million dollars out of it in the Portland boom! It's a game," he said after a moment. "Just a game. That's all. I've made two fortunes—you know that—and lost them. And now I'm climbing up again. Oh, if I had it to do over again, I—" He changed the words on his lips,—"I'd do the same thing. No doubt about it. We all think we wouldn't, but we would. We don't make our lives. They make us."
"Fatalist?"
"Fatalist." They smiled at each other again as she rose and held out her hand. He kept it a moment in a steadying grasp. "By the way, have you heard that your husband's around?"
"Yes." She thanked him with her eyes. "Good-by."
She was oppressed by a sense of futility, of the hopeless muddle of living, while the train carried her down the peninsula toward San José. To escape from it she concentrated her attention on the afternoon papers.
They were filled with wild rumors, with names of strange towns in Belgium, a mass of clamoring bulletins, confusing, yet somehow making clear a picture of gray hordes moving, irresistible as a monstrous machine, toward France, toward Paris. She was surprised by her passion of resistance. Intolerable, that the Germans should march into Paris! Why should she care so fiercely, she who knew nothing of Paris, nothing but chance scraps of facts about Europe?
"I must learn French," she said to herself, and was appalled by the multitude of things she did not know, both without and within herself.
The unsigned contracts in their long manila envelope were like an anchor in a tossing sea. She must get them signed that night. It was something to do, a definite action. She telephoned from the station, making an appointment with the buyer, and felt the familiar routine closing around her again while the street-car carried her down First Street to her office.
Bert was sitting in her chair, smoking and talking enthusiastically to Hutchinson, when she opened the door. The shock petrified them all. The two men stared at her, Hutchinson's expression of easy good humor frozen on his face; Bert's hand, extended in the old, flashing gesture, suspended in the air. The door closed behind her.
Later she remembered Hutchinson's blood-red face, his awkward, even comical, efforts to stammer that he hadn't expected her, that he must be going, his blind search for his hat, his confused departure. At the moment she seemed to be advancing to meet Bert in an otherwise empty room, and though she felt herself trembling from head to foot her hands and her voice were quite steady.
"How do you do?" she said, beginning to unbutton her gloves:
Though she had not been able to remember his face, it was as familiar as if she had seen it every day; the low white forehead with the lock of fair hair across it, the bright eyes, the aquiline nose, the rather shapeless mouth—No, she had not remembered that his mouth was like that. Her experienced eye saw self-indulgence and dissipation in the soft flesh of his cheeks, the faint puffiness of the eyelids. Her trembling was increasing, but it did not affect her. She was quite cool and controlled.
She heard unmoved his cajoling, confident expostulation. That was a nice way to meet a man when he'd come—she brushed aside his embracing arm with a movement of her shoulder. "We'd better sit down. Pardon me." She took the chair he had left, her own chair, from which she had handled so many land-buyers.
"God, but you're hard!" His accusation held an unwilling admiration. She saw that the way to lose this man was to cling to him; he wanted her now, because she had no need of him. Memories of all the wasted love, the self-surrender and faith she had given him, for which he had not cared at all, which he had never seen or known how to value, came back to her in a flood of pain. Her lips tightened, and looking at him across the desk, she said:
"Do you think so? I'm sorry. But—just what do you want?"
He met her eyes for a moment, and she saw his effort to adjust himself, his falling back upon his old self-confidence in bending other minds to his desires. He could not believe that any one would successfully resist him, that any woman was impervious to his charm. And suddenly she felt hard, hard through and through. She wanted to hurt him cruelly; she wanted to tear and wound his self-centered egotism, to reach somewhere a sensitive spot in him and stab it.
He wanted her, he said. He wanted his wife. She heard in his voice a note she knew, the deep, caressing tone he kept for women, and she saw that he used it skilfully, aware of its effect.
He had gone through hell. "Throughhell," he repeated vibrantly. He did not expect her to understand. She was a woman. She could not realize the tortures of remorse, the agonies of soul, the miseries of those years without her. He sketched them for her, with voice and gestures appealing to her pity. He had been a brute to her; he had been a yellow cur to leave her so. He admitted it, magnificently humble.
He had promised himself that he would not come back to her until he was on his feet again. He had reformed. He was going to work. He was going to cut out the booze. Already he had the most glittering prospects. Fer de Leon, the king of patent-medicine men, was going to put on a tremendous campaign in Australia. Fer de Leon had absolute confidence in him; he could sign a contract at any time for fifteen thousand a year.
He wanted her to come with him. He needed her. With her beside him he could resist all temptations. She was an angel; she was the only woman he had ever really loved and respected. With her he could do anything. Without her he would be hopeless, heartsick. God only knew what would happen. "You'll forgive me, won't you? You won't turn me down. You'll give me another chance?"
She was looking down at her hands, unable any longer to read what her eyes saw in him. Her hands lay folded on the edge of the desk, composed and quiet, not moved at all by the sick trembling that was shaking her. The desire to hurt him was gone. His appeal to her pity had dissolved it in contempt.
"I'm sorry," she said with effort. "I hope you—you will go on and—succeed in everything. I know you will, of course." She said it in a tone of strong conviction, trying now to save his egotism. She did not want to hurt him. "I know you have done the best you could. It's all right. It isn't anything you've done. I don't blame you for that. But it seems to me—"
"Good God! How can you be so cold?" he cried.
Even her hands were shaking now, and she quieted them by clasping them together. "Perhaps I am cold," she said. "You see already that we couldn't—make a success of it. It isn't your fault. We just don't—suit each other. We never did really. It was all a mistake." Her throat contracted.
"So it's another man!" he said. "I might have known it."
"No." She was quiet even under the sneer. "It isn't that. But there was never anything to build on between you and me. You think you want me now only because you can't have me. So it will not really hurt you if I get a divorce. And I'd rather do that. Then we can both start again—with clean slates. And I hope you will succeed. And have everything you want." She rose, one hand heavily on the desk, and held out the other. "Good-by."
Her attempt to end the scene with frankness and dignity failed. He could not believe that he had lost this object he had attempted to gain. His wounded vanity demanded that he conquer her resistance. He recalled their memories of happiness, tried to sway her with pictures of the future he would give her, appealed to generosity, to pity, to admiration. He played upon every chord of the feminine heart that he knew.
She stood immovable, sick with misery, and saw behind his words the motives that prompted them, self-love, self-assurance, baffled antagonism. She felt again, as something outside herself, the magnetism, the force like an electric current, that had conquered her once.
"I really wish you would go," she said. "All this gains nothing for either of us." At last he went.
"You women are all alike. Don't think you've fooled me. It's another man with more money. If I were not a gentleman you wouldn't get away so easily with this divorce talk. But I am. Go get it!" The door crashed behind him.
She did not move for a long moment. Then she went into the inner office, locked the door behind her, and sat down. Her glance fell on her clenched hands. She had not worn her wedding-ring for some time, but the finger was still narrowed a little, and on the inner side a smooth, white mark showed where it had been. Quietly she folded her arms on the desk and hid her face against them. After a little while she began to sob, rough, hard sobs that tore her throat and forced a few burning tears from her eyes.
An hour went by, and another. She was roused, then, by the sound of steps in the outer office. Doubtless a prospect had come in. She lifted her head, and waited, without moving, until the steps went out again. The noise of the streets came up to her as usual; street-cars clanged past, a newsboy cried an extra. Across the corner the hands of the clock in the Bank of San José building marked off the minutes with little jerks.
It was six o'clock. An urgent summons knocked at a closed door in her mind. Six o'clock. She looked at her wrist-watch, and memory awoke. She had an appointment at six-thirty, to close the final contracts on the forty-acre sale. Hutchinson was depending on her to handle it. Below the window the newsboy cried "War!" again.
Wearily she bathed her face with cold water, combed her hair, adjusted her hat. Contracts in hand, she locked the office door behind her, and her face wore its necessary pleasant, untroubled expression. The buyer's wife was charmed by her smile, and although the man was already somewhat disturbed by the war news, Helen was able to persuade them to sign the contracts.
A week later she announced to Hutchinson that she was going to stop selling land. She could give him no reasons that satisfied his startled curiosity. She was simply quitting; that was all. He could manage the office himself or get another partner; her leaving would make little difference.
He protested, trying half-heartedly to shake her determination. The shattering of accustomed and pleasant routine shocked him; he was like a man thrown suddenly from a boat into the unstable water.
"But what do you want to do it for? What's the idea? Aren't we getting along all right?" He was longing to ask if she were going to Bert, whose arrival and immediate departure had not been explained to him. The whole organization, she knew, was discussing it, and Hutchinson, on the very scene of their meeting, was in the unhappy position of being unable to give the interesting details. But he did not quite venture to break through her reserve with a direct question. He scouted her suggestion that the war would affect business. "Why, things have never looked better! Here we've just made a forty-acre sale. Sacramento's booming, and so is the San Joaquin. Fifty new settlers are going into Farmland Acres this fall. There's going to be a boom in land. Folk are going to see what a solid investment it is, the way stocks are tumbling. And the farmers are going to make money hand over fist if the war lasts a couple of years."
"Oh, well, maybe you're right," she conceded, remembering the twinkle in Mr. Clark's eye when she had accused him of taking care of the salesman's psychology. She still believed that spring would see a slump in real-estate business. She had learned too well that men did not handle their affairs on a basis of cool logic; too often in her own work she had taken advantage of the gusts of impulse and unreasoning emotion that swayed them. There would be a period when they would be afraid; no facts or arguments would persuade them to exchange solid cash for heavily mortgaged land. But the point no longer interested her.
She felt a profound weariness, an unease of spirit that was like the ache of a body too long held motionless. Business had rested on her like a weight for nearly four years. She could bear it no longer. She must relax the self-control that held her own impulses and emotions in its tight grip. The need was too strong to be longer resisted, too deep in herself to be clearly understood. "I'm tired," she said. "I'm going to quit."
An agreement dividing their deferred commissions must be drawn up and filed with the San Francisco office. Hutchinson took over her half-interest in the automobile she had left to be repaired in Sacramento. Already his mind was busy with new plans. Since she would no longer write the advertising he would cut it out. "Want ads'll be cheaper and good enough," he said.
Thus simply the bonds were cut between her and all that had filled her days and thoughts. She went home to the little bungalow, put the files of her land advertisements out of sight, hung her hat and coat in the closet.
The house seemed strange, with early-afternoon sunlight streaming through the living-room windows. It was delightfully silent and empty. Long hours, weeks, months, stretched before her like blank pages on which she might write anything she chose.
She went through the rooms, straightening a picture, moving a chair, taking up a vase of withering flowers. The curtains stirred in a cool breeze that poured through the open windows and ruffled her hair. It seemed to blow through her thoughts, too; she felt clean and cool and refreshed. With a deep, simple joy she began to think of little things. She would discharge the woman who came to clean; she would polish the windows and dust the furniture and wash the dishes herself. To-morrow she would get some gingham and make aprons. Perhaps Mabel and the baby would come down for a visit; she would write and ask them.
She was cutting roses to fill the emptied vase when she thought of Paul. He came into her thoughts quite simply, as he had come before Bert's return. She thought, with a warmth at her heart and a dimple in her cheek, that she would telephone him to come next Sunday, and she would make a peach shortcake for him.