III
IDA slept for two hours longer and rose in a philosophical mood. As she more than once had remarked to Ora, “nothing in life is just what you figured it out beforehand”; and this, one of life’s most unwelcome lessons, it had not taken her twenty-six years to learn. She had, in fact, accepted and docketed it while women twice her age were nursing their illusions.
She had expected to be met at the station not only by her husband but by Ruby and Pearl, to say nothing of reporters. “She had slunk in like a nobody,” and her husband declined to feed the fires of her vanity, blazing so merrily these last ten months. Never mind. She had the genius of quick readjustment and a sharp eye for the next move in the great law of compensation.
“And believe me,” she thought, as she put the finishing touches to her smart morning street costume, and taught the admiring Swede how to pin on a veil, “the gods have provided the goods pretty liberally, and I don’t belong to the immortal order of female jackasses. Nine-tenths of women’s troubles, mental and physical, sprout in that hothouse corner of their skulls they call imagination. None of it in mine. Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die. Wait till I’m launched in Butte. And just wait till I give a dinner party to the second son of an English duke. Tra la la!”
Before the morning was over even philosophy had folded her wings. If life had been niggardly yesterday she gave with both hands today. When Ida arrived at the bank she was received with exceeding deference by the vice-president and informed that he had recently invested two hundred thousand dollars in her name, acting on instructions from Mr. Compton; and that as a large part of it was in mortgages the interest in some cases ran as high as eight per cent. The money had been placed in his hands for investment shortly after the great land deal, detailsof which had reached the public ear in due course and greatly added to the prestige of Gregory Compton. In fact it had invested his remote and ambiguous personality with an almost sinister significance. As Ida listened to the story of this transaction (she barely had opened a newspaper in New York and knew nothing of it), she found herself wondering if it could be true that once she had possessed this man of whom even bankers spoke with bated breath. It was patent that they stood in awe not only of the rapid and masterly strokes which had increased his little patrimony by something over two millions in less than a year, but of his colossal luck, his sensational reputation as a “winner”, and his open defiance of the greatest of all great trusts.
It seemed to Ida, as she sat in the vice-president’s office listening to his classification of her husband with Marcus Daly, W. A. Clark, and F. Augustus Heinze, the three commanding figures heretofore in the financial history of Montana, and to predictions that Compton would go farther than any one of his predecessors, that she might have known Gregory in his extreme youth or in some previous existence; but that this man who now not only ranked first in the eyes of all Montana, but had focussed the attention of a continent, no longer touched her life save as a fairy-godfather. It was the first time that she had appreciated his fame. She had been absorbed in Europe and its diversions—and diverters; the new wealth had been accepted as a matter of course; her imagination had not been powerful enough to visualise at a distance what her mind grasped the moment the facts were presented to her in the measured yet glowing terms of a bank’s president.
“He always did feel himself a cut above me,” she thought grimly as she left the building and walked down Main Street. “And now, I suppose, he thinks Perch of the Devil is Mount Olympus, and that he is some god. It would be fun to put a nick or two in his halo—but never mind: I’ve got a cool two hundred thousand—anda palatial residence,anda limousine—sounds like a fairy tale. There’s nothing mean about him, anyhow.”
When she reached her beautiful home she found four reporters awaiting her. They apologised for not meeting her at the train, but as hour after hour had passed withdiscouraging reports, they finally had gone home to recuperate for the next day’s labours. Ida dismissed the last of her regrets, and told them all that she wished Butte to know at once, showed the women the contents of her trunks, which the maids were unpacking, promised to let them know when the newer Paris wardrobe arrived, and finally gave them lunch. Reporters are the quickest people in the world to detect affectations, assumptions, and false values, and the most merciless in their exposure; but, although these four were on the alert, they could find neither traces of original commonness nor imitation of the British aristocracy. Ida apparently had consigned the slang of her former class to the limbo of careless grammar, and she was so simple and natural that they failed to discover how clever she was; they agreed, as they walked down Broadway, that she was merely a marvel of adaptability, like so many others that had done credit to the great state of Montana, to say nothing of the fluid West in general.
But, although Ida could be anything she chose when occasion demanded, she always sought relief from the strain as quickly as possible. Immediately after the departure of the reporters she telephoned for her limousine and drove to the large “Block” in the heart of the business district where Miss Ruby Miller kept the looks of the Butte ladies up to par. As she left the elevator she saw that the familiar door was open as usual and the old screen before it. She tapped discreetly, and Miss Ruby came out into the hall, removing the cold cream from her hands with her apron.
“Ide!” she cried rapturously, throwing both arms about her friend’s velvet shoulders. “Glory be, but I’m glad to see you and you do look fine——”
“How mean of you not to meet me——”
“We had it all fixed and supper here, but gave it up at ten o’clock. For all we knew you might not get in till morning, and you know how we work——”
“Well, I’ll forgive you if you both come to dinner with me tonight. I want to have one good old time before I sit up and play the grande dame act for weeks on end——”
“I guess you’re one now without any play-acting. You look the real thing all right. And I guess we won’t see so awful much of you now——”
“Do you mean because I’m harnessed up to a bunch of money——” began Ida in high indignation.
“Oh, I know you’ll always feel the same, but grand dames and our sort don’t gee at the same table. The West is democratic but it ain’t too democratic. Don’t think I’m jealous. You’re just where I’d like to be myself, and I’m proud that one of us has got to the top so quick. My! But Mr. Compton’s a wonder. To think that I ever dared call him Greg—even behind his back. Well, he’ll be just as proud of you as you are of him. Pearl’ll want to see your hats.”
“She can copy them all. Be sure to come early.”
She felt warmed by the little interview, but as she went down in the elevator she admitted to herself that her future intercourse with her old friends must be sporadic, no matter what her loyalty; and she wondered if her new friends would take their place; or even be to her the half of what Ora had become in the long intimacy of travel. She shrugged her handsome shoulders. If you elected to mount in life, you must pay the toll. Were she abruptly returned to the old cottage in East Granite Street certainly Ruby and Pearl would not compensate her. No, not for a moment. You may slip back in life if you are not strong enough to hold on, but you do not deliberately turn back even for the friends of your youth. Neither does Progress halt and sit down to wait for its failures to catch up. Ida leaned back in her limousine and met the interested eyes of many pedestrians of both sexes as her chauffeur drove her about for an hour to get the air, and incidentally to be looked at.
Today she was in a mood to enjoy Butte, and she deliberately summoned the long anticipated sensations. She revelled in the gaunt grey ugliness of Anaconda Hill which flung its arrogant head high above the eastern end of the great hill itself; in the sensation of driving over miles of subterranean numbered streets, some of them three thousand feet below, to which that famous mass of rock and dirt and angular buildings was the portal. She leaned far out of her car to admire the glittering mountains that looked like blue ice topped with white, and decided that they were far more original and beautiful than the Alps of Austria and Switzerland; certainly they tugged at her heartstrings and at the same time filled her with anunprecedented desire to sing. She noticed for the first time that the violet foothills against the nearer mountain east of the city seemed to close the end of the streets as the Alps did in Innspruck, and gave the ragged overgrown camp clinging to its high perch in the Rockies a redeeming touch of perfect beauty.
She drove out to Columbia Gardens, bought flowers from the conservatory for her rooms, and wandered about recalling the many gay times she had had in the dancing pavilion. But her eye was suddenly arrested by the steep mountain behind, then dropped slowly to the base. It was there that she had promised to marry Gregory Compton. She remembered his young passion and her own. She had never felt anything like it again; nor had he ever been quite the same. Was it one of those “supreme moments” novelists so blithely alluded to? The logical inference of that old bit of bathos was that such moments had no duplicates. She felt faint and dizzy for a moment; then walked back to her car, smiling grimly as she realised that she had experienced a fleeting echo of that vast unattainable desire women live and die cherishing or bewailing. “Poor things! Poor things!” she thought, with the first pang of pity her sex had ever inspired. “No wonder they go in for suffrage, art, work, any old thing. Home,” she added to the chauffeur.
She peremptorily dismissed all thought of the past during the drive back to town and reverted to her pleasure in once more feeling a part of her surroundings, hideous though they might, for the most part, be; instead of walking with alert critical eye through what always must seem to her the animated pages of ancient history. But her complacency received a sudden shock. The car was rolling along Park Street when her eye rested upon a man’s face vaguely familiar. She had bowed graciously and the face was behind her before she realised that the man was Professor Whalen, and that, for a second, she had looked into a pair of pale blue eyes that sent her a swift message of hate.
Ida shuddered. The warm light air of her beloved Rockies turned cold and heavy. “I feel as if I’d stepped on a snake and just missed getting bitten,” she thought, putting her sensations into a concrete form, after her habit. “I had forgotten the little viper was alive, andI wish to goodness he wasn’t.” She had flouted superstition always, but she could not shake off the sense of menace and evil that had vibrated from the man until she was within her own doors once more. Then she became as oblivious of Whalen’s existence as during that late exotic period when everything connected with her old life had seemed too crude to be real.
The parlour maid handed her a note that had arrived an hour before from Mr. Luning, Mark’s partner. Mrs. Blake, he wrote, had bought a present for Mrs. Compton in Paris and sent it to the care of her husband’s firm. Mr. Luning had gone the day before to Great Falls to clear it in the Custom House, and now had the pleasure of forwarding the boxes, etc.
“Good gracious!” exclaimed Ida, “what can it be?”
“There’s four big boxes in the back hall, ma’am.”
Ida lost no time. If Ora had given her a present it must be worth looking at, and she went as rapidly as dignity would permit to the nether regions and ordered the boxes opened. The present proved to be a magnificent silver service, from many dozens of “flat ware” to massive platters, vegetable dishes, flower, fruit and bon-bon pieces, and candelabra. The delighted servants made a shining display on the dining-room table, and after Ida had gloated over it for a time and informed her audience that it was copied from a royal service in the Louvre, she went suddenly up to her bedroom. This time she did shed a few tears, and as she looked at her handkerchief in some wonder she decided that there was at least one person that she loved, “hard-headed” as she was, and that Ora Blake had found the one soft spot in her flinty heart and wormed herself into it. She went to her desk immediately and wrote Ora a letter that was almost tender, admitting that she missed her “like fury”, and begging her to return soon.
“Greg telephoned this morning,” she concluded, oblivious that she was betraying the fact that she had not seen her husband, “and told me to tell you to keep Mark down below for several months. But his lungs must be well by this time or he’d be dead. And the rest of him will mend all the sooner in this magnificent air. Heavens, but it’s good to breathe it again! It makes one feel as if the atmosphere of Europe hadn’t been aired for a century.I’ve got a wonder of a house and a jim dandy of a limousine, but ever since I came I’ve felt kind of homesick, and I’ve just realised it’s for you, old girl. So, come home. Once more ten million thanks.”
And when Ruby and Pearl dined with her that night she realised that all her old zest in their society was gone. Ida Hook, at least, had “passed on.”