XXXTUCSON AGAIN
Itwasn’t a dappled gray this time, but one of the same breed. Elbert was abroad in the streets of Tucson, long before the city was astir, his train having set him down at an unseemly hour. He passed a harness shop and peered in through the window, where his eye encountered the cocked ears and pointed head of a wooden horse. Evidently its place was the sidewalk, daytimes, being wheeled into the shop at closing-hour on castors.
It was as if he were in the Plaza at Los Angeles again. It was more: like a man coming back to find his old nursery unchanged. Elbert’s lips moved.
‘Wouldn’t Mamie shy if she passed that palfrey on a lonely road?’
His hand pained. He was clutching the arm of a rocking-chair. He had left a network of invisible foot-tracks over two sections, at least, of the city of Tucson. The day was now advanced to eight-thirty in the morning, and he was back in his room at the Santa Clara. His strong, blackened fingers relaxed on the oak. He arose and pulled down both outer windows. He went to the hall-door to feel that it was locked.He took off coat and vest, wiped the sweat from his forehead, called a number at the telephone.
‘May I speak with Miss Gertling?’
‘Miss Gertling—why, she doesn’t live here any more—’
‘Does she—where?’
‘She’s only here part of the day—some days—’
‘Could you give me her address?’
‘Who is it, please?’
‘Mr. Sartwell—’
‘Oh.’
‘Elbert Sartwell—’
‘Oh,—you’re—wait a moment, please!... Yes, Mr. Sartwell, you may call—’ the snappy tone had softened.
Elbert’s mind fumbled the number, but he got it down.... His second call was entered. A man’s tone advised him respectfully not to disconnect. Then out of the smothering stillness:
‘Hello?’
‘Mary Gertling!’
‘Yes.... Oh, I know ... and where are you?’
‘At the Santa Clara.’
‘Will you come over?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, wait! I know better. I’ll come foryou! In the street in front of the hotel—in ten—fifteen minutes.’
He bathed a third time. He was below watchingthe street both ways. Crowds were passing, by this time—on the way to work. Elbert’s feelings were torturingly divided. Sometimes he pitied all these people going to work; sometimes he envied their calm matter-of-fact seizure of life. As for himself, he seemed dangling in space, having lost his clutch entirely.
The crowd jostled him back against the entrance. It must be a half hour. Could there have been a mistake? His eye verified the fact that it was the Santa Clara hotel he was standing against. Many faces coming from the right, as many more from the left. He would hold his eyes one way, until he felt she must be standing at his back. Yet it was from neither right nor left that her call came—from the throng of cars in the street, a roadster pressing in toward the curb. She was alone. She had opened the door. Like that day in the flowered room, he had been listening and watching toward the hall and she had come from the porch.
‘I gave you a ring at the Finishing School,’ he said, as if he had been waiting months to say just that.
‘I finished last June, but stayed on part-time for other work there.’
‘Post-graduate work?’
‘I’ve been learning to ride a horse. I thought you might come there first.’
Any one could see she had driven a car for a long time—queer ease of her own, no thought. She straightened her dress and thrust her wrap back from her shoulders, as if ready for all day. The small boot poured gas with mathematical accuracy and steadiness.
They were out of heavy traffic now; passing through an end of town increasingly familiar to Elbert.
‘Everything has seemed tangled and lonesome during this last week,’ she was saying. ‘But before that, it all grew clearer and clearer.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘For three weeks, just before this last, everything seemed to get clearer and clearer.’
‘Why, those were the weeks I spent in the mountains,’ he said. ‘I was alone all the time, and high up. It sure was a change coming down, though. Last few days, it seemed my mind was trying to make up something that never really happened. Hardest of all, just before I got you on the ’phone this morning.’
Yes, it was the Border Highway they were on. She was at his left. Gradually he was breathing better. At first he had thought she would have to hurry back, but that thought was slipping away. She wasn’t speeding, but pressed the car forward steadily, as if making a day’s passage. It was a white dress she had on, a sort of linen—likea handkerchief. The white road stretched ahead, very straight, but gently rolling. The sense of on and on came to him. He had always felt like fighting when with a girl before—except in that flowered room—but there wasn’t a fight in the world to-day. The wide empty road stretched ahead for miles; a film of dull shining vapor gleamed over the top of each rise, but always as they rolled up to it, the film vanished, showing up presently above the next. They never arrived, always approaching, as to a mirage.
‘Sometime we’ll get to know it down here on the roads and even in the midst of the city,’ she said.
‘You mean that sense of clearness—I spoke of having in the mountains—?’
‘Yes, we must not lose it anywhere—as we did last week. Why, I thought some of the time you weren’t coming back—’
‘I thought some of the time, you weren’t expecting me to come back,’ he said with a shiver.
They were running through Harrisburg of trucking days. Evidently she had no mind to return—Heaslep’s beyond. It would break in upon their day to stop, yet she had chosen the way. He couldn’t tell her to go back. He had wanted to see Cal and Slim, but not to-day. Still, she kept on, the ranch-houses finally showing ahead.
‘I know ’em there—we’ll have to call, sincewe’re going by. That’s where Cal and Slim are. At least—’
‘Shall I turn in?’ she asked strangely.
‘Yes.’
He saw the faces jerking out from the farrier’s and the cook-house, one or two Chinese. Elbert nodded and gestured, but not an eye turned to him, all cooling upon the one at his side.
‘Drive on to that door marked “Office,”’ he whispered.
Frost-face appeared in the doorway. Elbert’s fixed smile of greeting had not yet registered for a return glance. Frost-face began lifting off his wide hat. Elbert couldn’t remember ever having seen before that hard white head, uncovered.
‘She’s some—car,’ Frost-face said suddenly.
‘We were just ridin’ by. Thought I’d—’ Elbert began, but the foreman wasn’t paying attention. Finally in the strain Elbert pursued:
‘Any sick cattle?’
‘No, but we’re on the watch. Is she a six?’
‘No, an eight—straight eight. Thought we’d like to see Cal and Slim—’
‘Up in Wyoming—when I heard last—playin’ the round-ups and the rodeos.’
‘We were just ridin’ by,’ Elbert said.
‘I hear Slim sat Poison-face for twenty-five seconds at Cheyenne.’
‘Are they coming back?’
‘Ain’t likely. They—you see, we’re using tourin’ cars mostly to ride range and keep up fences.’
Now Elbert received his first direct glance. ‘I see you’re wearin’ everything but your likker this morning,’ Frost-face remarked.
‘I’m starting East,’ said Elbert.
‘Round by Panama?’
Elbert chuckled. ‘I mean, I’m startin’ East to-morrow night.’
‘Takin’—the filly?’
‘No, she’s back in San Forenso. You’ll sure remember me to the boys, won’t you?’
The roadster was rolling quietly out of the ranch driveway. Mary turned the car south toward the Border. No word about it.
Twilight—Nogales—they were having supper in a little Yaqui restaurant There were paper-thin leaves of corn-bread baked in the sun. He was looking away toward the South.
‘Sometime we must go clear down to the señora’s house in Nacimiento where we first met,’ he said.
‘I don’t know. We can’t ever find what we’re looking for by goingbackto any place. It’s always ahead.’
‘What we’re looking for,’ he repeated, but not as a question.
‘It would seem so easy to find; it would seem so easy to keep,’ she went on, ‘but I don’t know any one who has kept it. Certainly none of my girl friends who have married. I don’t even know what it is exactly.’
‘It’s something that’s kept on building. Really started when I was in the hospital—no, before that—at the explosion.’
‘No, before that,’ she said.
‘Did it?’
‘Yes, at the barefooted woman’s, where you were so firm. And then something really happened to us in that ride back from San Pasquali, when we were not in our heads.’
‘I had your letter in the hospital.’
‘And then, that day you came to the Finishing School.’
‘That was a great room to me,’ he said.
‘Every day has been different, but it has kept right on building.’
‘Especially in the mountains.’
‘Yes, wonderfully then—until last week when I spoiled everything, by getting so nervous and expectant.’
‘It’s been building all day to-day—with me,’ said Elbert.
‘Yes,’ she helped, ‘differently from ever before. And to-morrow night you are starting East—’
‘It will keep right on, won’t it?’
‘It must, but it’s so easy to spoil—that’s what frightens me. You wouldn’t think it could, only you see so many others who do—who have.’
‘It couldn’t be with us.’
‘I think everybody says that at first. You won’t let me spoil it, will you?’
‘I was going to ask you that.’
‘But you are so firm. You must always be like that. Why, it’s all because you were so firm that first night.’
The day was passing fast as a theater scene, but in the last moments of Nogales, he kept thinking of the seventy miles back to Tucson. At least, they had that much left to-day.
‘Won’t you drive back?’ she said at last.
‘Not unless you’re tired?’
‘Oh, no, I don’t think about it.’
‘Then you—’
Sixty miles still to go. She was driving slightly under ‘thirty,’ but the minutes were racing by. She didn’t go any slower. Fifty miles. The roadster kept its pace, the meter staying around twenty-eight or twenty-nine, always between twenty-five and thirty. Forty miles; then half way. She didn’t cheat.... Stars, sage, warm wind, early evening.... A thoroughbred, always different.... What could possibly be spoiled, if two kept on and on like this? But she knewsomething; and others, he knew, certainly had spoiled it.... Twenty-five miles.
The night suddenly opened for him. He was nearer to her than ever before, though he had not changed position. He could not feel himself or her, but there was a white ball of light between his eyes—like all the stars of the gray haze fusing into one, like all the perfumes of the air fusing into one, all the stillnesses he had ever known fusing into one.
‘You—’ from her.
‘Yes, I’m here—’
‘You know something—I must know!’
‘You are something—I must be,’ he went on, as if finishing a magic formula which she had begun.
‘Oh, what has happened to us?’ she cried suddenly.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you suppose—the others—ever know anything like that—like this?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Elbert.
‘If they did—I don’t see how they could ever go apart.’
Lights of Tucson, streets. The amazement that he knew now, was that she had kept on steadily driving.... ‘You are something—I must be—’ Had she said that, or had he? Had it reallybeen spoken at all? And the car hadn’t halted a moment.
‘But we must never stop—no matter how wonderful it is—and say “This is it,”’ she repeated. ‘We must always keep on and on—’
‘It’s so very much—right now—’
‘I know—I know it is—but don’t ever let me stop and say: “We’ve found it.”’
The car drew up at the curb of the Santa Clara.
‘To-morrow. Luncheon. I’ll come at twelve—right here.’
Then he stood upon the pavement, differently alone.
It was after 11.30, next morning. Elbert had sent a telegram to his father that he was starting East to-night. Passing the desk he saw a paper in his box.
‘Friends of yours in Suite 14,’ it read. No signature. Writing he hadn’t seen before.
He stood still for a moment. It wouldn’t be necessary to go up right now. She would be in front in fifteen or twenty minutes. He might let the message wait until afternoon. But after that, perhaps they would be going out somewhere. Better now, yet the hush he was in was hard to break. It was like a spell, yet the elevator door stood open.
It wasn’t Bart who opened the door of theupper room but the old don of El Relicario, and graciously behind him, biding her time, the señora. Then from an inner room (was the crucifix there, too, and the white flower?) came the corn-dust maiden.
‘Ah, Señor, you were so brave—it was all because you were so brave!’
And behind her sounded the easy flowing laugh—words from Bart:
‘Everybody here but the rurales!’
‘Only—’ said Elbert, ‘only my friend—a girl—I’ll get her now—and bring her up.’
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes
Transcriber’s Notes
Transcriber’s Notes
Minor, silent changes have been made to regularize punctuation and hyphenation.
Archaic spelling, slang and dialect have been retained as typeset.