97CHAPTER VI
The Tiffany house—I spare you full description—rambled with many a balcony and addition over that hill which rose like a citadel above San Francisco. From its Southern windows, one looked clean over the city, lying outspread below. Even the Call building, highest eminence piled up by man in that vista, presented its roof to the eye. I can picture that site no better than by this; Over Judge Tiffany’s front wall hung an apple tree, gnarled, convoluted, by the buffets of the sea wind. In autumn, when the fruit was ripe, stray apples from this tree had been seen to tumble from the wall and roll four blocks down into the Latin quarter.
From the rear, the house looked out on a hedged and sloping garden, quite old, as gardens go in that land, for a pioneer planted it; and from the rear gate of that garden it was only a step to the hill mount. Thence one came out suddenly to the panorama of the98Bay, stretching on three sides; a panorama divided, as by the false panels of a mural landscape, into three equal marvels. To left, the narrow gate, a surge like the rush of a river always in its teeth and the bright ocean, colored like smelt-scales, beyond. In front the Roads, where all strange crafts from the mysterious Pacific anchored while they waited their turns at the docks. Both in foreground and background, this panel changed day by day. It might be whalers from the Arctic which lay there in the morning, their oils making noisome the breeze; it might be a fleet of beaten, battered tramp wind-jammers, panting after their fight about the Horn; it might be brigs from the South Seas; it might be Pacific steamers, Benicia scow-schooners, Italian fishing smacks, Chinese junks—it might be any and all of these together. As for the background, that changed not every day but every hour what with the shifts of wind, tide and mists. Now its tinge was a green-gold betraying pollution of those mountain placers which fed the San Joaquin and the mighty Sacramento. Now it was blue and ruffled, now black and calm, now slate-gray,—a mysterious shade this last, so that when the99fog began to shoot lances across the waters, these fleets at anchor by Quarantine wharf seemed argosies of fairy adventure. Even Tamalpais, the gentle mountain which rose beyond everything, changed ever with the change in her veil of mist or fog or rain-rift. The third panel, lying far to the right, showed first dim mountain ranges and the mouths of mighty rivers, and then, nearer by, masts, stacks and shipping, fringing the city roofs.
North into this garden ran a small wing of the Tiffany house. Upon the death of Alice Gray, Mattie Tiffany had set it apart for Eleanor the baby. When, after her years with Billy Gray, Eleanor came back, Mattie had refurnished it for the grown baby. The upper story held her bedroom and her closets. Below was her own particular living-room. This opened by a vine-bordered door into the garden, into that path which led up to the bay view.
Judge Tiffany, sitting within the front window to watch the shimmer of a pleasant Sunday afternoon on the city roofs below, perceived that his wife had walked three times to that garden wall which looked down along100the drop of Broadway to the Spanish Church.
The second time that he perceived this phenomenon, his eyes showed interest; the third he smiled with inner satisfaction and rose to meet her return as though by accident. He was leaning upon a cane, getting ease of the sciatica which plagued him.
The Judge had aged during the two years since he opened these events. He had settled now into the worldly state of a man who rests content with the warming sun and the bright air which feed life. But the inner soul, whose depth was his philosophy, whose surface his whimsical humor—that still burned in his dark blue eyes. Those eyes glistened a little as he went on to this, his daily sport.
He met her on the piazza. She had raked the rise of Broadway, which one mounted by two blocks of hen-coop sidewalks; and now she was inspecting the cross street.
“All the Sherlock Holmes in me,” said Judge Tiffany, “tells me that Miss Eleanor Gray is going to have a caller, and that Mrs. Edward C. Tiffany is in a state of vicarious perturbation.
“Further,” continued Judge Tiffany, dropping his hand upon her arm with that affectionate101gesture which drew all sting his words might have carried, “this is no common caller. For that young civil engineer and Mr. Perham the painter and Ned Greene, Mrs. Tiffany never blushes; but these new attentions to her niece—well, I hope my approach drew as much blood from her heart to her countenance twenty-five years ago!”
“I—Iamperturbed,” said Mattie Tiffany. Running rose-bushes, just leafing out into their fall greenery, overgrew the pillars beside her. These she fell to pruning with her hands, so that she turned away her face.
“I see that discipline is relaxing in this family,” said Judge Tiffany. “Dear, dear, after managing a wife bravely and well for a quarter century, to fail in one’s age! Mattie, he works in my office, this blush-compelling caller; and I told you when I gave him the position not to take him up socially for the present!”
“But what was I to do when he telephoned to Eleanor and asked her?” Mrs. Tiffany turned her head with a turn of her thought. “Did you hear him telephone—was that how you knew?”102
“I’d lose all hold on discipline if I revealed my methods.”
Judge Tiffany settled himself in an armchair as one prepared to make it a long session. “Let’s begin at the start. How came he to renew his acquaintance with Eleanor, and when, and where—and how much had Mattie Tiffany to do with bringing them together again?”
“Not a thing—truly Edward! Some of Eleanor’s slumming with Kate Waddington and the Masters—they met by accident at a restaurant—Eleanor asked him. You remember he was taken with her that afternoon just before she went to Europe—the time he mortified me so dreadfully.”
“And the time he attracted my attention,” said Judge Tiffany. “And now behold that youth, who will always get what he wants by frontal attack, reading my California cases and wearing out my desk with his feet.”
“Do you think he will make a good lawyer?” asked Mattie Tiffany. She turned full around at this, and the glance she threw into her husband’s face showed more than a casual matchmaker’s interest.
“He’ll make a good something,” said the103Judge. “So far as anyone can judge the race from the start. But that isn’t why I have him in the office. You know how little I care in these days for such practice as I have left. I tell myself, of course, that it is my lingering interest in life as a general proposition which made me do it—I am curious to see before I die how this find of yours is coming out. That is what I tell myself. Probably in my very inside heart I know that it’s something else.”
“What else?” asked Mattie.
“This is one of the hidden things which this experiment is to discover,” said Judge Tiffany. “What made me notice him in the first place? What made you invite him to tea on the lawn? What has made you and me and Eleanor remember this chance meeting so long—let me see—how long was it?”
“A year ago last June,” said Mattie. One of her functions in their partnership was to hold small details always ready to the hand of the wide-thinking Judge.
“Will he go back on me—that’s the question,” pursued the Judge. “Success is probably at the end for him, but he has two ways of success open. He may go slowly and well,104or fast and ill. Road number one: he stays with my moth-eaten old practice, he refurbishes it, he earns a partnership; and so to conservative clients and, probably, to genuine success.” He hesitated.
“And the other road?” asked Mrs. Tiffany.
“Oh, that has many by-paths. He is trying one of them already. The stealthy, invaluable Attwood has told me about it. This Mr. Chester has made an investment in Richmond lots on information which he had no right to use. Never mind the details. If he follows that general direction, it will be a flashy success, a pretty worm-eaten crown of laurels.”
“Like Northrup’s,” broke in Mrs. Tiffany. That name always jarred on their ears. Northrup, ex-congressman, flowery Western orator, all Christian love on the surface, all guile beneath—he had taken to himself that success which Judge Tiffany might have had but for his hesitations of conscience. Theirs was a secret resentment. Judge Tiffany’s pride would never have let him show the world one glimmer of what he felt.
“Suppose he should follow that path—and take up with Northrup,” went on Judge Tiffany. “Mine honorable opponent has use for105such young men as our Mr. Chester will prove himself if he follows that path—magnetic young men to coax the rabble, young men not too nice on moral questions. Well, a boy isn’t born with honor, any more than he’s born with courage; he grows to it. And God only knows just when the boy strikes the divide which will turn his course one way or the other.”
“But Edward, you ought to warn him!”
“In the first place, it would do no good to warn one of his age and temperament. In the second place, it would spoil the experiment—but I had commanded you to talk, and here I am doing it all. How looked she; what said he?”
“To-day—just before church—I was hooking up Kate and Eleanor, and he telephoned.”
“Instinct, of course, informing you that it was none other than he at the other end of the wire?” On another tongue and in another fashion of speech, this sentence might have been offensive; between them, it was a part of his perpetual game with her amiable weaknesses.
“If I did listen, it was no more than right.106It was what a mother would have done by Eleanor. I heard her say, ‘Good morning Mr. Chester,’ not at all as though she were surprised to have him call up; and I was really quite disturbed. You had told me not to invite him here for the present; and I hadn’t the slightest reason for knowing that Eleanor had seen him since she came back from abroad. Her speaking so familiarly—well, I wondered. But Kate—”
“Oh, she was listening too?”
“Well, I know that she hadn’t the excuse for listening that I had; but I had stopped hooking her up, and it was only natural that she should listen too. Eleanor said, ‘Certainly I shall be in,’ and Kate said, ‘That’s the old friend we met with Mr. Masters last night in the Hotel Marseillaise. He is prompt!’ Rather sharp in Kate, considering what Eleanor has been doing for her!
“You’d have thought Eleanor had eaten the canary bird when she came back. Of course, she knew we had been listening. I wish she hadn’t. I’d have liked to see whether she’d have told us then, or waited for him to surprise us. Kate was sharp again. I wonder107if she isn’t envious at bottom? After all Eleanor is so much more a lady! Kate said again, ‘The young man is prompt!’”
Judge Tiffany laughed.
“Oh, that women could dwell together in peace and harmony! Can’t you grant my playmate Miss Waddington a feminine jab or two?”
“Well, sheisnice to you!”
“Did it never occur to you as a virtue in her that she puts herself out to entertain—even, Madame, I flatter myself to fancy—a withered old codger like me!”
Mrs. Tiffany’s first expression flooded her eyes and said, “Is there anything strange in liking you?” Her second expression set her mouth hard and said, “What is her object?” Her voice said nothing.
“And behold him now,” said Judge Tiffany.
There, indeed, came Bertram Chester, visible over their garden wall as he toiled up the hen-coop sidewalk. The Judge returned to the house; Mattie Tiffany settled herself on the piazza with the preen and flutter of a female thing about to be wooed.108
The Tiffany drawing-room, panelled simply in woods, furnished with the old Sturtevant mahogany, came upon Bertram Chester like a stage setting as he entered with Mrs. Tiffany. Upstage, burned a driftwood fire in a low hearth of rough bricks; Judge Tiffany sat there, in a spindle-backed chair, reading. Across a space broken only by a painting, a Japanese print or so, and more spindle-backed chairs, Eleanor and Kate had grouped themselves by the piano. Eleanor, turning the leaves on the music-rack, looked over her shoulder at him. She was in pink that day; the tint of her gown, blending into the tint of her fresh skin, contrasted magically with the subdued background. Kate, all in white, sat on a hassock pulling a volume from the low book shelf. All this came upon Bertram with a soothing sense which he did not understand in that stage of his development, did not even formulate.
Kate, tripping across the rugs with a lightness which perfectly balanced her weight, greeted him first; Eleanor and Judge Tiffany shook hands with more reserve. And as Bertram settled himself in an arm-chair before the fire, it was the ready Kate who put109him at his ease by opening fire of conversation.
“Did I tell you, Mrs. Tiffany, about the restaurant which Mr. Chester found for us last night? such an evening he gave us! Mr. Chester, who is Madame Loisel—you should have seen her, Judge Tiffany—you’d never dine at home again. When these young charms fade, I’m going to marry a French restaurant-keeper and play hostess to the multitude and be just plump and precious like her. How can you ever get past the counter with her behind it, Mr. Chester?”
“I’m generally hungry—that’s how!” said Bertram Chester.
“That’s man for you!” responded Kate. “Judge beloved, if you were a young man and Eleanor—I’m too modest to mention myself, you see—were what she’ll be at forty, and she were behind a counter, and you before it, would hunger tear you away? Oh dear, it’s such a bore to keep one’s grammar straight!”
“I ask my wife’s permission before giving the answer which is in my heart,” said Judge Tiffany.
Eleanor broke into the laugh which followed.110
“But I would like to know about Madame Loisel.”
“Well, she’s certainly a ripe pippin; you’ve seen that,” answered Bertram, his smile on Eleanor. “And I’d like to know what she’s saying when she parleys French to the garçons. She’s all right if she’s feeling right, but I’ve seen her tear the place up when the service went bad. I guess she’s a square and a pretty good fellow!”
“Tell us more about her—” this from Eleanor.
“About her squareness? Well, there was the time Gentle Willie Purdy got drunk. We call him Gentle Willie because he isn’t, you know. About three o’clock in the morning, he took the notion it was dinner time and climbed the side gate to the Hotel Marseillaise and pounded at the door. He faded out about then, he says. When he woke up, he was laid out on a couch, with a towel on his head, and Madame was bringing him black coffee. He tried to thank her after he felt better; and what do you think she said? ‘Meester Purdy, nevaire, nevaire come to eat in thees place again.’ She stayed with it too!”111
“Good for her!” said Mrs. Tiffany, reaching for her crewel work.
“Oh, yes,” responded Mr. Chester in the uncertain tone of one who gives assent for politeness without knowing exactly why.
“If I ever depart from the straight and narrow paths and get drunk, may I have Madame Loisel to hold my head,” cried Kate.
The talk ran, then, into conventional channels—the news, the latest novel, and the season’s picking at the ranch. Judge Tiffany dropped out gradually, and resumed his book; and more and more did Bertram direct his talk, salted and seasoned with his magnetism, toward Eleanor. Kate Waddington, left out of the conversation through three or four exchanges, crossed the room and draped herself on a hassock at the feet of Judge Tiffany.
“Judge darling,” she said in an aside which penetrated to the furthest corner of the room, “I’m going back to my unsympathetic home before tea. Don’t you think we’re well enough chaperoned to go on with our flirtation just where we left off?”
“Where was I when we were interrupted?” asked Judge Tiffany, leaning forward.112
“Twenty-fourth page, fifth chapter,” said Kate. “I was just getting you jealous and you were trying not to show it. Mr. Chester—oh excuse me—well, I’ve broken in now, so I might as well get the reward of my impoliteness—may I use you to make Judge Tiffany jealous?”
“Sure you can!” answered Bertram.
“Oh, he won’t do at all!” Kate was addressing Judge Tiffany again. “He’s entirely too eager. Who would be a good rival anyway, Judge adored? Let’s create one, like the picture of your future husband in a nickel vaudeville!”
“Eleanor,” spoke Mrs. Tiffany, “suppose you show Mr. Chester your end of the house and our garden—or would you like it, Mr. Chester? We’re rather proud of the garden.”
“I’d like it,” answered Bertram; and he rose instantly. Mrs. Tiffany made no move to accompany them; she sat bent over her yarns, her ears open. And she noticed, at the moment when Bertram made that abrupt movement from his chair, how Kate hesitated in the middle of a sentence, as though confused.113
The rehearsed flirtation between Kate and Judge Tiffany faded into a game of jackstones on the floor.
Mrs. Tiffany heard the double footsteps fade down the hall, heard the garden door open and close. After a short interval, she heard the door again, and the dim footsteps sounded for but a moment. They had turned, evidently, into Eleanor’s own living room. Would they stop there, these two, for a talk—yes, her gentle treble, his booming bass, drifted down the hall. Presently Mrs. Tiffany heard Eleanor’s laugh, followed by his. In that instant, she looked at the jackstone players by the hearth. Kate, on the crackle of that laugh, had arrested all motion. A jack which she had tossed in the air, descended with no hand to stop it. For a moment, Kate held that intent pose; then,
“Judge wonderful, I’m a paralytic at times. You for twosies.” She swept the jacks towards him with one of her characteristic gestures, free and yet deft.
A bell rang in the outer hall, and the maid entered.
“Miss Waddington is wanted at the telephone,” she announced.114
Eleanor, when she saw that her visitor had no intention of rejoining the party, commanded him to smoke. He rolled a cigarette, Western fashion, from powdered tobacco and brown paper, and disposed himself in the window-seat, one leg drawn up under him, his big shoulders settled comfortably against the wall. Eleanor began to talk fluently, superficially, with animation. She felt from the first that he was throwing himself against her barriers, trying to reach at once the deeper stages of acquaintance. His direct look seemed both to plead and to command. She outwitted two or three flanking movements before he took advantage of a pause and charged her entrenchments direct.
“I’ve said it before, but I’m going to keep on. You are pretty.”
“Thank you,” she replied; and smiled—mainly at the ingenuousness of this, although partly at the contrast between her present view of him and that old memory.
“Oh, it never seems to bother you when I say that,” went on Bert Chester, bending his rather large and compelling black-brown eyes upon her. “Some girls would get sore, and some would like it; you never pay any attention.115That’s one of the ways you’re different.”
(“Heavens—is he making love already—he is sudden!” thought Eleanor with amusement.)
“You are, you know. I picked you for different the first time I saw you. I wondered then if you were beautiful—I always knew you had nice eyes—and it isn’t so much that you’ve changed, as that the longer a man looks at you the prettier you are.”
“Shall we discuss other things than me?” asked Eleanor.
“Why shouldn’t we talk about you? I’ve never had a chance before—just think, it’s the first time ever I saw you alone—even that time on the ranch a bull chaperoned us!” This minor joke, like every play of his spirit, gained a hundred times its own inherent effect by sifting through his personality. She smiled back to his smile at the boyish ripples about his mouth and eyes.
“You see, it means a lot when a girl sticks in a man’s mind that way,” he continued. “Why, I’ve carried you around right through my Senior year at college and my first year out. So of course, it must mean something.”116
The open windows of Eleanor’s bower looked out upon a bay tree, a little thing awaiting its slaughter—for shade trees might not grow too near the windows in San Francisco. It was flopping its lance-leaves against the panes; puffs of the breeze brought in a suggestion of its pungency. That magic sense, so closely united with memory—it brought back a faint impression upon her. Her very panic at this ghost of old imaginations inspired the inquiry, barbed and shafted with secret malice:
“How many really nice girls have you known in that time?”
Bertram, sitting in considerable comfort on the window seat, flashed his eyes across his shoulder to her.
“Oh, a few in my Senior year, not many this year. What’s a man going to do on twelve a week?” She noticed the indelicacy of this, since he spoke in the house of his employer. But the next sentence from him was even more startling:
“The last time I was in love was down in High School at Tulare. She’s married a fellow in the salt business now. I guess she was117pretty: anyway, her hair was the color of molasses candy. I wrote a poem to her the first day I saw her.”
“A poem?” asked Eleanor.
“You do well to ask that,” said Bertram, throwing on one of those literary phrases by which, in the midst of his plain, Anglo-Saxon speech, he was recalling that he was a university man. “It rhymed, after a fashion.”
“You don’t know how to be in love until you’re older,” he went on.
(“Even that bay scent brings up only wonder, not emotion; and I can laugh at him all the way,” she thought. Yet in this tiny triumph Eleanor was not entirely happy. The vision, a little disturbing, a little shameful, but yet sweet, was quite gone.)
“Tell me about this girl with the molasses hair. She interests me. And a lot about yourself.”
“Oh, I’ve forgotten most about her long ago. And I’ve something else to remember now, I hope. I’d like to talk about myself, though. I’d like some girl to hear about my ambitions. I really think it would do me good.”118
He stopped, as though expecting an answer. None came. He bent his eyes closer on her and repeated:
“It would!”
And at that moment, a pair of high heels tapped in the doorway, a cheerful voice called for admission through the portières, and enter Kate Waddington. Mr. Chester, Eleanor saw, rose to her entrance as one who has not always risen for women; there was something premeditated about the movement.
“Mrs. Tiffany said you two were in here,” she began in her full, rich contralto, “and I made so bold, Nell—Mrs. Masters is taking a party over to their ranch next Sunday. One of her men has disappointed her and she’s just telephoned to give me the commission to fill his place. Mr. Chester, you are an inspiration sent straight from Heaven. Any other man, positively any other, would be a second choice—but she didn’t know you when she made up the party, so how could she have invited you?”
She paused and threw an arch look past Eleanor.
“Sure I’ll come!” said Bertram, jarred into119the vernacular by his internal emotion of pleasant surprise. “Sure—I’d be delighted.”
“I told Mrs. Masters you’d be the ready accepter,” said Kate.
“You’re going too, aren’t you?” asked Bertram of Eleanor.
“No; I had to decline, I’m sorry to say.”
“And I’m sorry; blame sorry.” He turned back toward Kate Waddington, and she, the lightning-minded, read his expression. He had made a greatfaux pas; he had seemed more eager toward Eleanor, to whom he owed no gratitude for the invitation, than toward her.
“Would you care to drop in on Mrs. Masters as you go down town to let her know that you are coming? Or if you wish I’ll tell them—I’m going now—that way.” Her tone gave the very slightest hint of pique; her attitude put a suggestion. The game, plain as day to Eleanor, raised up in her only a film of resentment. Mainly, she was enjoying the humor of it.
Bertram rose promptly.
“It is time I was going,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed myself very much, Miss Gray. If120you don’t mind, I’d like to come to see you again.”
“And I’ll get into my things,” said Kate.
They all moved toward the door.
Kate passed first; then Eleanor. There hung beside the door-casing a hook, designed to hold the portière cord. Eleanor brushed too close; it caught in the lace at her throat. She pulled up with a jerk, gave a little cry; the lace held fast. She turned—in the wrong direction.
Bertram saw this tiny accident; he sprang forward, caught the lace, disentangled her. And to do so, he must reach about her so that his arms, never quite touching her, yet surrounded her as a circle surrounds its centre. She turned and looked up to thank him, surprised him, surprised herself, in that position.
And a wave which was fear and loathing and longing and agitation ran over her with the speed of an electric current, and left her weak.
Her face, with its own sweet inscrutability, showed little change of expression; but he caught a dullness and then a glitter of her eye, a heave of her bosom, a catch of her breath. As he stood there, his great frame121towering above her, something which she feared might be comprehension came into his eyes. And—
“You make a picture—you two there!” called Kate Waddington from without. The transitory expression in his eyes—Eleanor saw it now with triumph—was that of one who has thrown a pearl away. But he followed.
Dining with Mark Heath in the Hotel Marseillaise that night, Bertram fell into a spell of musing, a visible melancholy uncommon in him; for his ill-humors, like his laughters, burned short and violent. Mark Heath—by this time he was growing into a point of view on his chum and room mate—remarked it with some amusement and more curiosity.
Mark was casting about for an opening, when Bertram anticipated him. Staring into the dingy wall of the Hotel Marseillaise, past the laborers, the outcasts, the French cabmen purring over their cabbage soup, he said in a tone of musings:
“When Bert Chester grows up and gets rich, he’ll take unto himself a wife. We’ll live in a big house in the Western Addition with a122bay frontage. It will be furnished with dinky old dull stuff, and those swell Japanese prints and paintings. And I’ll have two autos and a toy ranch in the country to play with. We’ll give little dances in the big hall downstairs. I’ll lead the opening dance with the missus, and then I’ll just take a dance or so with the best looking girls—the ones I take a special cotton to. I’ll have my home sweet home dance with the missus—” he fell again to musing.
“A man up a tree,” said Mark Heath, “would say you were in love.”
“I’ll be damned—I wonder if that ain’t the matter?” said Bertram Chester.
123CHAPTER VII
The Ferry, doorway to San Francisco, wore its holiday Sunday aspect as Bertram Chester approached it. A Schuetzen Park picnic was gathering itself under the arches, to the syncopated tune of a brass band. The crowd blazed with bright color. The young men, in white caps, yellow sashes of their mysterious fraternity, and tinted neckties like the flowers of spring, lolled and larked and smoked about the pillars. Fat mothers and stodgy fathers fussed over baskets and progeny. Young girls, in white dresses and much trimming of ribbons, coquetted in groups as yet unbroken by the larking young men. Over these ceremonial white dresses of the Sunday picnic, they wore coats and even furs against the damp, penetrating morning—rather late in the season it was for picnics. In the rests of the ragtime, rose the aggressive crackle of that flat, hard accent, with its curious stress on the “r,” which would124denote to a Californian in Tibet the native of South of Market, San Francisco.
Bertram Chester, had he been accustomed to spare any of his powers for introspective imagination, might have beheld his crossroads, his turning point, in this passage through the South of Market picnic to the little group waiting, by the Sausalito Ferry, to take him to the Masters ranch. But a month ago, he himself had whistled up that infatuated little milliner’s apprentice who was his temporary light of love, and had taken her over to Schuetzen Park of a Sunday. He had drunk his beer and shaken for his round of drinks with the boys, had taken the girl away from a young butcher, had fought and conquered the bookmaker’s clerk who tried to take away the milliner’s apprentice from him, and had gone home, when the day was done, with his head buried on that soft curve of the feminine shoulder which was made to receive tired male heads.
Now, without a backward look, he was walking toward Sydney Masters, Mrs. Masters, the sprightly and dainty Kate Waddington, and those others, grouped about them,125who might be guides and companions on his new way.
Kate Waddington had acquainted him in advance with the party, so that the introductions brought no surprises. That young-old man with the sharp little face was Harry Banks, mine owner, millionaire, and figure about town—every one in San Francisco knew him or knew about him. That tall, swaying girl with the repressed mouth, the abundant hair coiled about her head, the rather dull expression, was Marion Slater—“she paints miniatures and hammers brass and does all kinds of art stunts,” Kate had said. That tall young man, who radiated good manners, was Dr. Norman French; that little woman, all girl, was Alice Needham, his fiancée. “They play juvenile lead in this crowd,” had been Kate’s phrase for them.
Kate, taking possession of Bertram at once, gave him her bag to carry, and, as the gates opened and the whistle blew, she walked beside him. From the upper deck, this Masters party watched that city panorama, spread on the hills for all to see, roll away from them, the wheeling flocks of gulls trailing the126craft in the roads, the surge of golden waters rolling in from the Gate. A morning mood blew in upon the winds; the party became gay.
Bertram, in the rise of his morning spirits, performed certain cub-like gambols for the benefit of Kate Waddington. The company failed not to notice that he had assisted her up the gangway by slipping his hand under her elbow. On the deck, he cut her out immediately from the rest, insisted on tucking her veil into his pocket, made a pretence of trying to take her hand. Even Kate found it hard to parry these advances. Banks, slouching back on a bench in his easy, indolent attitude, looked over toward them, and his mouth tightened and set. So much had he been courted for his wealth and personality, this Harry Banks, that among his familiars he assumed the privilege of falling into moods without reason or preliminary notice. His present mood was a perverse one; and he took it out on its reason for being—this presumptuous outsider.
“Me Gawd, Jimmie, but me belt hurts!” he called out suddenly in his richest imitation of the South of Market dialect. With his127light step of a dancer, he skipped over to Kate Waddington, whirled her to her feet, and began to waltz about the forward deck, imitating the awkward, contorted, cheek-to-cheek style of the Schuetzen Park picnic. Kate, who fell in at once with every invitation, had laughed as he began to whirl her, but she flushed too. The whole upper deck was craning necks to stare. Mrs. Masters caught her breath and whispered, “Oh, don’t!” Dr. French and Alice Needham fell to talking apart, as though repudiating, in their embarrassment, such company. Marion Slater, sitting at ease on her bench, cast one glance at Harry Banks as he whirled to face her. His eyes fell; on the next turn, he waltzed Kate back to her seat. The relationship between these two was a puzzle to their familiars. He, the uncaught bachelor, the flaneur, the epicurean, he who lived for his pleasures, taking them with a calculated moderation that he might preserve the power to enjoy; she, the etiolated, the subtle, the earnest follower of art, she who seemed always a little too earnest and conventional for that group of the frivolous and unconventional rich—people had wondered for years how128there could be anything between them. These two alone understood that the bond was of the mind, not of the flesh or the spirit. She but thought, and he thought with her; she but lifted her eyebrow or moved her hand, and the motion translated itself to speech in his mind. That glance of her had made his mind say, “I am making them all ridiculous.”
And, like the spoiled child that he was, he ceased from one naughtiness only to plunge into another and worse one. As Kate dropped to the bench, he looked at Bertram and said:
“You try it; I am a little rusty.” One of his rare embarrassments flamed into the face of Bertram Chester. The shot had gone more truly than Harry Banks could have known.
“No, thank you,” Bertram said simply, and flushed again.
Masters spoke up from his corner:
“Well, Chester, you ought to be a good dancer if build counts—though I shouldn’t like to have you showing off your accomplishment right here—you might lack the public finish of the Banks style. You big football fellows always have the call on the little men129in dancing. It is a matter of bulk and base, I think.” The ferry boat was passing Alcatraz now, and the populace had turned its attention away from Harry Banks and his party. The spoiled child kept straight ahead.
“They make real, ball-room gents,” he said. He turned toward Marion on this; turned as though he could not keep his look away. She lifted her eyebrow again, and he fell into a sulky silence.
The others rushed to the first refuge of tact—personalities. After a moment, Banks joined the talk; and then appeared another aspect of his perverse mood. He took the conversation into his own hands, and he talked of nothing which could by any chance include Bertram Chester, the callow newcomer, the outsider. It was all designed to show, it did show, how intimate they were, how many old things they had in common—never a passage in which Bertram could join by any excuse. Even so did Banks direct it as to draw Kate Waddington into the talk. Bertram sat apart, then, his face showing all his displeasure. His straight brows set themselves in a frown, which he bent sometimes at the group volleying personalities at Harry130Banks, and sometimes on the terraced hills of Sausalito.
When they trooped off with the crowd, Kate fell in beside Bertram again. Lagging deliberately, she let a group of picnickers come in between them and the rest of their party. He was still frowning.
“I’d like to soak that man,” he said. “Maybe I will.”
“No you won’t!” said she.
“Won’t I?” he replied.
“Oh, don’t think I haven’t seen it all. He was horrid. You see, we’ve got used to him. You’re meeting him new, and you don’t quite understand him yet.”
“Well, I’m going to spend no sleepless nights trying!”
“He’s really very clever and kind, at bottom. You’ll come to like him as we all do. And he’s a man that it’s good for you to know.”
Bertram seemed to be considering this.
“Well, what did he mean, anyway?” he snapped.
“Nothing. It’s just his foolery. We all had to take it from him at first—and then we came to appreciate him.”131
Bertram answered with an impatient gesture. Kate caught his arm, held it for just a second.
“Now, you wouldn’t spoil my day, would you?” she asked softly. “You know I’m responsible for you—”
His frown melted into his smile.
“Sure, if you put it like that!”
“Now, you’re a sensible, accommodating, self-restrained lad, and every other adjective in Samuel Smiles. You could charm the buttons off a policeman—and you’ll see how really nice he can be.”
“You’ll take out time until I get over my grouch?”
“Of course.” They were approaching Masters and Dr. French, who stood waiting by the train platform. “Late and happy!” she called.
Harry Banks, walking ahead beside Marion Slater, had taken his own wordless rebuke from her. During the train passage, he made the concession of keeping away from Bertram, and grouped himself off in the other double seat. Bertram, sitting with Kate and the engaged couple, spoke but seldom and then languidly. He did not come face to face132with Harry Banks again until the buckboards had delivered them at the Masters ranch.
This estate bore the title of “ranch” only by courtesy. Masters himself said that he raised nothing but mild Hell on his forty acres. He did have an olive orchard, a small orange grove flourishing by luck of a warm gorge in the hills, and a little fancy stock. Kate and Masters took possession of the new guest at the gate, and carried him over the estate for inspection. Mainly, Bertram took this entertainment sullenly. He warmed a little at the sight of the cattle. The house, built by Masters’s own design, drew only the comment, “pretty nice.” After that, Bertram was free to go to his room and dispose his belongings. Returning in a marvelously short time, he came out upon the house-party, grouped all in the big, redwood ceiled living-room.
A fire of driftwood snapped with metallic crackling on the hearth. Alice Needham sat with Dr. French beside it; Mrs. Masters, pausing in a flight of supervision, had stopped to speak with them; Alice was looking up at her, presenting her fresh, full-faced view to the gaze of the man on the staircase.133Marion Slater stood with Masters by one of the Dutch windows, criticizing the design with a painter’s half-arm gestures. Banks, by another window, sat dividing his time between a book and the valley below.
It happened then, as Bertram stood there, that Alice Needham looked in his direction. It happened, also, that she was smiling. He caught her smile and smiled back.
That smile was half the secret of his physical charm. In the first place, it broke with wholly unexpected force. His face, what with its heaviness of feature, was a little forbidding and severe. As he bent his unillumined gaze, he appeared stern—even angry. Then, with the sudden preliminary vibration of an earthquake, that smile would begin to quiver about his mouth, to start wrinkles about his eyes. Next, as he bent his head forward toward the target of his charms, it drew back the corners of his mouth to show his white teeth, it pulled eyelids and eyebrows into a tiny slit, through which his pupils twinkled like electric sparks. These movements—wholly muscular at that—spiritualized and transformed his face.
Mrs. Masters, looking up at the interruption,134was caught in this flood of charm and good will. Harry Banks, feeling a psychic current running about the room, looked up also; and that smile caught him. It carried away the last trace of his perverse mood. And Bertram heaved himself down the stairs and crossed at once to seat himself beside Alice Needham.
“I see at a glance I’m going to like this party,” he said. On other lips there would have been nothing to laugh at in this; but they all did laugh. In a minute more, Harry Banks had dropped his book and crossed over to the fireplace. Bertram, leading the talk now, took him in without a trace of apparent resentment. Kate, emerging from the room, dropped down beside Harry Banks on the floor and joined her cheerful pipe to the symphony of good fellowship. Before luncheon, this find of hers was the centre of the party; events were revolving about him.
In the lazy hour after meat, the engaged couple found chance to slip out into the orange grove. Masters, summoned by his foreman, went to look after a sick cow, Harry Banks went back to his reading, and Alice Needham to a design for a window seat which135she was building for the Masters dining-room. These pairings left Bertram and Kate to each other; and presently they were out-of-doors, drawing on into the woods. Masters, from the barn, watched them and noted what a goodly couple, what a faun and dryad in clothes, they were. Kate Waddington was turning over her shoulder her slow and rather lazy smile, which began at her lips and lit her green-grey eyes last of all. That was her best attitude of head. Bertram swung up the trail, making progress by main force—not walking so much as lifting himself on those sturdy, saddle-sprung legs of his. He was making wide, sweeping gestures; and Kate, as he talked, leaned a little toward him now and then, like a woman absorbed.
Momentarily, she had him on the subject of football. He was touching upon the subject of one Bill Graham, Stanford tackle and opponent in two varsity games, whom she knew and whom he was teaching her to know better. Bertram stooped and gathered a handful of pebbles from the trail to show how Bill Graham used to throw sand in his eyes; he thrust his open hand against an alder, bordering the trail, to show how he136contravened these tactics by slamming Bill Graham in the face. Even so far did loosen his tongue and spirit that he boasted of his victories and excused his defeats. He went further; he touched upon the most frightful disappointment of his career.
“It was in the ten to nothing game,” said he. “You remember, don’t you, how they had us down on our ten yard line early in the second half? We got the ball away. Nobody had scored yet. Well, Stuffy Halpin he gave the signal for a delayed pass on end. That was a freak play we were trying out that year—delayed pass first and then the back passed to me. I jogged Bill Graham and he stumbled down the field just bull-headed—he never did have much football sense. I looked down toward the goal”—(Bertram had been gesticulating wildly; now he gave the outstretched fingers of his right hand a sudden fillip to show the changed direction of his glance) “and I saw a clear field right straight to the fullback or glory—”
“Gracious! What happened?” asked Kate. She was capable, wit and social strategist that she was, of assuming all this interest by way of leading an inept youth to make a fool and137a braggart of himself for her amusement. But she showed not a glimmer of irony, neither in her mouth nor in her green-grey eyes. She spoke with the straight, sincere interest of a dairymaid listening to the self-told heroisms of a stable boy.
“Stuffy tumbled all over himself and dropped the ball!”
Bertram’s answer conveyed all the tragedy in the world.
They were come now to a place where the trail ran steep and the redwoods thickened to make a Californian hillside. It was November, but the season was late. The earth was washed bright by the early rains and not yet sodden with the later ones. The black, shaded loam, bare of grass, oozed the moisture it was saving for its evergreen redwoods against a rainless summer. In the dark clefts grew scentless things of a delicate, gnome aspect—gold-back fern, maiden-hair overlying dank, cold pools, sorrel, six-foot brake. No blossoms blew among all this greenery; only by that sign and by the wet, perspiring earth might one know that it was autumn on those hills.
The clean ooze and dew started a little138stream which ran, choked with maiden-hair, to the trail, and formed a pool. Some philanthropic camper had driven a nail into the rock and hung there a tin cup. Kate (Bertram still talking and gesticulating at her left) threw a perceptive glance.
“How good the water looks!” she said. “I believe I am thirsty!”
While he filled the cup, she seated herself on the rock, disposed herself into a composition; and after they had both drunk, she showed no disposition to move from her perch. In fact, she loosened her brown student beri, shook her hair free, and sat there, a wood-nymph framed by the ruddy brown and dark green of redwood and laurel. He crouched his big frame down beside her, so that she leaned back against the rock. A long silence, and:
“Nature is mighty nice!” he said.
Then, perceiving her as a part of the picture, he added:
“And you’re the nicest thing about it.”
At this frontal attack, Kate waited to see whether it meant further attack, skirmish, or retreat. His general softness of expression, showed that it meant attack.139
Bertram, in fact, was in the mood for attack on rose citadels. A year of life on twelve dollars a week—cheap, crowded lodgings, meals at the Hotel Marseillaise, the landlady’s daughter and those of her kind for companionship—and now, in a week, the refinements of the Tiffany house, the refinement plus entertainment of the Masters villa, and these two lovely, fragrant women. It seemed all to roll up in him as he sat there, the woods about him and this golden creature at his side; and it found half-unconscious expression on his lips.
“I’m going to be rich some day,” he said.
“I hope so.”
“I am, sure. When I get rich I’m going to have a place like this—I’ll have a long pull by that time and be able to invite anybody I want—this is the only way to live.” His voice fell away.
Then he looked up and bent upon her that smile.
“It’s great to have a girl like you to confide in,” he said.
“Thank you; but you haven’t confided much as yet,” responded Kate.
“I don’t suppose there is a whole lot to140confide. At least, things you’d want to tell a girl like you. Only one thing. I’m in love!”
The arrest of all motion in Kate which followed this declaration was like one of those sudden calms which fall over a field at the approach of evening. It descended upon her in the mid-course of a gesture; it wrapped her about in such a stillness that neither breath nor blood stirred. Then, though only her lips moved, her vocal cords responded to her will.
“And she is to be mistress of the villa when you get rich?”
“If she’ll take me,” said Bertram. “You see, it is a brand new case. I’ve just got it—just realized it. She’s up and I’m still down, so it wouldn’t be square to say anything about it, now would it?”
“No,” answered Kate softly, “though we women like bold lovers too.”
“Yes, that’s so. And I suppose if I keep too still about it, somebody else will come riding onto the ranch and carry her off. It’s my game, I guess, to stay around and watch. And if I find any gazebo getting too thick with her, then up speaks little Bertie for the word that makes her his.141
“If she’ll have me,” he added. “But she’s a good many pegs above me just now and I’ve got more than a living to make. Of course, that’ll come all right if I have fair luck. If it was easy money plugging my way through college, it will be easy plugging it through the world. Don’t you size it up about that way?”
Kate clasped her hands and leaned forward.
“If you’re playing the long game, I suppose so. But wouldn’t you do better at least to hint to the girl?”
“I guess you can advise me about that,” said he. “Better than anybody I know. Suppose I tell you all about it?” A little panic ran through the nerves of Kate.
“Now?” she said, “are—are you ready?”
“Now-time is good-time,” he said. “Well, I guess you’ve savveyed just who it is and what’s the matter. It’s—it’s Miss Gray—Eleanor Gray.”
To the end of her days, Kate Waddington remembered to be thankful for a certain cotton-tail rabbit. At that moment precisely, this fearling of the woods streaked down the trail, pursued by a dog whose heavy crashing sounded in the distance; came out upon them,142whirled with a loud roaring of fern and leaves, screamed the heart-rending scream of a frightened rabbit, and dashed off into the wood. The sound, coming in this tender moment, betrayed Bert Chester into a guilty start. So, when he looked back, her face was as smoothly beautiful as ever and she was even smiling.
“You lucky boy!” she said. And then, “I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t blame any man.” Bertram fairly glowed.
“I knew you’d agree with me,” he said. “Say, what chance do I stand—honest, what do you believe she thinks of me?”
“Honest, I never heard her say. It is likely she hasn’t begun to think of it at all. Women are slower than men about such things. How long have you been—in love with her?”
“Of course, I’ve been that way ever since I saw her first—ever since I was a student, picking prunes for her uncle, and went down and helped her run a bull off her place. I thought then that I never saw nicer eyes or a more ladylike girl. She’s always given me the glassy eye. I think she hates me—no, it143isn’t that, either. She just feels superior to me.”
“Oh, perhaps not that!”
“Well, anyhow, I was in college and any one girl looked about the same to me as any other—” Bertram wrinkled his brows in contempt for his utter, undeveloped youngness of two years before—“but I remembered her always. When I saw her sitting in the Hotel Marseillaise that evening, I felt queer; and after I called on her I just knew I had it. Funny, you coming in that afternoon. You and I have hit it off so well, and here I’m confiding in you! It was a regular luck sign, I think.”
Kate’s voice, when she spoke, fell to its deeper, richer tones.
“And I’m sure I feel flattered—any girl would. I really thank you—you don’t know how much.”
“And you’ll help me, won’t you?”
“With my advice—yes.”
“Well, that’s all I want. If I win this game, I want to win it square.
“Say, you are sure the goods. You’re as pretty—it wouldn’t be natural for a man to144say you’re as pretty as she is, but a man can just look at you and wonder—” and here he dropped one of his hands gently upon hers. She let it rest there a moment before she drew away.
“We’d better be going back,” she said. “They’ll think it’s I and not Eleanor, if we stay so long.”
As they started, he stooped to get her another drink. Standing above him, her hand lifted toward her student beri, she bent her gaze on his back. A peculiar look it was, as though an effort against pain. It faded into an expression like hunger.