CHAPTER VIII

145CHAPTER VIII

It seemed afterward to Bertram Chester, reviewing the early events of a life in which he was well pleased, that his real attack on things, his virtual beginning, came with that house-party of the Masters’s. The victory of his smile on the staircase he followed up that evening to a general conquest. For Masters, when dinner was over, brewed a hot punch. They drank it about the driftwood fire, and even the severe Marion Slater relaxed and made merry. The essence of the gods strips self-control and delicacy first, so that the finer wit goes by without tribute of a laugh and the wit of poked fingers—especially if it be sauced by personality—rules at the board. After the punch had worked sunshine in them, the poked finger of this young barbarian was more compelling than the sallies of Masters or the mimicry of Harry Banks.

When the party dispersed at the Sausalito146Ferry and scattered for a workaday Monday, he found himself accepting invitations left and right. Dr. French asked him to motor out to the Cliff House that very night; Mrs. Masters wanted him to dinner; Harry Banks must have him over to his ranch under Tamalpais. Kate Waddington, mounting the steps to Banks’s automobile, slipped him a farewell word.

“You were a success,” she said. “That’s the reward of naughty little boys when they reform!”

“Well, I’d have liked to smash his face just the same—then.”

“You’ve done better than that—you’ve quite conquered him. I’ll see you Wednesday at the Masters? Good bye!”

Bertram Chester sold forthwith the Richmond lots, his first venture in business, to get ready money for the wisest or the most foolish investment which a young man of affairs can make in the beginning of his career—general society. With all his youth, his energy and his eager attack on things, he plunged into the life of San Francisco. Only in that city of easy companionships and careless social scrutinies would such a sudden rise have147been possible. His furnished room, where he used to read and study of evenings in his years of beginnings, knew him no more before midnight. He dropped away from those comrades of the lower sort with whom he had found his recreation; abandoned and forgotten were his old lights of love. The milliner’s apprentice, a coarsely pretty little thing, used to wait for him sometimes on the doorstep. Mark Heath, coming home one night earlier than usual, found her there, took her for a walk about the block, and conveyed to her the unpleasant news that Bertram was now flying higher than her covey. After that, she came no more; and the first phase of his life in San Francisco drifted definitely back of Bertram Chester.

We shall stop with him only three or four times in the course of that winter wherein he made his beginnings. Before it was over, he had entered, by the special privilege accorded such characters, the club about which man-society in San Francisco revolved; he had broken into a half a dozen circles of women society; he had become hail-fellow-well-met with the younger sons of the cocktail route, the loud characters of flashy Latin quarter148studios, the returned Arctic millionaires of the hour and day who kept the Palace Hotel prosperous, the patrons and heroes of the prize-fight games, the small theatrical sets of that small metropolis. Sometimes he flashed in a night through four or five such circles.

He hung of late afternoons over bars, exchanging that brainless but well-willed talk by which men of his sort come to know men. He sat beside roped rings to witness the best muscle of the world—and not the worst brain—revive in ten thousand men the primeval brute. He frolicked with trifling painters, bookless poets, apprentice journalists, and the girls who accrued to all these, through wild studio parties in Latin quarter attics. He sat before the lace, mahogany, crimson lights and cut glass of formal dinners, whereat, after the wine had gone round, his seat became head of the table.

From these meetings and revels, whereby he made his way along the path of dalliance in the easiest, most childish, most accepting city of the Western world, two or three kaleidoscopic flashes remained in his maturer memory. The night of the football game, for example, he strayed into the annual149pitched battle of noise and reproach at the Yellowstone between the California partisans and the Stanford fanatics. A California graduate, his companion along the cocktail route, recognized him; immediately, he was riding shoulder high. His bearers broke for the sidewalk, and down Market Street he went, a blue-and-gold serpentine dancing behind him. There was his first Jinks at the Bohemian club—an impromptu affair, thrown in between the revelling Christmas Jinks in the clubhouse and the formally artistic Midsummer High Jinks in the Russian River Grove. The Sire, noting his smile and figure, impressed him into service for a small part. This brought a fortnight of rehearsal which was all play and expression of young animal spirits, a night of revel refined by art, an after-jinks dinner of the cast, whereat Bertram, as usual, spoke only to conquer. Memory held also one perfectly-blended winter house-party at the Banks ranch, with the rain swaying the eucalyptus trees outside and a dozen people chosen from San Francisco for their power to entertain, making two nights and a day cheerful within.

Later in life, he, the unreflective, thought150that times had changed in his city; that men were not so brilliant nor circles so convivial as when he was very young. It was not in him to know that neither times nor men had changed; that he thought so only because he looked on them no longer through the rose glasses of youth.

He himself would have called it a season of great change, and he would have missed, at that, the greatest change of all—the transformation in himself. The face on which we saw so little written when he had that meeting in the Hotel Marseillaise, the new sheet straight from the mills of the gods, had now a faint scratching upon it. The mouth was looser in repose, firmer in action; the roving and merry eye was more certain, more accurate as it were, in its glances. His youthful assurance had changed in him to something like mature self-certainty. In those external city manners which he had set about from the beginning to acquire, he showed more ease. Although he had lost the fragrance of an untouched youth, he had become altogether a prettier figure of a man.

He needed all the prodigal youth and the cowboy strength in him to keep up his social151pace and still do his work, but he managed it. Indeed, he became of distinct value to the office through the business which he brought in from his wandering and his revelling. It seemed that he might refurbish that old law practice and find his way to the partnership which Judge Tiffany foresaw at the end of one path.

Through this consideration and through the partisan friendship of Mrs. Tiffany, he became gradually a pet and familiar of the Tiffany household, taking pot-luck dinners with them, joining them once or twice on their out-of-doors excursions. His big, bounding presence, his good-natured gambols of the Newfoundland pup order, transformed that somewhat serious and faded ménage, gave it light and interest, as from a baby in the house. Although Mrs. Tiffany mothered him, gave him her errands to do, she made no mistake about the centre of attraction for him. He was “after” Eleanor. That young woman took him soberly and naturally, laughing at his gambols, accepting his attentions, but giving no sign to Mrs. Tiffany’s attentive eyes that her interest was more than indifferent friendship.152

His wooing, in fact, went on in a desultory fashion, as though he were following the policy which he had expounded to Kate Waddington—“hang around and watch.” He paid no more compliments to grey eyes; he paid no compliments at all. When they were alone, he entertained her with those new tales of his associations in the city, which pleased her less, had he only known it, than his tales of the ranch and gridiron. If he showed the state of his feeling, it was no more than by an occasional long and hungry look.

In one way or another, he saw nearly as much of Kate Waddington, that winter, as he did of Eleanor. Kate, too, was a ray of light. She—“the little sister of the clever” her enemies called her—made the Tiffany house a bourne between her stops at her home in the Mission and her rangings about Russian Hill. Bertram noticed with sentimental pleasure that the two girls were a great deal together. He found them exchanging the coin of feminine friendship in Eleanor’s living-room, he met them on shopping excursions in Post street. When the three met so, Kate always sparkled with her best wit, her most cheerful manner; but she showed, too, a kind of153deference toward Eleanor, an attitude which said, “He is yours; I am intruding only by accident.” The meaning in this attitude bore itself in, at length, even upon Bertram Chester; and he did not fail to glow with gratitude. He expressed that gratitude once or twice when he was alone with Kate. Somehow, it was easy for him to talk to her about such things.

154CHAPTER IX

“Are you off the job to-night?” came the resonant voice of Bertram Chester over the telephone.

“Yes!” Eleanor laughed. “Are you coming to play with us?”

“No. You’re coming to play with me. One of our best little playmates leans over my elbow as I indite these few lines—little Katie. Mark Heath is reporting great doings in Chinatown to-night, and he wants assistance. Do you suppose your Aunt Mattie will object to Chinatown?”

“Aunt Matilda never dictates—”

“Then it’s Chinatown! We’ll be along for you in half an hour. We’re dining with the Masters, who have inconsiderately refused to come along. What’s happened to you?”

“Nothing—why?”

“Your voice sounds so chipper!”

“That shows I’m in a mood to play!”155

“Then we’ll be along in aquarterof an hour.”

“And I’ll be waiting at the garden gate!”

The swish and murmur of night, the rustle of a steady sea breeze, the composite rumble of the city far below, tuned with the song in Eleanor’s blood as she stood waiting by the front gate. She looked down on the pattern of light and heavy shadow that was the city, and a curious mood of exultation came over her. Light foreshadowings of this mood had touched her now and again during the past two months; never before had these transitory feelings piled themselves up into such a definite emotion.

She could not trace its shy beginning, but she was aware of it first as a sense of the humanity in the cells of that luminous honeycomb below, the struggling, hoping, fighting, aspiring mass, each unit a thing to love, did one but know the best. The wave of love universal beat so strong on her heart that she turned her eyes away for surfeit of rapture, and looked up to the stars. They, the bright angels of judgment whose infinite spaces she could not contemplate without fear, united156themselves in some mysterious bond with the little human things below; the sight of them brought the same wave of rapture. Too mighty long to be endured, the wave broke into ripples of happy contemplation. Sounding lines of forgotten poems ran through her mind, movements of old symphonies, memories of her vicarious raptures before the altar in the convent, glimpses of hillsides and valleys and woods in the winter rain which she had seen unseeing that she might reserve their deeper meaning for this deeper sight of the spirit. “I wonder if this is not happiness; if Heaven will not be so?” she thought. It came, too, that if this exaltation lasted a moment longer, she should know with God the meaning of all things, the Reason which united stars and space and men and the works of men.

The resonant bass of Bertram Chester, beating down Kate’s cheerful treble, floated up from the sidewalk. The sound came almost as a relief; yet on second thought she was a little sorry for their intrusion into this lonely rapture of the spirit. She looked over the wall. Kate, revealed in the light of their gate-lamp, walked between the two men, who157were bending toward her; now they were all laughing together. She was radiant, this firm-fleshed, golden flower of the West. Eleanor dipped from her clouds of glory to notice that she wore a new tailor gown, that every touch of her costume showed how she had got herself up for that special occasion. And now the spiritual fluid in Eleanor transmuted itself into a reckless gaiety. She slipped down the steps and confronted them on the sidewalk.

“Hello,” said Kate, looking her over. “Well, who’s given you a present?”

Eleanor hugged her. “That’s just what’s happened, Katie. Somebodyhasgiven me a present—I believe it must have been the stars.” She extended her hands, right and left, to the men; holding them so, she rattled on; “Boys and girls, there’s so much ego in my cosmos to-night that it’s running out at every pore. I’m sure there’s going to be a party to-night, and I’m sure it’s got up for my benefit. I’m going to play so hard—so hard that they’ll put me to bed crying! Mr. Heath, bring on your Chinese and let them gambol and frisk. It’s my birthday. This isn’t the date in the family Bible, as Kate158could tell you if she weren’t a lady, but I’m sure my parents made a mistake. I just know that some menial is coming in a minute with a birthday cake—and the ring and the thimble and the coin and everything will be in my slice—Hello, Bert Chester!”

“Where do I come in?” enquired Kate.

“You? You come in as my dearest little playmate, to whom I sent the first invitation.”

“I see at a glance,” rejoined Mark Heath, “that we’ve got our work cut out for us. I will now announce to the Little Girl who is Having a Party the program of games and sports. The festival of the women is on in Chinatown.”

“I saw it from the car as I passed Dupont Street,” chimed in Kate. “And the Quarter is blazing like a fire in a tar barrel.”

In the most natural manner, Kate linked herself to Mark Heath. She always yielded the place beside Bertram when Eleanor was present; quite as naturally, she herself took that place when Eleanor was away. Bertram cast a long look on his companion; and he ventured for the first time in weeks, on something like a compliment.

“Whathashappened to you? You look—hanged159if I can just tell you how you look, but it’s great!”

“Oh, compliment me! I love compliments! That’s my birthday present from you. I wonder if the Chinese babies will be out on the street—the little, golden babies. Why haven’t they a legend about those babies? Mr. Heath, do you know Chinese mythology? Kate, aren’t you sure those children are primroses transformed by the fairies to hide them from the goblins?”

Bertram frowned a little as she drew the other couple into their private conversation. But he continued to study her. This lightness and brightness which she had developed so suddenly, seemed quite to dim the radiance of his own personality. He fell into a quiet which lasted far into the evening. She, on her side, moved like one intoxicated by some divine liquor. Never had she seemed so gay, so young; and—though he did not wholly formulate this—never had she seemed to him so inaccessible.

They approached a dark alley beside an Italian tenement. Eleanor, dancing around the corner, came upon it suddenly. She drew up.160

“There’s an ogre in this dark den—I know there is. I must see him! Just think, I’m ten years old going onto eleven, and I never yet saw a real ogre. Come on—we’re going ogre hunting!” She plunged into the shadows. Mark, laughing, followed.

Eleanor peeped into the door of a wine-house, peeped over a board fence, and came back to announce:

“He’s not in. I left my card—oh, there he is—he’s visiting the goblin in that garden across the street!” She skipped across to an old stone wall which held its half-acre of earth suspended over the hill-fall. Mark skipped with her; Bertram followed at a distance as one who plays a game of which he is not sure. Eleanor brought up against the wall.

“There he is—by the kitchen door. Of course you see him! Good, Kind ogre, you don’t eat little girls on their birthdays do you?”

“Aren’t his red eyes beautiful and hasn’t he a classy set of teeth?” rejoined Mark Heath. “Be good, Fido, and you shall have a plumber for breakfast.”

“But he’ll spare me! He says I’m too beautiful161to eat!” Eleanor was dancing back. “Oh Kate, I’ve seen an ogre!”

Kate did not answer. She fell in with Mark Heath, and as they drew ahead she murmured:

“I wonder what’s got into her?”

“Nothing I guess. I should rather say she’d got out. I think it’s bully.”

“Oh, yes,” said Kate, drawing out the last word.

They turned into the Quarter at Washington Street, and at once they were in the midst of the festival. From a doorway burst a group of little, immobile-featured Cantonese women, all in soft greens, deep blues, reds and golds that glimmered in the gas-lights. Banded combs in jade and gold held their smooth, glossy black hair; their slender hands, peeping from their sleeves, shone with rings. The foremost among them, a doll-girl of sixteen or so, tottered and swayed on the lily feet of a lady. The rest walked upon clattering pattens, like a French heel set by the cobbler’s mistake at the instep.

Mark Heath, the young reporter, proud in his knowledge of “the inside,” took up the reins of conversation.162

“A fairy story for you right at the start, birthday lady! That little-foot girl is the daughter of Hom Kip. You remember the story, don’t you? The old plug tried to sell this daughter of his for wife to a merchant in Portland. She had her own ideas—she eloped with the second tragedian from the theatre over there. Hom Kip put detectives on them, and caught her at Fresno. But she’d already married her actor American fashion; and the Portland bridegroom is waiting until father makes his little blossom a widow.”

“As temporary Empress of Chinatown, I order that he shall do nothing of the kind,” said Eleanor.

“As your grand vizier, I shall put the machinery in motion that will free the beautiful young bride,” rejoined Mark Heath.

Kate broke in.

“What became of the actor? I’m one of those dull persons who always wants the rest of the story!”

“I told you, didn’t I, that father is going to make her a widow? At least he was until the Empress ordered otherwise. The actor has probably abandoned his art, which gives him undesirable publicity. And some day, if163father dares disobey the Empress, there’ll be a mysterious murder in a backwoods laundry—police baffled.”

Eleanor contemplated the lily-foot girl, swaying about the corner into Dupont, her little handkerchief in one hand, her proper fan in the other.

“Poor little blossom—I wonder if she’ll mourn for him? Faithful Grand Vizier, don’t tell me sad facts on my birthday night. I want only pretty things.”

“Whether she’ll mourn or not won’t make much difference to father—or to the Highbinders. Je-hoshaphat—look!”

For they had turned the corner into Dupont Street, main avenue of the Quarter. Its narrow vista came upon them at first as a smothered flame. Innumerable paper lanterns, from scarlet globes as big as a barrel to parti-colored cones that one might hold in his palm, blazed everywhere, making strange combinations, incredible shades, in the flaring Chinese signs, the bright dresses of the women. The sidewalks quivered with life—soberly dressed coolies, making green background for the gauds of their women, bespangled babies late out of bed that they might gain good luck164and blessing from those rites, priests in white robes, dignitaries in long tunics, incongruous Caucasian tourists and spectators.

A moment Eleanor drank it all in; then she addressed her Grand Vizier.

“Inform my people, through your invaluable publication, that their demonstration in my honor is perfect.”

“It shall be done, liege lady—three column spread on the front page. Oh, you’ve got to have a shoe.” For a vendor was bearing down on them, carrying a tray of pink paper shoes like valentines. “That’s the symbol of this festival—the goddess lost her shoe before she died. How much, Charlie? Two bits two? All light! Empress, permit me to present this souvenir of a grateful people. Miss Waddington, have a shoe on me!”

Eleanor hung the pink trifle to the pin at her throat.

“I shall add it to the royal treasure trove,” she said. It came across her then, as one of the unrelated thoughts and fancies which were coursing in such swarms through her mind, that Bertram Chester, though he stuck close to her side, had been unusually silent. She drew him in at once.165

“Does it become me?” she asked.

“Everything becomes you.”

“You don’t say anything aboutmyshoes!” said Kate.

Now the crowd began to eddy and to whirl toward the next corner. There rose the clang of gongs, the shrilling of a Chinese pipe playing a mournful air in that five-toned scale Whose combinations suggest always the mystery of the East. About that corner swept the procession of the Good Lady, priests before, women worshippers behind. The priests set up a falsetto chant, the banner-bearers lifted their staves, and the parti-colored mass moved down on them.

“It’s like a flower-bed on a landslide!” exclaimed Eleanor.

Mark Heath gravely pulled out his left cuff and took rapid notes with a pencil.

“That goes into the story—anything more up your sleeve like that?”

“Wasn’t it good? Eleanor is always thinking up clever things to say,” Kate came in. Her voice was rather flat.

At the edge of the gutter where they stood, a Chinese shoemaker had set out on a lacquer tray his offering to the gods. Red candles166bordered it, surrounding little bowls of rice and sweetmeats, a slice of roast pig, a Chinese lily. As the banners approached, certain devout coolies found room on the sidewalk to prostrate themselves. Eleanor, absorbed now in a poetic appreciation of all this glory of color and spirit, felt a movement beside her. She looked down. The shoemaker was flat on his forehead beside his offering.

“Would you per-ceive that Chink grovel,” spoke the voice of Bertram Chester.

Before Eleanor could turn on him, he was addressing the shoemaker.

“Feel a heap better, Charlie? Say, who-somalla you? Brush off your knees!” The Chinese, if he understood, paid no more attention than he paid to the lamp post in his path. Gathering up his offering, he pushed his way back through the crowd.

For the first time that evening, Eleanor became somewhat like her normal self as she said:

“Why, this is a religious ceremony, isn’t it—all this light and color!”

“Yes,” responded the personal conductor of the party, “but you have to pinch yourself to remember it. For instance, you’ll be charmed167to know that I saw one of those priests, up in front there, arrested last week in a raid on a gambling joint. Morals haven’t an awful lot to do with this religion. Maybe that fellow on the pavement was praying that he’d have a chance to murder his dearest enemy, and maybe he was applying for luck in a lottery. Empress of Chinatown, up yon frazzled flight of stairs lurks the New York Daytime Lottery. The agents of said lottery are playing ducks and drakes right now with the pay of the printers on the imperial bulletin which I have the honor to represent. Some day, your grand vizier and most humble servant is going to do a Sunday story on a drawing in a Chinese lottery.”

Eleanor showed no inclination to go on with the game.

“Have another shoe—one shoe, Charlie, for the little princess!” continued Mark Heath. This one, displayed amid the cone-sticks and New Years nuts of a sweetmeat stand, was bright blue. Mark hung it on Eleanor’s shoulder; then, as a kind of afterthought, he bought a crimson tassel for Kate.

The procession was past, was breaking up. The women, in knots of three or four, were168scattering to the night’s festivities. Mark, as guide, let business go as he led them on his grand tour of Chinatown. They stopped to survey sidewalk altars of rice paper and jade, where priests tapped their little gongs and sang all night the glory of the Good Lady; they visited the prayer store, emporium for red candles, “devil-go-ways,” punks, votive tassels, and all other Chinese devices to win favor of the gods and surcease from demons; they explored the cavernous underground dwellings beneath the Jackson Street Theatre; they climbed a narrow, reeking passage to marvel at the revel of color and riot of strange scent which was the big joss house. Bertram’s spirits were rising by this time; he expressed them by certain cub-like gambols which showed both his failure to appreciate the beauty in all this strangeness and his old-time Californian contempt for the Chinese as a people. Once he tweaked a cue in passing and laughed in the face of the insulted Chinaman; and once he made pretence of stealing nuts from a sweetmeat stall.

Wherever Mark found a new design in toy shoes, he bought one for Eleanor, until she wore a string of them, like a necklace, across169her bodice. Yet had the illumination gone a little out of her; she replied with diminishing vivacity to Mark’s advances as he played the birthday game.

When they mounted the joss house stairs she lagged behind; and Bertram lagged with her.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “I never saw you so bright and chipper as we were awhile ago, and now—say, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Oh, Mr. Heath—” she raised her voice, “are the actors allowed in the joss house—and if not will you have it fixed for me?”

After they had presented their votive punks to the great high god, Kate announced that she was footweary.

“Can’t we find a place to sit down?” she asked. Mark took her up.

“That’s the signal for tea at the Man Far Low restaurant. Ever been there? Tea store below, fantan next floor, restaurant top side all the way through the block. Come on, Empress of Chinatown. The royal board awaits.”

The Man Far Low was in the throes of large preparation for the Chinese all-night170banquets which would close the festival. The cashier wore his dress tunic, his cap with the red button. The kitchen door, open on the second landing, gave forth a cloud of steam which bore odors of peanut oil, duck, bamboo sprouts and Chinese garlic; through the cloud they could see cooks working mightily over their brass pots. Every compartment of the big dining hall upstairs held its prepared table; waiters in new-starched white coats were setting forth a thousand toy devices in porcelain. Though the Chinese feasting had not yet commenced, it was plain, from the attitude of the waiters, that slummers and tourists were not wanted on that night. But still the head waiter, when he came slipping over on his felt shoes, led them to a table in the Eastern dining room, from whose balconies one overlooked Portsmouth Square. His aspect, however, was anything but cheerful.

“Say, you Chink, smile!” said Bertram as he seated himself.

By a slight turn of the head, the very slightest in the world, the Chinese showed that he caught this in all its force. But he went gravely on, setting out porcelain bowls. Eleanor’s171hand moved a little, as though in restraint.

“Cheer up, Charlie, crops is ripe!” resumed Bertram.

“Don’t—please,” cried Eleanor. The first word came short, sharp and peremptory; the “please” was appealing.

The color rose under Bertram’s brown skin. Kate, an outside party to this passage, smiled a quiet smile; but she spoke to Mark Heath.

“Whatarethose paintings on that screen—come and tell me about them!”

Now Bertram and Eleanor stood alone with the table between them.

“I was jollying him!” burst out Bertram. Eleanor glanced at Kate, who stood profile-on listening to the ready Heath.

“Shall we go out on the balcony?” She stepped through the open French window.

As they stood in the shadow, the city at their feet, neither spoke for a moment. Finally,

“It’s a call-down, I suppose?” began Bertram, tentatively.

“Not necessarily.”

With a slam, he brought his hand down on the balcony rail.172

“You don’t give—you don’t give a damn—that’s the trouble with you—you don’t care what I do!”

Eleanor drew a little away from him before she answered:

“I care if anyone is uncivil.”

“What is it but a Chink? They expect it! Why, down in Tulare—” His voice fell away as though he recognized the futility of an attack in this form. She spoke:

“It is you who should not expect it.” And then, “I am sorry I said what I did. It was an impulse. We are all imperfect. I’ve often been unkind myself.”

Bertram stood gripping the rail before him as one caught and held by a new emotion. When he spoke, his voice was low and rather hard. At the first tone of it, she shrank from the daimon in him.

“If you only cared enough to call me down! That’s the trouble with you. Am I—am I the dirt under your feet?”

“Oh, don’t please!” But he was going on, too fast to be stopped.

“I’m afraid of you—that’s what’s the matter. What have you got in you that I can’t seem to melt? You kept away from me the173first time ever I saw you. You’ve kept away ever since. You don’t think I’m as good as you—and I’m not. But it’s aggravating—it’s damned aggravating—to have you rub it in. You’ve got something about you that I can’t touch anywhere.” And he paused, as though expecting her to deny it.

“I don’t know what right you have to say this,” she exclaimed.

In her swift rush to her own defence, she had dropped her guard. She realized it on the moment, heard his inevitable reply before he opened his mouth to the swift-flashing answer which, that outer self told her, was the only possible answer for him to make.

“Only this right. I’m in love with you. I’ve been in love with you ever since I saw you down at the Judge’s ranch, only I didn’t know it then. I love you.” Silence for a moment, and then, “I love you!”

For just one instant, it seemed to her that she was swaying toward him in spite of herself. He made, curiously, no active motion toward her. That outer self of Eleanor’s, reigning as always over her conscious self, commenting, criticising, seeing—that outer self remembered, above her mental turmoil,174that never in all their later acquaintance had he tried even to touch her finger.

“Oh, don’t!” she cried, “please don’t!”

He made a growl in his throat, the adult counterpart to a baby’s cry of disappointment.

“Didn’t I tell you?” he said, “and now I’ve laid myself wide open for a throw-down.”

“If you call it that. Oh Bertram—” he and she both noticed the shift to his familiar name—“I’m afraid I haven’t been fair to you. Oh, have I been fair?”

He paused as though considering a whole new range of ideas.

“Yes, I guess you have,” he responded at length.

“You’re a man,” she said, “and a big man. I suppose I ought—to love you. To have the power of loving you in me. And oh, there have been moments when I thought I could.” She stopped as though appalled by the lengths to which she had gone. “You see, I’m trying to be fair now. I’m telling you everything.”

And then, with the thought which succeeded, it was as though she felt the physical tingle of bay leaves in her nostrils, “or nearly everything.”175

Through the open French windows came the cheery voice of Kate Waddington.

“Tea is served, ladies and gentlemen!”

“All right—be along presently!” called Bertram. And then to Eleanor:

“You must tell me—you can’t keep me hanging by the toes until I see you again.”

“The rest means—since I am being perfectly fair to you—that I can’t tell.” Now something like strong emotion touched her voice—“Don’t think I am coquetting with you—don’t believe that it is anything but my effort to be fair.” She turned on this, and stepped through the open window.

Bertram struggling to compose his face, Eleanor wearing her old air of sweet inscrutability, they faced the quick, perceiving glance of Kate Waddington who sat pouring tea from the crack between two shell bowls.

Eleanor settled herself on the teak-wood stool.

“Youmustcome out on the balcony before we go,” she cried. “I never saw the city lights so wonderful.”

“Well,” said Kate, “it all depends on the company!”

176CHAPTER X

Kate’s plump and inert mother, who always regarded this daughter of hers somewhat as a cuckoo in the nest, was in a complaining mood this morning. She sat in her dressing-gown embroidering peonies on a lambrequin and aired her grievances. Kate, writing notes at the old-fashioned black walnut writing desk, looked up at the climaxes of her mother’s address, bit her pen and frowned over her shoulder. For the greater part of the time, however, Mrs. Waddington spoke to empty air.

“I never did see such a daughter,” said Mrs. Waddington, jabbing with her scissors at a loose end of pink silk. “As if it isn’t enough, gallivanting around the way you do, fairly living in other people’s houses, never bringing any company home, but you can’t even be decently civil when youareat home. We might just as well be a hotel for all the respect you pay us. What are you doing when you’re177away, I’d like to know? It’s all well enough, the stories you tell—” Kate, resting between notes, saw fit to parry this last thrust.

“I’ve always supposed I was capable of taking care of myself,” she said. “At any rate, you’ve let me proceed on that theory.”

It needed only the slightest flutter of an opponent’s rapier to throw Mrs. Waddington on the defensive.

“You never let me,” she mourned. “Goodness knows, I gave you every chance to take me along. When first you began going with those painter people, you might have counted me in.”

“You didn’t seem eager, perceptibly, until I had made my own way,” Kate vouchsafed. At that moment the telephone rang.

While Kate was in the house, no one else thought of answering the telephone. Mrs. Waddington would have been the last to usurp the prerogative. For that instrument was the tap root of her spy system over her daughter. By it, she picked up things; learned what this irresponsible responsibility of hers was doing. Mrs. Waddington had her mental lists of Kate’s telephonic friends. She imagined that she could tell, by the tone178of her daughter’s voice, just who was on the other end of the line.

“Oh, Bert Chester!” came Kate’s voice from the hall. Mrs. Waddington made note number one. This mention of the name was significant. The discreet Kate, who knew her mother’s habits, hardly ever called names over the wire.

A pause for a very short reply, and then:

“Certainly. Zinkand at one. I’m beginning to think it’s time I worked at my job as confidant. What is the use of a confidant if you don’t confide?”

Mrs. Waddington leaned forward while Kate got her reply. The mother in her, unsensitized though as it was, noted the sparkle in Kate’s voice. But for the intervening door, she might have seen a great deal more sparkle in Kate’s face, down-turned to listen.

“Oh yes, I was aware of that!” Kate’s voice went on. “Dolt! Did I catch it? You’re a poor dissembler. You’re too honest. You might tell the verdict before I tell you—”

Mrs. Waddington could stand it no longer. It was so uncommon for her daughter to speak thus freely and emotionally at the telephone, that she must have a look. She rose, therefore,179and crossed past the open hall door. She noticed a certain tension in her daughter’s face as she bent her head to await the reply.

“You poor, perplexed boy!” went on Kate’s purring, caressing voice, “Then you need a confidant. Zinkand’s at one—and I’ll look my prettiest to draw you out!”

Mrs. Waddington, when her daughter was come back into the room, renewed her plaint:

“I wish you’d save for your parents a little of the graciousness you give your friends,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind so much if you were getting somewhere. But here you are, nearly twenty-four years old and goodness knows if you’ve had a young man, I don’t hear about it. How can a respectable young man want to marry a girl like you, I’d like to know? Those they play with, they don’t marry.”

Kate’s mood had changed completely. She advanced now with the prettiest caressing gesture in the world, threw one arm across the wrinkled skin and old lace of her mother’s throat. Mrs. Waddington resisted for a moment, her head turned away; then, gradually, she let her being lap itself in this quieter air. Her head settled down on Kate’s shoulder.

“Perhaps,” said Kate, “I may.”180

“Well I wish you’d hurry up about it,” said Mrs. Waddington. “Girls will be girls, I suppose, and they’ve got to learn for themselves. There, there—you’re mussing my work.”

Kate dropped a kiss on her mother’s forehead and vanished up the stairs.

Bert Chester, waiting before Zinkand’s an hour later, picked her a block away from the nooning crowd. Before he recognized the olive-green tailor suit which he had come to know, he noticed the firm yet gracile move of her. As she came nearer, he was aware of two loungers waiting, like himself, to keep appointments. He caught this exchange from them:

“Who? The girl in a kind of brownish green?”

“Yes. Isn’t she a peach?”

Just then, it seemed to him, did the purely physical charm of her burst upon him for the first time. Supple and swaying, yet plump and round; her head set square with some of a man’s strength, on exquisitely sloping shoulders: and the taste—he would have called it so—of her dress! A discriminating woman might have noticed that her costume bordered181on ostentatious unostentation. For it was designed in every detail to frame the picture, to set off not only that figure but also the cream of her skin, the tawny hair, even those firm, plump hands.

He found himself remembering that he had just proposed to another girl. The thought flashed in, and flashed out as quickly.

The Café Zinkand formed, at the time, a social nodule in the metropolitan parish that San Francisco was. As the Palace Hotel was its Rialto, gathering-place for prosperous adventure, so the Zinkand was its bourne. In this mahoganied and mirrored restaurant with its generous fare, its atmosphere of comfortable extravagance, those who made the city go, who gave its peculiar Saxon-Latin move and glitter, were accustomed to gather and gossip. It blazed with special splendor on the nights when this or that “Eastern attraction” showed at the Columbia Theatre. To stand on such evenings at the Powell Street terminus, to watch those tripping, gaily-dressed, laughing Californian women thronging the belt of city light from the theatre canopy to the restaurant canopy—ah, that was182San Francisco! Not Paris, not Buenos Ayres—they say who have travelled far—could show such a procession of Dianaides, such a Greek festival of joy in the smooth, vigorous body and the things which feed and clothe it. With that absence of public conventionality which was another ear-mark of the old city, all sorts and conditions of men and women sat side by side at the tables. Harlots, or those who might well pass as such, beside the best morale there is in women; daughters of washerwomen beside daughters of such proud blood as we have; bookmakers’ wives, blazing with the jewels which will be pawned to-morrow, beside German housewives on a Saturday night revel; jockies and touts from the race tracks beside roistering students from Stanford and Berkeley; soldiers of fortune blown in by the Pacific winds, taking their first intoxicating taste of civilization after their play with death and wealth, beside stodgy burghers grown rich in real estate; clerks beside magnates—all united in the worship of the body.

At noon, however, its workaday aspect was on; it was no more than a lunching place. Chester and Kate found seats in a retired corner.183

She looked him over with cool mischief while she drew off her gloves and let one white hand, still creased in pink with the pressure of the seams, drop toward him on the table.

“I am not exactly to congratulate you,” she said, “but for a man who was turned down last night you don’t seem exactly unhappy.”

Bertram let several expressions chase themselves over his face before he blurted out:

“What’s the matter with me?”

“Not a great deal. Has she so refused you as to make you conscious of sin?”

“It wasn’t a cold turn-down. I’d like it better if it was. I’d have something to go on. It’s—it’s like trying to bite into a billiard ball. I—you know what I mean.”

“You mean that she holds herself above you—that she feels superior to you?”

Bertram arrested all motion on that word, sat with the menu card, which he had been twirling, immovable between his hands.

“Yes. If you want to jolt it to me good and hard that way. I guess that is what it does mean.”

“I suppose then that the crisis—last night—came about from your little passage with the184Chinese waiter? It happened while you were out on the balcony didn’t it?”

Bertram stared and glowed.

“Say, you’re a wonder. You reach out and get things before they come to you at all. That’s just what did happen.”

“And then? Or pardon me, I don’t want you to tell me any more than it’s right for you to tell—any more than you feel like telling.”

“Oh that’s all right. Well, when we got outside it was the same old song. She didn’t care enough even to call me down. And like a fool I came out with it. What’s the use of telling what she said or what I said? It was just the same way. She kept me dancing. She wouldn’t say yes and she wouldn’t say no. She seemed anxious about only one thing. She wanted to know if she’d been fair to me.”

“I suppose she has—!” Kate brought this out as though he had put a question to her. “And you want to know what I think?”

“I sure do.”

“I think she cares—at least a little—shall I tell you all?”

Bertram, even in the hottest of this conversation, did not forget the needs of his body.185The waiter stood at his elbow. He rushed through the order, and continued:

“I want to know everything.”

“Well, to begin with—Bert Chester, you’re a man.”

“I didn’t ask for hot air.”

“That’s all of that. You’re an unfinished man. You—haven’t had the chance to get all the refinements which people like Eleanor Gray have acquired. Do you see now? You’ve made it—you’ve been making it—all for yourself. You had no fortune. It’s splendid the way you worked to get all these things. I know the story of how you got through college. Everyone who knows you is proud of that. But—well Eleanor’s mother was rich and proud before she married, and her grandparents were richer and prouder. Then she’s lived a great deal alone; and she never really blossomed out until she went abroad. So she learned her social ways from Europeans. She’s got a lot of British and Continental ideas.

“With the rest of us, you know, it doesn’t make any difference. You could perceive that by the way we’ve taken you in. Why, it’s really a part of you. You’re only two186years out of college, hardly that; and you’re still studying law; but think how people have taken you up! It is simply that Eleanor looks at it in a different way. It’s a pretty peculiarity in one of the sweetest girls I know.”

Kate paused. Bert made no move to answer. She went on:

“Now about the thing you can’t grasp in Eleanor. It’s this way. You can’t see her nature as anothergirlcan. She’s just as sweet and tender and delicate as she can be, and she has high ideals—that’s one result of her living away from the world. If she were a little warmer in temperament, it might be different, but—” Kate paused here as though pondering whether to reveal or to conceal the thought of her mind.

“But of course it is the coldness of a diamond or a sapphire or something else very pure and precious.”

Bertram Chester pulled himself up at this point and plucked at a place away back in the conversation.

“What are these things that I don’t know? Where is it that I fall down?”

“They are some of the finer points.”

“Well tell me.” Kate noticed that the187color had risen in his cheeks and that his eyes drooped from hers.

“They must be corrected as we go on—provided you’ll let me correct them.”

“That’s what I am asking for—but I’d blame well like an example.”

“Well, now, we’ll take that waiter episode. The kind of people she’d like to know treat servants impersonally. Servants are just conveniences to them, like dumb waiters. So of course,—even if it was only a Chinaman—she didn’t like your noticing him and she came out of her shell for just a moment to say so. Do you see now?”

Bertram’s dark complexion reddened with the rush of his shame.

“Oh, that’s the idea is it? I thought from something she said that she was afraid I’d hurt his feelings. She wants me to put more front on before ’em, does she?”

“Just about that. She doesn’t like to see you put yourself on a level with them.”

“All right, that was straight over the plate and I got it.”

Again Kate reached over to pat his hand.

“Now don’t take it seriously; I know—she herself must know—how splendid and able188and promising you are—how much of a man!”

Bert spoke in some irritation.

“I always knew I wasn’t a gentleman,” he said, “but this is the first time it was ever shot straight at me that way.”

“Bert Chester, as long as I’m a friend of yours don’t you ever dare say to me that you’re not a gentleman. You’re one of the biggest and strongest gentlemen I ever knew. Anyone need only see you for five minutes to know you’re that. But some people have certain things which they attribute to a gentleman—notions, as I’ve said. And Eleanor from her European experiences has some of these notions. Don’t you see?”

The smile, which always broke so suddenly, came back to Bert Chester’s face.

“Well, of course that’s why I broke loose from the ranch and went to college in the first place. I wanted to be as good, every way, as the best there is!”

“And you are already!”

He shook his head.

“No, or this wouldn’t have happened. I want to be good enough to marry any girl, no matter who. I’m going to amount to something.189I’m going to be rich, too—and a darn sight quicker than most people know. I don’t know that we came here to talk about that, though.”

“Please go on. We came here to talk about you—anything about yourself.”

“That part of it has something to do with the main issue. I’m going to pull out from Judge Tiffany as soon as I go up against the bar examinations next month. At least, I want to pull out, and I’m only wondering how the Judge will take it and how she will take it. You see, I might just as well get admitted, and then it is good-bye to law for me afterwards unless I use it in politics. Law—” Bertram rammed his finger on the table with each word that followed “law is too blame slow. Anyone could see that I couldn’t be chasing about as I’m doing if I had to depend on what Judge Tiffany is paying me as a clerk. Why, I’ve made twice as much already whirling at business. I’ll always have my admission to the bar, too. If I want to settle down on a law practice after I get rich, I can do it.”

“That seems very promising to me.”190

“But here’s the question. Is the Judge going to take it for a throw-down, and how is Eleanor going to like the program?”

Kate appeared to be considering. In fact, she was considering a great many more things than Bertram knew.

“I’m pretty sure Eleanor wouldn’t care,” she said at length. “Hers isn’t a very practical mind. It’s impossible to say about Judge Tiffany. He’s crotchety. The right’s on your side, for a man has a right to change his employment, hasn’t he? And I’m sure you have more than returned your little salary. On the whole, I don’t know but it would be better for you with Eleanor if the Judge did get angry with you. A girl with ideals like hers rather likes to have a man persecuted. And you can’t let it stand in the way of your career.”

“But—”

“Oh, it isn’t as though it were a choice between the girl and the career. It isn’t at all. The best way to win her is to build yourself up to the big, splendid man she’d like you to be. If you stay a little law clerk for five years or so, you won’t have much inducement191to offer her! When you consider marriage, you have to remember that a girl like Eleanor can’t live on a trifle. I’d follow my own career. It isn’t, you see, as though there were anyone else in the field. Other men come to the house, of course—men she’s met at the Masters, old friends of the family—but I don’t consider any of them as rivals. I did think for a time that Ned Greene was attracted, but he’s crazy now over Katherine Herbert. So it isn’t a case for immediate action.”

“Do you think—have you ever heard her speak of me?”

Kate’s answer came readily.

“She has spoken to me of you—the way women do, so that you see under what they say. We women are devils”—she smiled—“no, I can’t tell you what she said. I’m in a peculiar position about it. You see, her talk, as it happens, is all twisted up in a confidence she made to me—something else in her life—nothing to do with you—and I can’t break it. But I can do something without breaking any confidence. I can tell you what I think you ought to do.”192

“Well, I guess that’s what I want—” with the air of one who would have liked a great deal more.

“The man who gets Eleanor Gray—and especially if Bertram Chester is the man—cannot take her by assault. If you reach out to grasp her—you who are so strong—it will only break something in that delicate nature of hers. Don’t woo. Serve. Don’t even see her too often. Don’t renew that scene on the balcony—never make that mistake again. When you are with her, show by your attitude how you feel, and show her—well, that you’re learning the things you’ve asked me to teach you—the things I’m going to teach you.”

“It’s sure a pink tea program,” said Bertram. Kate laughed.

“Bert Chester, when you make your dying speech from the scaffold you’re going to say something original and funny. You can’t help it. Now can you?”

The smile broke again on Bertram’s face.

“Well, it has its funny side,” he admitted. “All right. If refinement’s the game, me to it.” His smile had caught Kate’s laugh, and there came between them a kind of mental193click. Soft gratitude sprang into his heart and quivered on his lips.

“You’re a bully girl! I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have you to talk it over with. And you really do understand lots about women and those things—where did you learn it?”

The smile went out of Kate. She drooped her eyes and let her pink nails flutter on the tablecloth.

“Suffering and experience, I suppose.”

“Could I—would you tell me about it?”

She looked up with an air of sweet sincerity.

“I should like very much to tell you. You could help me as much as you say I’m helping you. Some other time, we’ll have that all out together. You see, when one has held a thing in her heart for a long time—well, it’s a struggle at first to get it out. But sometime when I’m in the mood!”

And then he discovered that an appointment at the office was overdue. While they went through the formalities of checks and wraps, she talked foolish nothings. He parted with her hurriedly to run after a Market Street cable car.194

“We’re going to be the best chums in the world,” he said as he shook hands.

“Indeed we are!”

She watched him as he ran after the car, swung on the platform with the easy economy of motion which belongs to the athlete. But just before he set his foot on the platform and looked back at her, she herself whirled and started down the street, so that he saw only her trim back-figure, the glint of her bronze hair, the easy grace of her walk.

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