195CHAPTER XI
So Bertram Chester went on, the easy familiar of the Tiffany establishment, the contriver of Mrs. Tiffany’s household assistances, and the devoted follower of Eleanor. He never referred in any way to the scene on the restaurant balcony; he did nothing formally to press his suit. Indeed, his occasional air of gentle diffidence puzzled and amused her. She had a queer sense, when she beheld him so, that she liked it in him less than some of his old uncouthness, and only a trifle better than such roughness of the heart as that passage with the Chinese waiter. This new attitude was loose in the back, tight across the shoulders, short in the seams—it was not made to fit Bertram Chester. When he launched out into rudimentary art criticism, stringing together the stock slang which he had picked up in the studios, when he tried to impress her with his refined acquaintance, his progress toward “society” of the conventional kind, her amusement took another turn196in the circle of emotion, and became annoyance.
In general company, he reverted to type. At their home dinners, when wine and good fare had lit the fires of his animal spirits, he still told his rambling, half-boastful stories of the cow country and of College times, or laid before these home-stayers the gossip of the town. That manner of his, always more compelling than either his substance or his words, carried the plainest story; and he had at least the art of brevity. One laughed when he laughed, catching from his spirit the humorous idea, even when its expression failed on the tongue. Voice and gesture and an inner appreciation which he could flash instantly to his tongue contributed to these dazzling effects. His new-made friends of the artistic set used to tell him, “If you could only write down your stories—what humor, what action!” Mark Heath, with the information of a room mate, the judging eye of a half-disillusionized friend and the cynicism of a young journalist, was first to perceive that a stenographer concealed to transcribe his talk would get only barren words.
In his fading and declining years, Judge197Tiffany leaned more and more upon Eleanor, his business partner. Now it had come spring. The trees were in bud along the Santa Clara. They must begin preparing for the season. The family did not move to the ranch until apricot picking was afoot; but from now on either Judge Tiffany or Eleanor would run down every week to watch the trees and to oversee the Olsen preparations for harvest time. Purchase of supplies and the business of selling last year’s stock, held over for a rise in German prices, kept Eleanor busy.
She dragged the Judge out of his library one March afternoon, that he might inspect with her a new set of sprayers which she was considering. The Judge went to his office all too seldom nowadays; Eleanor and Mrs. Tiffany used continually all kinds of diplomacies to keep him at his business, from which he stubbornly refused to retire. When they had driven their bargain, Eleanor guided and wheedled him to the office. The methodical Attwood, having his man there, thumped a pile of papers down before the Judge, representing that this demurrer must be in on Tuesday, that case tried or continued next198week. The Judge sighed as he pulled the papers toward him.
“They’ve nailed me, Nell,” he said. “Here, I’ll appoint a substitute. Send for Mr. Chester, Attwood—dining anywhere, Chester? Then take pot luck with us and pay me by escorting my business conscience home. I’ll overwork myself if someone doesn’t carry her away!”
The afternoon fog, forerunner of another rain, floated in lances above Montgomery Street. The interior valleys had felt their first touch of baking summer, had issued their first call on their cooling plant—the Golden Gate, funnel for mist and rain-winds. The moisture fell in sleety drops; yet only the stranger and pilgrim took protection of raincoat or umbrella. The native knew well enough that it would go no further. On these afternoons, neither cold nor hot, wet nor wholly dry, the blood is champagne and the heart a dancing-floor.
At the moment when Eleanor stepped out into the home-going crowd, she, an instrument tuned to catch delicate vibrations from earth and sea and air, felt all this exhilaration. Life199was right; the future was right; the display of a young female creature before the male—that most of all was right. And Bertram Chester, talking for the moment like his old, natural self, was a main eddy in the currents of joy-in-youth.
“You are bonny to-day!” she said quite naturally as she looked him over.
He blushed happily. And the blush helped restore him in her eyes as the natural Bertram Chester.
“And you’re the bonniest of the bonny. I never saw you look so full of ginger except—” he hesitated there, and her words rushed in to meet the emergency.
“Thank you! Though I wasn’t fishing, I am grateful just the same.”
“Then you do find something now and then that you can stand for in me?”
“I find a great deal—when you are Bert Chester.” He seemed to puzzle over this, to ponder it; so that she added:
“Let’s not talk conundrums in this air and this crowd! We’re not blue-nosed, self-searching New Englanders. Let’s keep away from Market Street and walk through the Quarter. They haven’t yet taken the Easter200things from the shop windows, and there’s a darling atrocious group of statuary next door to The Fior d’Italia which you must see!” And then, as they turned the corner—
“What’s the crowd? I’m for disremembering that I’m refined. I want to be curious!”
“Looks like a scrap—do you—”
“Nonsense! Come on. I divide women into those who would like to see a prize fight and admit it, and those who would like to see a prize fight and deny it!”
“Gee whiz!” said Bertram. They had reached the edge of the crowd, which circled about some knot of violent struggle and gesture. “Excuse me!” He had sprung from her side and was breaking his way through. By instinct, she followed into the hole back of him, so that she found herself in the second row of spectators to a curious struggle, the details of which flashed in upon her all at once.
Two laborers, gross, tanned, dirty, were fighting. They had swung side-on as the hole opened, and her glance focused itself upon the smaller of the two. He was an old man, quite gray; and down his scalp ran a201stream of bright blood which trickled upon his ear. The thing which puzzled her was the action of the older man. He seemed to be hanging to the arms of his younger and sturdier opponent; also he was talking rapidly, excitedly; and she caught only one phrase.
“Hit me with a nail, will you?”
And just then the younger man got his arm free, and dove for the pavement—dove at precisely the same instant with Bertram Chester. Apparently, the younger fighter arrived first; he backed off from the scuffle brandishing a piece of packing box. Then she saw what the old man meant. Pointing the weapon was a nail, stained red.
As this rough fury poised himself for the stroke, she took in the whole picture—a young, tall, brute man, one eye puffing from a new blow, the other blood-shot, the mouth open and dripping, the right arm raised for the murderer’s blow.
Bertram Chester came between as though he had risen out of the earth. His left hand, with a trained aptitude which made the motion seem the easiest thing in the world, caught the upraised wrist. The laborer202ripped out an unconsidered oath and struck with his free fist at Bertram’s face. Bertram evaded the blow, slipped in close. And then—in a lightning flash of speed, Bertram’s right hand, which had been resting loosely by his side, shot upward. His whole body seemed to spring up behind it. The blow struck under the point of the chin. The head of the young bruiser dropped, then his shoulders, then his arms; his body sagged down upon Bertram. The champion of age shook him off; he dropped to the sidewalk. All this in a flash, in a wink.
The crowd, curiously inert, as all city crowds are until the leader appears, now followed this leader. A clamor of many tongues arose—“Get a cop!” “He’s killed him!” “Do him up!” A short rush of half a dozen boys toward the fallen bully met the resistance of Bertram, who had turned as though anticipating such a movement. He shoved them back and raised his hand. His eyes were bright, his face flushed, and that smile which won and commanded men had broken out on his lips.
“Say,” he said, “you all saw me do this203man fair and square. He isn’t dead. He’s only put out. He’ll be all right in five minutes. You know it was coming to him. Now, I’ve got a lady with me, and I don’t want her dragged into the police station. The cops will be here in a minute. I’d like to show this thing up in court, but we don’t want to trouble the lady, do we? If I beat it, how many of you will witness to the cops just what happened?”
“I!” and “I!” and “I!” from the crowd and “Me! God bless ye!” from the elder warrior, who stood wiping the blood from his ear. Bertram gave them no chance for reconsideration. “All right!” he said, “here I go!” He pushed his way out as he pushed it in, swept Eleanor along with him. The spectators lifted a cheer; but only a mob of small boys followed.
“Beat it, kids, or the bulls will pipe me!” called Bertram over his shoulder. At this magic formula, the boys fell out. A half a block away, Eleanor dared look back. A policeman had just arrived; he was clubbing his way stupidly through the crowd. Bertram looked back too.204
“All right,” he announced, “now don’t appear to hurry.” At Kearney Street, he swung her aboard an electric car.
“Victory!” she cried as the conductor rang his two bells and the car gathered headway. “It was perfect!”
He stared down at her.
“Well, I just had to put it through once I got started, but say—I thought you’d sure be sore on me.” His voice took on an apologetic tone. “It seems to me when I see a scrap, I constitutionally can’t keep out of it.”
“No more should you—such fights as that.”
“Then you make distinctions?” he asked.
“If you mean that I distinguish between fighting just for the lust of it and fighting to protect the helpless, I may say that I do. You did well.”
“Thank you!” he said, half-earnestly. “I’d have thought you wouldn’t like to see me muss things up, that way.” He was letting his voice slip away from him, both in volume and in manner, and the car was crowded. A panic necessity for concealment took possession of her.
“Surely we’ve evaded the police—let’s get out and have our walk through the Quarter.”205
“I’m with you.” Kearney Street, that thoroughfare which gathered into its two miles every element in American life, here struck its hill rise. Sheer above them hung Telegraph Hill, attained by latticed sidewalks, half stairs. The Latin quarter thronged and played all about them in the dusk and the fresh lamplight. And again, mood and spirits rose in her. The event whose swift, kaleidoscopic action still danced on her retina, the very stimulus of brutal youth in action, had conspired with the perfect night to raise her above herself.
“Oh, talk to me about it!” she said. “How did you do it—what do you call it—I want to hearyoutell about it.”
“I guess you saw it all—just a plain uppercut. Those blame city crowds would see a man killed before they’d think of anything but the show. I’ve always said that, and now I know it. I caught sight of the old man side-on and I saw he was hurt by something more than a punch. Far be it from me to spoil a good scrap, but that wasn’t a fair shake. So I dropped you and started in. And then I saw that nail. I made a slip there,” he let his voice fall in self-depreciation—“I should206have kicked that chunk of board away, instead of diving for it. He beat me to it. The rest was so easy it was a shame to take the money. Up comes his head and up comes my guard”—he stopped in the street to illustrate—“and he couldn’t use his club any more than a kitten. I’d have let him go, if he hadn’t hit at me—and clipped me. For a second, I could have bit nails in two. When I pulled myself in close, there was his chin just above me—a be-auty target. And an uppercut was his medicine.” Bertram jerked his right hand up from his hip to illustrate the uppercut. Then he screwed up his face and felt of his right shoulder. “He marked me some,” he said in explanation.
“Did he hurt you?” she asked with real concern. It ran into her mind that the conventional hero of romance makes his wound a scratch before his lady. If she expected that from Bertram Chester, he disillusionized her.
“Well, you don’t take a punch like that, even glancing on your shoulder, without something getting loose,” he replied. “I shouldn’t be surprised if I’d slipped a cog or a tendon or something.”
“Why—let’s go home and see about it.”207
“Oh, it isn’t bad enough for that!” Then he fell into reminiscences. In their toilsome passage up the hen-coop sidewalks of Broadway, he gesticulated—with constrained motions of his right arm—loosed the sparkle of his energetic, magnetic talk upon her. She drew close to him. Gradually, as the steps became steep, her hand slipped under his arm. She was only half-conscious of this motion; her consciousness was full of a softening toward him, a leaning upon that strength which she had seen in action. On his side, he did not fail to notice it—this first movement in her which had seemed like an advance. He stopped his buzz of talk at one moment and all the lines of his face relaxed as though he were about to say something softer and deeper. But he only caught his breath and changed to another story. He had remembered—and just in time, he thought—the advice of Kate Waddington.
But in spite of that remembrance, he permitted himself the luxury of being natural; and he talked continually until they were within the Tiffany doors.
Mrs. Tiffany must hear all about it from both of them. When they came to the hero’s208injury, she dismissed Eleanor, made him strip his massy shoulder, and got out her pet liniment. The Judge, coming home in the midst of these surgical cares, heard the story retold with heroic additions by his wife. Dinner that night was a merry, a happy, an intimate party.
When Bertram left, Mrs. Tiffany did not follow him to the door, as was her old-fashioned custom. He waited a moment, as though expecting something. His eyes were on Eleanor. She did not move. She only bade him a simple and easy good night over her shoulder.
The old couple sat for a long time before the fire. Eleanor was gone—not to bed, could they but have known it, but to sit by her window and breathe bay-fragrance and drink the foggy night air off the Gate.
The Judge smiled down on that faded daintiness at his feet.
“Are we now to consider him in the light of a nephew-in-law?” he asked.
“It has bothered me a good deal,” said Mattie Tiffany. “What do you think I ought to do?”
“If that frightful social responsibility of209yours drives you to anything,” responded the Judge, “I should say you’d best leave it alone.”
“But Edward, dear, I’m just like a mother to her—and goodness knows I haven’t always been the best of mothers. There was her father—you know how long I shirked that—”
“The sin of omission that you will carry to your grave—”
“And somehow this is so like Billy Gray! It was just this way in her mother’s case. When Billy came around—you remember how bonny a boy he was then, Edward—I, her own sister, could never tell how she felt toward him. I’ve always told you that Eleanor has slipped a generation. She’s her grandmother, not her mother, in mind. But she’s just like her mother in one thing. You can’t ever tell what she’s thinking about, and the deeper her thoughts go the harder it is to tell! That’s why I’m considering all this so carefully—she doesn’t commit herself in one way or the other. It’s a sign.”
“Knowing you, Mattie, I presume that you’ve conducted researches into his desirability as a nephew-in-law?”
“Well, shouldn’t I? Goodness knows, we don’t lead a conventional life in this family,210and I don’t chaperone her. I reproach myself a little with that. When Mrs. Goodyear wanted to take her up and put her into the Fortnightly, it wasn’t so much Eleanor’s disinclination as my own laziness about getting up gowns and paddling about paying calls which kept me back—and that’s God’s truth.”
“And these penitential exercises in detective work—what have they brought forth?”
“He’s a little careless morally, I think. He’s had too much conviviality about the Club. I’m afraid he’s blossoming over young. They can say all they want about wild oats, but in this city it’s a mistake to sow them all at once. That’s one reason why I’ve been so good to him. I flatter myself that a house like this is a moral influence on him.”
“It’s all a concern for his soul with you, then?”
“No. Frankly, I like him. Everyone likes him. He’s a dear. But as to Eleanor—”
The Judge had risen and taken off his skull cap.
“Well, she has run a ranch and she’s travelled alone to Europe and back, and she’s211saved the soul if not the body of a father. And I wonder whether a girl who’s all that to her credit can’t be trusted to deal with the problem of an undesirable though attractive young man—”
“If I were only sure he was undesirable!”
“It is according,” responded the Judge, “to your definition of undesirability. If you mean worldly circumstances, you needn’t fear for Bertram Chester. He resigns from my firm this month.”
“What for?”
“Attwood brought me news of it. I don’t know where he’s going. I’m not supposed to know anything. But for to get rich, for one thing.” He closed his book and restored it to its place on the shelves. “He took the left-hand road, you see. It was manifest destiny; and you and I and Eleanor cannot move one whit the career of that young man.”
212CHAPTER XII
When Kate called him up over the telephone, inviting him, second-hand, to join a Masters party at Sanguinetti’s restaurant, Bertram interrupted his banter to ask if Eleanor were going.
“I’m sure I don’t know what her plans are,” said Kate. “Why don’t you ask her?” The tone was a little cold.
Remembering his duty, Bertram did ask Eleanor over the telephone.
“I’m sorry,” answered Eleanor, “but I had to decline.”
“Oh, duck your engagement if you have any!” he said, pleading like a boy. “It’ll do you good to jolly up!” But she was firm. He matched the cool tone of Kate with the equally cool tone of Eleanor, and wondered, as he hung up the telephone, whether anything had gone wrong between those girls. He remembered now that he had not seen Kate at the Tiffany’s since the expedition into213Chinatown. Had he but known it, he was perceiving late a thing of which others were making gossip already.
While Bertram freshened up his toilet in his room and thought hard on this, Kate Waddington, at home in the Mission, was making certain special preparations of her own. Mrs. Waddington could measure the importance of her daughter’s engagements by the care she took with her toilet. Fresh lace indicated the first degree of importance, her latest pair of shoes the second degree, and perfectly fresh white gloves raised the engagement to the highest degree of all. To-night, all these omens served.
Further, Mrs. Waddington saw that Kate was rummaging through the unanswered letters in her writing desk, saw that she was comparing two of them. Kate picked up the larger one. She was wearing furs, since the April night was chilly. This letter she tucked carefully into her muff.
“Why in the name of common sense are you taking that letter along to a dinner party?”
“Oh, something I want to show someone,” answered Kate after a momentary pause. Mrs. Waddington knew from old times the214hidden meaning of that pause. Just so, when at the age of seven they had caught her in the sugar-bowl, Kate had paused before starting her ready explanation. She had never overcome it; and her mother was the last person likely to acquaint her with that flaw of method.
“It’s from Alice Johnstone, I judge by the handwriting,” continued Mrs. Waddington.
“Oh, I guess so,” responded Kate. She made rapidly for the door. “Good night, mother. I’ll be home to-night, but rather late.”
“Thank you for small favors—” but Kate was gone.
Sanguinetti’s held a place in the old city no less definite than that of Zinkand’s or the Poodle Dog. In the beginning a plain Italian restaurant, frequented by the Italian fishermen whose sashes made so bright the water front and whose lateen sails, shaped by the swelling wind like a horse’s ear, gave delight to the bay, it had existed since the Neapolitans came to drag the Pacific with their nets. Painters and art students from the attics of the Quarter “discovered” it. When they made a kind of Bohemia about it, “the gang”215of tawdry imitators and posing professional Bohemians followed as a matter of course. That invasion put it on the fair way toward failure. But Sanguinetti’s saved itself by dropping one degree lower. “South of Market” discovered it. That district is somewhat to San Francisco as the East Side to New York, though with an indescribable difference. Then came the milliner’s apprentice who slaved all the week that she might brighten the “line” on Saturday afternoon, with the small clerk, her companion or the butcher-boy her beau. There came also the little people of the race track, as jockies out of a job, touts, bookmakers’ apprentices—tawdry people mainly, but ever good-humored and ready to loosen restraint of custom after the second quart of Steve Sanguinetti’s red wine. So this place came to have an air of loose, easy, half-drunken camaraderie, which seldom fell into roughness. It was the home of noise and song and easy flirtations which died at the door. When this transformation was fully accomplished, the painters and art students and seekers after “life” came back again. This time, they did not spoil its flavor. The fishermen had been216shy folk who fled from the alien invasion; no shyness about South-of-Market people on a holiday!
This Sanguinetti dinner party of Sydney Masters’s differed but slightly, after all, from other slumming parties in the hostelry of touch-and-go familiarities. Amused outsiders, they watched the growth of swift flirtations, passed comments on the overdressed women, joined in the latest Orpheum songs which started when the cheap wine made music in the throat, chucked quarters into the banjoes of the two negro minstrels who came in at eight o’clock to stimulate merriment. Bertram, in his position as jester to King Masters, went a little further than the others. It was he who bought out the stock of a small Italian flower-vendor, that he might present a bouquet “to every lady in the place.” His attention brought from the ladies varying degrees of gratitude, and from their escorts degrees of resentment which varied still more. Running out of flowers before he had gone clear around the room, he built up on toothpicks bouquets of celery and radishes, which he fastened to the corks of empty claret bottles and gave, with elaborate presentation217speeches, to the merrier and prettier of the neglected ladies.
From this expedition, he returned leading a little, sad man, who had the look of a boy grown old by troubles. A bleached-blonde woman followed them half-way across, but centre room she turned back with a stamp of her foot and a flourish of her shoulders.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Bertram announced, “I desire the privilege of introducing Teddy Murphy, California’s premier jockey, lately set down on an outrageously false charge of pulling a horse. He is here, ladies and gentlemen, to tell you his troubles!”
A moment of silent embarrassment on both sides.
“Here—take my chair, Mr. Murphy!” spoke Kate from the foot of the table. The next table, seta deux, had just become vacant. Kate slipped into its nearest chair. Bertram’s seat was back by the wall; to reach it, he must step over feet and so interrupt Mr. Murphy’s tale of wrong. Nothing was more natural than that he should take the seat opposite Kate. And instantly—he having heard the story already—Bertram lost interest.218
“Would you mind getting my muff?” asked Kate. “I think my handkerchief is in it.”
As Bertram handed over the muff, she was smiling up at him. She did not look down until she had taken out her handkerchief, flirted out its folds. Then a little, disconcerted “oh!” escaped her.
“What is it?”
Kate was shaking out her skirt, was glancing rapidly to right and left. “Goodness!” she cried.
“What’s the matter?”
“A letter. Have you seen it?”
Bertram looked under the table. There it lay, by his chair. He picked it up and passed it over.
“Oh!” she cried again, this time in a tone balanced between relief and embarrassment. She tucked it back into her muff, and her eyes avoided his. He noted all this pantomime, and he was about to speak, when Mrs. Masters touched Kate on the shoulder. “My dear, you’re missing this!” she whispered.
Kate put all her attention upon Mr. Murphy and his burning story about the pulling of Candlestick. Mr. Murphy grew a little too broad; Mrs. Masters, as the easiest way219rid of him, rose and asked for her wraps. As Bertram assisted Kate, he saw her reach an anxious hand into her muff.
Outside, she contrived a loose shoe lace, so that she and Bertram fell behind. She did not approach the subject of the letter; that came up later and, of course, quite incidentally.
“Anything to confide in me to-night?” she began.
“Oh, nothing much. Gee, you can’t tell about her, can you? Say, are you sure about your system? She was with me last Tuesday when I punched the jaw off a man, and she hasn’t treated me so well since I knew her as she did after that. I was blame near opening on her again. Blame near. What’s the answer?”
“A passing mood, perhaps.”
“Well, I’d like to get her in that mood often.”
“And you’ll find that she’s furthest from you in those moods—it’s in them that she’s least herself.”
“This general girl proposition is a tough one,” commented Bertram. “All right. You know the dope.”220
“You poor, perplexed boy!”
“Say, isn’t it time you began confiding?”
“Oh, you caught it—the letter I mean—There are few things those eyes of yours don’t see!”
“Man?” he continued, ignoring the compliment.
“Yes. It’s a dreadful perplexity.”
“Tell your old uncle!”
“Perhaps.”
“You’re in love?”
“I—I was. You see—ah, it’s gone past the place where it should have ended!”
“Then why don’t you break it off?”
“That’s all very well to say, but he’s a good man, and he says he’s crazy about me. Do I seem happy to you?”
“Middling.”
“I am—sometimes. Then something like to-day comes, and it puts me clear down in the heart. I have to keep up laughing and being gay when I’m all torn to pieces. I feel that I oughtn’t to keep him in suspense this way. He’s young, he’s fairly rich—if that counted. When he’s here, I often think I do—love him. When he writes, I know I don’t.”221
“Poor little girl!” said Bert, catching sympathetically at the half-sob in her voice.
“Thank you,” answered Kate on an indrawn breath. And then, “What would you do? I’m only a girl after all, am I not? Here I’m leaning on you, asking for advice.”
Bertram did not answer for a time. Then:
“Sure you don’t love him?”
“Not—not entirely. I might if he made me.”
Bertram was looking straight down on her. His mouth was pursed up.
“Suppose he made you—and after you’d married him you got to feeling again as you do now. That wouldn’t be square to him, would it?”
“I—perhaps not. But oh, it would hurt him so!”
“I guess he could live through it. They usually do, and don’t lose many meals at that. I think he’s running a bluff, myself.”
Kate drew slightly away from him.
“That’s a poor compliment.”
Bertram studied her meaning.
“What?”
“To say that a mancouldn’tget crazy over me.”222
“Oh! Not on your life. Sure thing no. I don’t know a girl anywhere that a man has more license to get crazy over. You’re a beauty and you’re just about the best fellow I know.”
“I suppose youhadto say that!”
“I figure that I wanted to. If I haven’t said it before, it’s because—” he stopped; Kate, as though it were an actual presence, could see the figure of Eleanor rising between them.
“Yes, I know—” she said quickly. “You do think I’m attractive then—cross your heart.”
“Cross my heart, you’re a beaut.”
“But that doesn’t get me any further with my troubles.”
“What are his bad points that make you hold off?”
“Nothing more than a feeling, I suppose. No, it’s more than that—something definite. It’s—I find this thing hard to say. Not exactly weakness in him—more a lack of proved strength. He inherited his money; he’s had the regular Eastern education. He’s at work, managing his properties. But I’d feel so much more secure of his strength if he had223made it for himself. That is the thing I could admire most in a man; more even than kindness. To have him succeed from nothing because his strength was in it. I don’t care how unfinished he might be—that would show he was a man!”
Bertram was still pausing on this, when Kate touched his arm.
“I’m afraid,” she said, “that we must join the others. They’ll be talking about us if we don’t, and we mustn’t have that—for Eleanor’s sake if for no other!” They hurried ahead, therefore, and walked beside Mr. and Mrs. Masters all the way in.
At the studio door, Kate declined a half-accepted invitation to remain for the night.
“Mother isn’t wholly well,” she said, “and I can be fearfully domestic in emergency! It’s only a step to the Valencia Street cars, and Mr. Bertram will get me home.”
It was still too early for the theatre crowd; they found themselves alone on the outer seat of a “dummy” car, one of those rapid transit conveyances by which San Francisco of old let the passenger decide whether that amorphic climate was summer or winter.
He had, it seemed, to shake her back into224the story of her love-affair. Three times he approached the subject, and each time she fended it off. They had passed clear into the Mission, were more than three-quarters of the way home, before he launched one of his frontal assaults.
“You might give me some more work at my job of confidant,” he said.
She began again, then; a story without detail; more a sentimental exposure of her feelings. The thing was growing like a canker; she fought it, but the decision, the feeling of his unhappiness should she give him final rejection, roosted on her pillow. It had never come to an engagement; it had been only an understanding; but she thought of dreadful things, even of his possible suicide, whenever she contemplated giving him the final blow.
The old-fashioned Waddington house stood on a big Spanish lot far out in the Mission. There was ground to spare; enough so that its original owners had room to plant trees without shading light from the windows. As they walked into the deep shadows, her voice took on an intonation like a suppressed sob.
“It is a comfort now to have said it, and it’s a new life to have you for support. Oh,225Bertram, what a big, strong friend you are! Be good to me, won’t you?”
She had stopped; in the shadows the clouded moon of her face looked up into his.
“Oh, won’t you be good to me?”
He slipped his arm about her; and suddenly he kissed her.
She suffered his kiss for only a moment; then she moved away. He let her go, and she rushed ahead to the door. When he reached the step, she had faced about.
“Consider myfeelings, Bert Chester,” she said; and the screen door slammed.
226CHAPTER XIII
Just where the Santa Eliza trail commanded sight of the main travelled road, Eleanor sat on a rock watching the hill-shadows lengthen on the valley below, watching a mauve haze deepen on the dark-green tops of redwood trees. The time was approaching when she must hurry back to Mrs. Goodyear’s bungalow for a dinner which she dreaded. Three weeks of perplexity had bred in her a shrinking from people. She had found excuse to wander away alone.
That lazy spring of the North woods, so like to early fall in other climates, had given her at first the healing of spirit which she needed. She wandered hither and yon as her fancy led her, following this trail, pushing into that opening in the chapparal. She had come out upon the Santa Eliza trail and gained sight of the road before she realized with a kind of inner shame the way in which227her feet of flesh had been tending, the direction in which she had been turning her eyes of the spirit.
Three miles away on the summit of the next ridge was the Masters ranch, and there rested the centre of her soul-storm. Bertram Chester, she knew by chance, was spending the week-end with the Masters.
She stopped by the rock, then; and immediately nature went out of her heart and the world entered. For three intolerable weeks, this heaviness had been descending upon her as by a whimsy of its own. Like the water of those cupped wheels in her little irrigation plant at the ranch, this black liquid, when it had filled its vessel to the brim, would empty automatically without touch on the spring of her will. When this came, she would feel rested, healed, in a state of dull peace. Now the struggle of thought was on her again. As always before, it began with an arraignment of the facts in the case, a search of memory for any forgotten data which might lead to a conclusion.
The first crisis arrived on the evening when Judge Tiffany came home in a plain mood of disgust, and announced baldly:228
“Well, Mattie; our young friend did everything I expected of him.”
He went on quite simply with the news. Bertram Chester had left him almost without notice. But that was to be expected. The rest was the worst. Bertram had gone to Senator Northrup—as manager of his real estate interests. The name Northrup was as the name of the devil in that household. Northrup’s operations included not only law and politics but latterly speculative and unprincipled ventures in business. A dying flash of his old fire woke in Judge Tiffany when he spoke as he felt about this young cub who had bitten his caressing hand.
Eleanor left the dinner table as soon as she had a fair excuse. She found herself unable to bear it. Had she remained, she must have defended him. But alone in her living room she look counsel of this treason and agreed in her heart with her uncle. The very manner in which he had done it—never a hint, never a preliminary mention of Northrup—appealed to her as the deepest treason of all.
The next evening, Bertram Chester had the superb impudence to call. Eleanor was alone in the house that night. She hesitated when229the maid brought in his name, then shook herself together and went out to face him.
He met her with an imitation of his old manner, an assumption that his change in employment would make no difference in his social relations with the Tiffanys. What words had she used to let him know her feelings? She could not remember now. But it had come hard; for the unmoral half of her perceptions was noting how big and beautiful he looked, how his blush, as of a stripling facing reproof, became him.
He pleaded, he stormed, he presumed, he passed in and out of sulky moods, he began to defend himself against the silent attack of her look. Why hadn’t he a right to do it? A man should look out for himself. But he’d have stayed and rotted with the old law office if he’d felt that she would take it that way.
“You mean more to me than success!” he said.
“No more of that, please!” she cried. After that cry, she fell into dignified silence as the only defence against the double attack from him and from the half of her that yearned for him. From her silence he himself230grew silent until, with a boyish shake of his shoulders—lovable but comically inadequate—he bade her good night.
“You’ll cool off!” he said at the door.
“Good bye,” she responded simply.
“No, it’s good night,” he answered.
She woke next morning with a sense of vacancy in heart and mind. Something was gone. She did nothing for a week but justify herself for calling that something back, or nerve herself to let it go.
On the one hand, her mind told her that he had done the ungrateful, the treasonable thing. It did not matter that he might have done it through mere lack of finer perception. That was part of his intolerability. On the other hand, her heart ran like a shuttle through a web of his smiles, his illuminations, the shiver, as from a weapon suddenly drawn, of his unexpected presence, even his look when he stood at the door to receive her final good bye. The woof of that web was the sense of vacancy in her—the unconquerable feeling that a thing by which she had lived was utterly lost.
And where would he go if she let him go? Ah, the inn was ready, the room was swept.231He would go inevitably to Kate Waddington. That would be hard to bear. Sense of justice was strong in Eleanor; she realized the ungenerosity of this emotion while she continued to harbor it. But was there not justice in it after all? Kate Waddington could grasp, could guide, only the worst part of him. Kate Waddington had in her no guidance for the better Bertram Chester, who must be in him somewhere. She hugged this justification to herself. Perhaps it was not right to let him go; perhaps her heart and her duty were as one.
A cock quail came out from the chapparal, saw her, and bobbed back; the feet of his flock rustled the twigs. Now he was raising his spring call—“muchacho!” “muchacho!” Clearer and slighter came the call of his mate—“muchacho!” “muchacho!” A ground squirrel shook the laurel-bush at her side, so that its buds brushed her shoulder. The cock quail came back into the pathway, slanted his wise head, plumed in splendor, to find whether she were friend or enemy, saw that she made no move, and fell to foraging among the leaves. She had sat so long and so quietly that the little people of the ground were accepting232her as part of the landscape. She began dimly to perceive these things, to take joy in them. And then they colored her mood.
What was she but a young, female thing, a vessel of life universal? What was her attraction toward Bertram Chester but a part of the great, holy force which made and moved hills, trees, the little people of hills and trees? What was she, to have resisted the impulse in her because of a few imperfections, a little lack of development in civilized morals?
Her perception of nature died away, but the slant which it had given her thoughts persisted.
When she felt and spoke as she had done that night in the Man Far Low, she was unwholesome, super-refined, super-civilized—she was proceeding by the hothouse morals which she had learned in books and in European studios. When she felt as she did on that first night under the bay tree, she was wholesome and eternally right.
How much greater in her, after all, if she had followed the call, had taken him for the man in him, to develop, to guide as a woman233may guide! Ah, by what token could she call him back?
Her gaze of meditation had been fixed on the road below. She had been half-consciously aware for some time of a figure which lost itself behind one of the hill-turns, reappeared again, became wholly visible in a band of late afternoon sunshine.
It was Bertram Chester. The vision came without any shock of first surprise. He had been so much part of her thoughts that it seemed the most natural presence in the world. He was swinging along the road in her direction, heaving his massive shoulders with every stride; he stopped, took off his cap, wiped his forehead with a motion which, seen even at that distance, conveyed all his masculinity, and strode on again.
Would he keep on along the road, or would he turn toward her up the Santa Eliza trail? And if he did keep on, would those roving eyes of his perceive her sitting there? Why not leave everything to that chance? If he looked up and saw her there on her rock, if he turned into the trail and passed her—that was a sign. She found herself, nevertheless,234humanly striving to cheat fortune and the gods by fixing all her mind and eyes upon him, as though she would hypnotize him into looking up.
But her mind and eyes had no power over him. He kept on with his even gait until he was lost behind the clump of trees which marked the branching of the trail. One chance was gone; she might not know the issue of the other until time and waiting informed her. How long before she should know? She crouched low on the rock and tried not to think.
The twigs and pebbles crunched under heavy feet; the branches shook and rustled; a blue sweater became visible in the shadows. She looked away.
“Well, I’ll be—eternally blowed!” His voice came out like an explosion. Much as she expected it, she started. When, after a moment, she dared look up, he stood over her.
“Are you going to run away?” he asked. His voice, with its ripple like laughter, showed that he expected nothing of the kind.
“No,” she answered, superfluously.
He seemed, then, to feel the necessity for explanation.235
“I hadn’t an idea—”
“Neither had I.” She broke in to anticipate his thought. Each was lying a little; and both knew it. She rushed to commonplaces.
“Uncle Edward and I are at Mrs. Goodyear’s bungalow over Sunday. It’s our last expedition out of town before we go down to the ranch.”
“Well, I must have had a hunch! I’m at the Masters ranch over Sunday. I got a freak idea to take a walk alone. It sure was a hunch!” Soft sentiment tinged his voice. She answered nothing.
“A hunch that you were alone here, nobody to interrupt—say, are you still sore on me?”
“I—I didn’t run away—”
“Oh, I knew you’d get over it. I think even the Judge will get over it. I don’t believe he’d care anyhow, if it wasn’t for his old grouch on Senator Northrup.”
“Perhaps. He’s said nothing—to me—”
“But it’s you I care about. Only you. I told you that and I mean it. I don’t want you to be sore—I’d go back and bury myself236in the old office for life if I thought it would make it different with you.”
“Would you, Bertram?”
He leaned close to her; she could feel his compelling eyes burning into her averted face. With one part of her, she was conscious that here was a crisis too great for her fully to feel; with the other part, she was aware that an ant, dragging a ridiculously heavy straw, was toiling up her rock.
Now he had her hand, which lay inert in his; now his arm was about her shoulder; and now he was speaking again:
“Can’t you? Can’t you stop looking down on me and believe I’m going to be good enough for you?”
She found power of speech.
“I never—I don’t think that I’m too good for you!” Her Rubicon was crossed. It was a strangely long time before he kissed her, but the silent interval after the kiss was stranger and longer still.
“Tell me what you plan for our future, Bertram, for I am afraid!” she whispered at length.
“It’s got to be a wait—that’s the risk you take with a comer. I’ll go on twice as fast237for you. What do you want—shall we tell about it, girlikins?”
“As you wish, Bertram.”
“I guess we’d better not, then—not until the old Judge gets his back down. Let’s have it just between me and my little girl.
“Say!” he added, the sentiment blowing out of his tone, “what was the matter, anyhow, that night on the restaurant balcony? Why did you turn me down then, and what made you so sore? I’ve never quite got to your thoughts, you know. But I’m going to!” He drew her closer. “Every one of them!”
She dropped her face on his shoulder.
“Ah, we’ve so many things to talk about, Bertram, and there’s so much time! I’ve been a girl that didn’t know her mind. Shan’t we let that rest now? Shan’t we be contented with what to-day has brought you and me?”
A film clouded his face.
“Yes—if you want it that way.”
“Hoo-ooo-ooo!” Clear and high, but quavering, a masculine voice was calling across the ridge. Eleanor sprang up.
“That’s Uncle Edward—it’s dinner-time—do238you want him to find you—you’d better go!”
He stood as though considering.
“All right. When are you going back?”
“We catch the seven train to-morrow afternoon at Santa Eliza.”
“Darn! I’d engaged to take on the five-ten at Las Olivas. I’ve half a notion to change and join you and see what the old man says—”
“No, Bertram, it’s better not. We’ll find a way. Go now!”
“You bet we will—good bye, girlikins!” He made no move to kiss her again; he turned and crashed down the trail.
Eleanor sped up the trail. Safe on the summit of the ridge, her secret hidden behind her, she answered the call. Then she dared look back at the figure vanishing in deep shadow below. Her expression and attitude, soft-eyed and drooping though they were, showed other emotions than unmixed happiness.