CHAPTER FOUR
For two days Roger Barton luxuriated in his escape from the law. At twenty-eight all experience had to him the nature of a material thing. It was to be grasped, used to his need, and when it failed him, dropped. He absorbed what his mind needed at the time and went on, as an animal leaves a food supply, its wants satisfied. University and law school had been the road to an education offered by a distant, childless relative with an ambition to have a profession in the family. Roger now wrote and told this relative he had given up the law, but the old man's irate answer did not disturb him in the least. He did not feel that he had been ungrateful or that he owed anything beyond the power of his own conscience to pay.
He had no definite plans for the future, except a general feeling that he was about to enter a real and interesting world. In this world there were fine, high things to do, and he would probably be poor, for John Lowell's office had convinced Roger that ideals do not pay and that nothing else is worth while. He took long tramps through the Marin hills, or lay on the sand at Land's End listening to the waves, and dreamed. In these dreams he thought often of Anne, standing on tiptoes before John Lowell. Now that he would probably never see her again he wished that he knew her better.
There could not be many women like Anne. She gave so fully of her time and interest, and yet there were unstirred depths beneath. Roger had always felt them in sudden, sad looks that passed across Anne's eyes, in the catching of the breath that marked an almost painfully keen interest, in small, quick motions and physical responses that he had accepted as mannerisms, but now saw as revelations of that courage and ideality that was Anne.
"It wasn't easy for her to confront that rotter, but she did it, the slip of a beauty-loving thing! How she must hate an office!"
And she would probably go into just such another in a few days, perhaps a worse one. She might already have found a place. While he lay on the sand, facing the full future, she might be bent above a machine, her fine enthusiasm leashed to the narrow demands of price lists, her physical rarity the object of some cad's coarse admiration. The thought sickened Roger when it first came to him clearly, an employer trying to touch Anne's hand, pressing her knee as he forced her to needless proximity for dictation; Anne, the hurt and quivering object of those advances he had seen other girls welcome with feigned annoyance and sidelong glances. He rose quickly to escape it, although he had come to his favorite cove with a book for the whole afternoon, and began walking again across the dunes. But the picture moved beside him.
"By Jove, it isn't right. A man has a hard enough time hanging to his principles, but a girl, a worth-while girl like that who has something beyond the idea of attracting men—it's a shame."
And he could do nothing to prevent it. He could not even call Anne a friend. He did not know where she lived.
"What a simp!" He stopped and kicked the sand viciously and marveled at his own stupidity. For six months he had worked with Anne and had never asked her to go anywhere with him, or tried to know her better. He knew now that he had looked forward in the mornings to seeing her, soft and small and silvery fair at her desk. He had snatched every opportunity to talk with her. And had made none! Seen so, now, from the outside, it was incredible but true. He knew nothing of Anne whatever. Nothing. She might even be engaged to some man, no better, under the veneer with which men, physically desirous, deceive girls, than John Lowell. Perhaps worse.
Roger strode on, his shoulders hunched now as they always hunched against obstruction and defeat. He would do something to prevent the waste of Anne. He would find Anne a place where that rare fineness would not be quite wasted in the mechanical routine of mercenary ambition. At least he could do that.
Anne quivering with hurt of ugliness, seeing the bay at night, the jewel-like islands, the stately white ferry boats, clinging to them for people she had never known! He would find a place for Anne and see her in it before he went out into the fullness of the future waiting for him. The possibility of Anne's engagement to a worthless man, Roger had finally to push aside, with reluctant concession to his own ideal of her. If Anne were engaged, the man would have to be worth while.
For a day and a half Roger sought a place for Anne. His own mail remained unopened, telephone messages unanswered. About twelve o'clock on the morning of the second day he found what he wanted. It was with a publishing firm and the duties involved a wider scope than the usual stenography. The surroundings were as pleasant as any office could offer, the hours easy, the firm established, conservative to a degree that had always rasped Roger's youthful enthusiasm, but satisfied him when he visioned the two white-haired, old-fashioned gentlemen as Anne's employers. At the end of half an hour he had forced the salary up five dollars a month and secured an option on the opening for two days.
From old Morrison he got Anne's address, and ten minutes later so astonished Hilda by his insistence that he must know Anne's whereabouts, that she forgot the definite orders to tell no one and described the Saunders home at Quincy so minutely that Roger could have found it blindfolded in the dark.
Three hours later Roger got off the train, the sole passenger for the windswept little wooden box upon the dunes. To the north and east the dun sand swelled to mounds and rounded hummocks, held from their eternal drifting by bunches of coarse, gray grass. Across the narrow bay, low hills, dense and black with chaparral, each guarding at its base a tiny white beach, ran westward to the sea, beating on the rocky coast in long, sobbing protest against the lashing wind.
In the vast, clean loneliness of sand and wind and sky, a fear that had touched him on the way up that Anne might think it strange for him to appear suddenly like this, dissolved. The silent emptiness absorbed the misunderstanding of motive, and Roger knew that if Anne did not wish the position she would not think him intrusive. He easily found the half-obliterated wagon-road Hilda had described and took it across the dunes.
As the front gate creaked on its sagging hinges, Barbara Saunders rose from the floor, where she and Anne had been trying to force a faded blue dimity to contain a yard more material than it had ever had.
"I simply will not wear the thing as it is. Janet can say what she likes—she doesn't care what she wears—but I've been to six Quarterlies in it—and I've reached my limit."
The gate slammed and Barbara turned to the window.
"Anne! It's a man!"
Anne looked up, still puzzling over the impossibilities of the faded dimity. "Do you know, Bab, I believe if we ripped the whole thing and turned the top to the bottom and gored it, we could take all the scraps left over and——"
"Come here," Bab whispered as if the person below could hear through the glass. "He doesn't look like an agent. Who on earth——"
Anne came and stood beside her. With nose pressed to the glass she could just see the top of Roger's hat. A loud knock echoed through the house.
"In a hurry, rather, isn't he? Who——" Bab turned. "Why! Anne! Do you know him?"
Before the burning self-consciousness in Anne's eyes, Bab stepped back.
"Will—will—you open the door? Yes, I know him. It's Mr. Barton. He—used to be in the same office."
Barbara's sallow cheeks flushed and her eyes scorned Anne's insincerity. For five nights Anne had let her go on, in the dark intimacy of the same room, piling up the mass of her small perplexities, the annoying efforts at adjustment between herself and Janet and her mother. And all the time Anne had harbored a romance. Anne was not the small, shy cousin, so different from Belle, so like themselves in spite of her daily contact with the great world of business. Anne knew men. When deprived for a few days of her society they came long distances to see her.
"Very well, I'll open the door. But don't be long, please. Janet's cleaning out the chicken house and looks like a fright. My other waist isn't ironed and mother's asleep."
She went. Anne heard her open the door and lead Roger down the creaking hall to the dining-room, a bare, dilapidated room, with sagging floor beyond the skill of the manless household to repair, and woodwork painted streakily by Bab and Janet.
Anne tried to hurry, but her cold fingers fumbled. And even when, at last, the hooks were hooked, the hairpins all in place, and Anne stood with her hand on the knob, it seemed impossible to turn it.
Why had he come?
Was Belle right? How had she known?
Roger Barton looked up as the rear door unexpectedly opened and Anne came toward him, with just the degree of welcome to express her surprise, and the exact amount of pleasure at the sight of a friend. Her greeting angered and disappointed him. Anne thought she did it very well.
"Hunting?" She tossed the word off lightly, as if she had many male friends all deeply interested in the sport.
"No," Roger snapped, annoyed at this assumption of social manner in the stark, unfriendly room, with its stained walls and broken floor. "No. I didn't bring a gun. Besides, it's not duck season yet. I never heard of any other game on the marshes, did you?"
"No. I don't think I have." Anne flushed.
Her embarrassment at discovery did not soften Roger; he had been too hurt by her greeting.
"No. I have no excuse except one you may think presumptuous. I heard, accidentally, of a place I thought might suit you. But you'll have to let them know by Tuesday, to-morrow if possible. It's with Wilmot & Brown—twenty-five a week."
Anne tried to look as if she were seriously considering, but she had scarcely heard. She had not thought of this and now she saw so clearly it could have been the only reason for his coming. He had a deep, human kindliness for all misfortune, and she had been unfortunate. She, a working girl, had given up her place. He had found her another almost instantly.
"Thank you. It was very kind of you. But I'm not sure I'm going back to town directly. My cousins," the word contained the broken floor, the scratched wall, the worn furniture, "want me to stay for the rest of the month. I may do it."
Through the window she saw Janet wheeling a refuse-filled barrow from the chicken run. Bent against the wind, she moved, almost doubled above the vile load. Bab followed with a pitchfork. They disappeared behind the barn. Anne looked straight at Roger:
"There are no men on the place and the school vacations are the only time my Cousin Janet gets enough leisure to do anything. We have been talking about fixing the fences and mending this floor. If you'd come to-morrow instead of to-day you'd have found us calcimining."
Roger's eyes came back to Anne, flushed, defiant, so unmistakably proud and hurt.
"I didn't mean it intrusively," he said quietly. "I just couldn't stand the thought of you taking any old thing—another rotter like Lowell, perhaps—where anything but a machine is wasted. Please believe——"
A sound from beyond the thin partition struck him to silence. It was a high, querulous voice calling, "B—a—b."
Anne started. In another moment Aunt Harriet would come trailing in, her frail hands moving gracefully to insure safety, her sightless blue eyes staring before her. It was years since Harriet Saunders had talked to a city man, a professional man, a man worthy of her own Harrington culture, a culture guarded through long years with Hilda Mitchell's brother, kept undimmed to hand down to "the girls." In another moment she would be there, winding about him the snake-like coils of her selfish monopolization.
"Would you mind if we went outside?" Anne whispered, partly because she could so convey the need for instant action, partly to bear out the quickly invented reason. "Aunt Het is rather an invalid and she has been asleep. If no one answers she'll drop off again, but if she hears us——"
"Certainly," Roger whispered back, and they tiptoed from the room together, out through the nearer kitchen to the yard. And there Anne paused. Where could she take him? There was no spot on that windblown dryness, no garden nook. For a moment she thought of the barn, a favorite place of her own. But it was so overtoned; herself and Roger Barton, who had come to tell her of a position, sitting in the hay!
"It does seem inhospitable to drag you out on a day like this," she began, but Roger cut her short.
"I like gray days, and it may be an extraordinary taste but I love the wind—in the open. Not city wind filled with dust, like the dead hopes of people blowing in your face, but clean, open wind like this."
Anne's face lighted with the pleasure of a shared sensation.
"So do I. It seems to blow all the tangles out of the world and give every one a chance to begin again—simply."
"I guess—maybe—that is it—only I hadn't thought of it as a beginning again. It always makes me feel courageous, like plowing straight on through everything, just as it is."
Anne did not look toward him instantly, but she felt him very sharply, so much taller than herself, broad, with that courageous, crisp hair, and his clear blue eyes that could look so different according to his mood. They would be wide and blue now, with a light in them as if Roger were turning it upon this "everything" through which the wind gave him the courage to plunge. He would be looking straight ahead, his chin up, ready. Anne turned a little, and he was looking exactly like that. She felt that she knew him very well, and then, that he was rushing into the wind, away from her, leaving her behind.
"I think you will, because—I don't believe you're ever afraid, are you?"
"No—I don't believe I am. You see," he seemed to be feeling his way carefully through this new experience of dissecting his own impulses, "there is really nothing to be afraid of in the world. Of course there is sickness, but when you're well you don't go about fearing a possible illness; there's hard work, but that's fun."
"There's poverty."
"Yes, I know there is, but, somehow, the poorer I am the freer I feel."
"But it's so ugly—always skimping and twisting and thinking about money. It—it's stifling."
"But you don't stay in a state of poverty for long," Roger laughed. "You get busy getting out of it. But while it lasts there's something exhilarating in being broke and not knowing what's going to happen. You know how it feels on a clear, cold, sunny morning of north wind, when the bay's all white-caps and you can almost see the windows of every house in Oakland? The air seems more alive than at any other time, and everybody goes round with his head up, smiling. Of course the feeling wouldn't last forever, but, for a time—it's like being suddenly freed from all binding restrictions, being lifted from a groove and thrown suddenly out into new possibilities—like being picked up by this wind and carried—off to China. There's something safe—and depressing—about a steady income."
Anne tried to smile in return. But the tissue-wrapped allotments of her childhood were too vivid.
"I don't think it's the having nothing that exhilarated you, it's the excitement of getting the next thing."
Roger stopped and the wind wrapped them about. "I never thought of it that way," he said slowly, "but perhaps it was."
They went on again in a moment, their relation somehow readjusted. Roger felt masculine and dense; Anne protective and feminine. Roger felt her sensitive and intuitive reaction to hidden impulses, and she his need to be looked after.
Anne became conscious of this readjustment first and tried to find an impersonal path back to the reason for having come out at all, but could not. She grew gradually so conscious of the physical motion of walking that she felt she was obeying a natural law as inescapable as the force of gravity. She would put one foot before the other until they had reached the moaning sea two miles away.
By a tremendous effort she stopped. And then the alternative of going back to the house and watching Aunt Het's python-like embrace of Roger in general conversation, emerged from subconsciousness.
"There's an old Indian graveyard back a little; would you like to see it?" Without waiting his agreement, Anne turned into a depression between the dunes and led the way. "When I was a little girl, I used to think this was the most wonderful place in the world. We used to dig up beads and arrow heads and invent the most conventional Indian stories about braves and princesses."
Roger did not answer. The wind swept across the dune tops, leaving them in the warm seclusion of a sandy depression. Anne went lightly just before him, small and silvery blonde, her arms white and quiet by her sides, no physical effort disturbing her swift, quiet way over the shifting sand. A sudden turn brought them to it on a slope above the dunes. Anne stopped and waited for him. Together they climbed the short distance to the small square of parched earth, with its broken fence, once whitewashed, now peeled by sun and wind to leprous patches, like the little wooden crosses that marked the mounds within. At the corners four gaunt gum trees sighed and bent, chieftains wailing the degradation of the Christian burials below. Anne passed through an opening in the fence and Roger followed, tense now with the realization of Anne, of the moaning trees, of the wind searching over the earth, and, far away, the sea crying its everlasting plaint to the rocks.
Up one row and down another they went, Anne trying to read the rain-washed names on the tiny crosses. "You see, many of them were half-breeds, and Father Crowley was the only friend they really had among the whites, and so he managed to baptize most of them and bury them at last with the rites of the Church. I wonder what they really felt while he annointed them."
"Like fakirs, I suppose," Roger said quickly, and moved a little nearer to Anne.
She shook her head. "No, I don't think they felt like that. They're all gone now except one or two, but when I was a little girl there were a lot scattered through these hills, and I knew some of them. One was very old, wrinkled like an oak leaf, with the most piercing black eyes. I used to feel as if he had died, all but his eyes. We called him William Black, but he had a wonderful Indian name we never could pronounce and he would never tell what it meant. Most often, when we asked, he would grunt and walk away, but once he told me that his name was dead, and if he told it, it would come back and kill him. I didn't know what he meant, but now I think he was sad and ashamed of his people and despised us too much to even tell us what he had once meant among them. He was the only Indian I ever heard of who refused to be baptized. Nevertheless, when he died Father Crowley buried him over there. It was really just on the edge of the consecrated ground then, but one night the fence in that corner was broken down, and when they put it up William Black was outside. I think the others were very proud of William, but not so strong as he."
"Very likely," Roger muttered, and stepped nearer still.
She felt him so close that the slightest motion on her part would touch him, strong and alive against this eternal sleep of a dead race.
"On—on—a clear day—you can see the sea—from here, and the spindrift—high as the cliffs—in a rough surf." Her arm, so slim, so white, like a wisp of the fog caught in form, pointed toward the muffled calling.
Leaning over her, Roger's hand closed gently on the cool flesh. He drew her slowly round and they looked silently at each other.
"I think I have always loved you," Roger said at last, like a child, whispering a confession strange to itself, born of the tender knowing in its mother's eyes. He did not understand this thing himself, revealed with such sudden swift quietness, but the earth understood, and the fog, and that old, old race asleep. As if the mist had parted and revealed it to him, so this love was revealed, something concrete in that wind-filled emptiness, something definite and shapeable, a thing he could cup in both hands and offer to Anne.
It had come. Belle had been right and so utterly wrong; Belle, with her cheap experience, her world-eaten deductions from sickness and disease. Roger Barton loved her. The wonder of it held Anne to the exclusion of her own feeling.
Roger dropped her hand and Anne looked up quickly.
"I'm pretty clumsy, Miss Mitchell, but——" the pounding in his throat choked him. A piercing shaft of joy shot through her.
"You're—you're not clumsy at all. And I—I would like to marry you very much."
Sudden awkwardness descended upon them. They looked shyly at each other, Anne waiting for Roger to draw her close and kiss her, Roger a little frightened.
Wasn't he going to kiss her? Chill crept over Anne. And then he was drawing her to him. The surface of her body broke into tiny pricks of excitement, triumph, awe. She could feel his breath on her face, see the inevitable approach of his lips. Now he was too near to see. His lips were on hers. Suddenly, driven by the need to reach through to something beyond them both, Anne returned their pressure. Roger felt their clinging with faint surprise, deep tenderness and awe.