CHAPTER EIGHT
The next day The Kitten joined Vicky in the country.
Twice in the next three Herrick went to the phone to call Jean, and hung up in the very act of asking for the number.
"You can never make her care...." The Kitten knew him as no woman had ever known him, and he hated her for this knowledge.
He went nowhere and saw no one. Through the lonely dinners, and long evenings in the studio, Herrick worked himself into a fury that urged him on and held him back. His anger spread from The Kitten to Jean, to all women. He was sick of them, weary of the power they had always had over him. He loathed the women who had yielded to him and the women who had not. He hated his own inability to live his life independent of them. If no woman had ever crossed his life, interfering in its plan, destroying the dreams he had dreamed in those last years of the Connecticut farm, he would long ago have written something worth while. He would have succeeded as Freeman and Harcourt and the others had done. He would be free of The Bunch in their hectic fight for forgetfulness. His life would be ordered with calm poise. He had it in him. Jean felt it. Could she even yet make him what he might have been? Like an intermittent fever the conflict raged. Then, through sheer exhaustion, it dropped away. Herrick wondered what it had all been about and went again to call for Jean at the closing hour. She was not there. Two weeks before Jean had lost her place.
The next day they walked again in the hills. Jean was whiter and quieter than he had ever seen her. The two weeks had tried her nerves almost beyond control. The last to come on the library staff, a reduced appropriation demanded that Jean be the first to go. And, although she had taken no joy in the work itself, she had been happy in the security of having work to do. Now, after two weeks of following every advertisement to its end, only to discover she had none of the experience they all demanded, the old horror of teaching had come back, and Jean was almost ill. The new baby cried incessantly and the house was more cluttered than ever. Tom had at last been forced into a job at a ridiculous salary and from morning till night Elsie predicted starvation for herself and her "two helpless little ones." Through it all Martha Norris moved, armored by prayer to gentle acceptance of these petty annoyances that Jean felt closing about her forever.
Her independence weakened by fear for the future, Jean was another person and Herrick thrilled at the new Jean, this unsure, rather desperate Jean. She felt his strength and experience, so much greater than her own, and his understanding and sympathy seemed to relieve her from the necessity of maintaining the silence she had mapped out as a shield against the atmosphere of her home. For the first time she told him something of that atmosphere, of her childhood, not as poor and bare as his, but filled with the same rebellion for something whose name she did not know. Much of what Jean sketched in bare outline, Herrick could fill in. It told him much that had puzzled him. He knew her better than she knew herself.
As Jean sat, throwing pebbles into the almost dry creek at their feet, he knew her eyes were full of tears. He took her hands in his and forced her to look up.
"Don't, Jean. It hurts me terribly to see you unhappy. Something will turn up. It always does. I've been there too, you know."
Jean smiled through her tears. "I know I'm an idiot. But I do loathe the idea of teaching and yet it's the only thing I suppose I'm fitted for. I mean I have a diploma, an actual proof on paper, that I've been through the preparatory mill and I can wave it in their faces. I shall kill the next person who asks me if I've had experience."
"Well, don't begin with me, please. You're positively glaring."
Jean answered his laugh and felt better.
"Because if you do you'll eliminate my valuable assistance, and I think maybe I see light. How would you like to go on a paper?"
"What!"
"Oh, I'm not suggesting that you edit one, but there are several things of lesser importance, things that don't need more than an ability to write good English. If you have a sense of color, so much the better. I think perhaps you have. You'd rather like it in some ways, especially at first, but I don't think you'd ever be a howling success. You're not what they call 'a born newspaper woman.'"
"I don't believe I'm a born anything." Jean made no effort to still the quavering of her voice. She felt as if she had been struggling along a hard road by herself and some one had suddenly picked her up and carried her to a safe spot.
"Nonsense. Of course you are. Only it takes some of us a long time to find out. Would you really like to try it?"
"I should like it more than anything I can think of. How do I go about it? Just walk in and say: 'I'm not a born newspaper woman, but please give me a job'?"
"Hardly, though it might not be such a bad way. Anything that startles an editor looks like ability to him. But we'll be less original than that. Thompson of theChronicleis going to start a new Sunday section and he's looking for some one. He wants some one with 'a new angle,' 'fresh viewpoint,' 'punch,' etc. These things to a real editor are like the golden calf to the ancient peoples. He grovels before them. His life is spent in a mad search for them."
"But I have no newspaper angle and no viewpoint at all."
"Patience, neophyte. That's only another name for a perfect greenhorn, with intelligence and an ability to manufacture, enthusiasm for the editor's pet schemes. Do you think you can do that, Jean?"
"I could drown in enthusiasm, genuine, hysterical enthusiasm over anything that would save me from school teaching. If it gave me enough salary to move mummy to the city and make it an eternal impossibility for her ever to ask Tom and Elsie to stay five minutes, I'd drop dead of sheer exuberance."
"Under that condition I may not speak to Thompson. But if you promise to continue in this life I'll see him the first thing in the morning and let you know by afternoon. I'm not sure what it is. You may have to do Household Hints or Beauty articles or Society notes. You may develop into the greatest Lady Teazle of the United States and have the New York papers sending for you."
"Then, when my biography is written you'll be mentioned as having given me my 'first chance.'"
"Is that the only capacity in which I figure in your life?" Under the banter Herrick's eyes looked deep into hers. Jean blushed.
Again, when he left her, Herrick kissed her. This time her repulsion was less. Jean was poignantly ashamed that it was there at all. To the dead black and white of Jean's logic there was something wrong in feeling as near as she felt to Herrick, and at the same time sensing that slight inner revulsion at the touch of his lips on hers.