CHAPTER FOUR
Exactly at half past five Herrick came. The thick hair had been freshly cut, and he wore a suit that Jean had not seen before. He looked young and very happy and full of joy in life. As they came down the library steps and joined the after-matinée crowds, it seemed to Jean that Herrick stood out from other men, bigger, cleaner, stronger. There was something in him, burning below the flesh, that whitened and sharpened him, so that the lines which were sometimes dull and heavy when he bent intently over the books across the table, were now finely cut. He walked beside her as if he were walking lightly on springy ground, and the memory came back to Jean how, the first time she had seen him, she had thought of a gull, a strong, white gull, poised in flight. It was impossible to believe that it was only two weeks ago, and that she had seen him, in all, not more than seven or eight times.
Herrick made no effort at conversation as they threaded their way through the crowds. He was not at all sure of his ground with Jean, for his first interest had deepened in the two weeks to an intensity that surprised him. To be interested in a woman who was not obviously pretty, whose life lay well within the circle that The Bunch called the Outland, who made no effort to attract him, who never, by the slightest feminine trick, tried to rouse his interest, a woman who had been through college and was earning her own living and yet had something cloistered about her. She piqued Herrick's curiosity. One by one he had seen his small efforts drop like spent arrows against the wall of her sincere but unemotional interest.
"She's either the most subtle thing that God ever made, or else——" Herrick did not know what else. But he would find out.
When they had left the more crowded streets behind, Herrick stopped and looked at his watch.
"It's only six, and it's not much good getting to Giuseppe's before seven. What shall we do? Go round to Chinatown and have tea, or would you like to go up to Flop's studio? He's the father of The Bunch, you know, and maybe you'd feel as if you knew him better if you saw some of his stuff first."
He stood looking down at her with a smile that consulted only her preference, and showed none of his own eagerness that she should choose the latter. When Franklin Herrick was trying to break through the reserves of a woman, he looked like Sir Galahad going to battle. It always filled the woman with a rush of tenderness, and a longing to stand for something fine and real in his life.
"Besides, I'd like to show you some of Flop's stuff for its own sake, and we won't get a chance after dinner, when the whole Bunch is there. We are a noisy lot, Miss Norris. You must be prepared for anything."
"Oh, I can make a lot of noise myself. And I'd like awfully to see the pictures."
"This way, then. We'll go down through The Coast, if you don't mind. It's quicker."
His tone apologized for the street into which he turned, in a way that made Jean want to laugh at the idea of her needing protection, and at the same time delighted her. She had never been in this part of the city before, and she looked about her with interest.
Skirting the edge of Chinatown, beyond the boundaries of the big bazaars, they touched the poorer fringe of the Latin quarter, where dirty black-eyed babies tumbled in dark doorways, and tired women with bundles of food under their shawls hurried by, dragging hungry, screaming children by the hand. Here the narrow streets struggled up steep hillsides, as if in a forlorn hope of reaching quiet above. Everywhere was dust and noise and the harsh voices of men screaming at each other in the rough Sicilian dialect.
Then down through the sordid section that lies between the White World and the Yellow, where mean, gray houses cling hopelessly together, like the poor for comfort and outcasts for respectability. Where the tides of Barbary Coast wash the world beyond, Herrick paused. Then he plunged in.
It was early and The Coast had not yet come to life, but to Jean it was filled with the rumblings of the swelling tide. A drunken sailor lurched from a dance-hall. A mechanical piano ground out a popular rag. A painted woman with sodden, indifferent eyes looked from a window and laughed shrilly. Other women, powdered to a deathly whiteness, turned to stare after Jean and Herrick. Their eyes were sometimes scornful, sometimes curious. When they brushed close to Jean she felt herself turn a little cold and sick.
Once when she was a small child, while playing in the garden Jean had accidentally plunged her foot through the planking of an unused well and had felt the cold blackness sucking up. For months after she had had a terror of that end of the garden, and could feel the bottomless blackness drawing her. Now the same feeling reached out from these painted women, and Jean drew a little closer to Herrick. There was something horrible and black and hidden, the same black oozing mud that lay at the bottom of the old well. These men and women who moved and talked like herself and Herrick were down there, crawling about. She drew nearer still to Herrick. For the first time he touched her, slipping his hand under her elbow.
"We'll soon be out of it."
Then he began to talk of his work at the library. He had another week of it before he would be through.
"And I'll be glad of it in many ways. If I had to go on much longer digging that dry rot out of books I'd quit my job."
"But in a way you put life in it, rearrange it, make it your own."
Herrick laughed. Like the echo of a memory Jean's repugnance to that high, thin laugh returned. But it seemed trivial now that she really knew him.
"There's nothing to make one's own in the whole business. It hasn't any permanence. Not a scrap of reality. It is notmywork."
Herrick had said this so often that he believed it, and his voice was bitter with reproach. "You see it's not so bad so long as you don't want with your whole soul to do something else. It's the knowing and not being able to get at it that's hell."
Jean remembered her hatred of teaching and the misery of that last college year. And she had only known what she hated and not at all what she wanted. What was it that this man wanted so much that the thought of it changed his voice and made him seem suddenly older? She longed to ask, but felt that he had expected her to understand and she did not want to fail him. The next moment he answered it himself.
"Several years ago I mapped out a novel and I've never had time to start it. I can't work sneaking moments. I'd have to have a straight sweep—and so I don't start it. But it gnaws there just the same."
"'Gnaws.' That's exactly what things do when they have no outlet."
He turned quickly. "Do you write, too?"
"No."
"But there's something you want to do. You couldn't understand if there weren't."
Jean shook her head. "It's mostly concerned with not wanting to do things. I have no special talent."
"How do you know? Have you tried anything?"
The irritation at her modesty was flattering. Jean flushed.
"No. But I have no faith in hidden genius. I'm twenty-four, you know, and it would have showed before this."
Herrick felt that she would have confessed to thirty-four just as readily. Her frankness repelled him.
"I don't know about that. I don't believe that we all instinctively know what we want to do. Most of us have to live some time and be hurt a lot before we find out very much about ourselves."
"I suppose we do," she said humbly.
Herrick thrilled at the note in Jean's voice. But he went on in the same serious way as if he were being forced almost against his judgment to let Jean into his confidence.
"For years the longing to get things down on paper haunted me, but I only knew that I was miserable and felt stifled. It wasn't till I came to the city, here, that the puzzle suddenly fitted into place." He stopped and made a quick sweeping gesture with both hands. "Wouldn't it be great to get all this, all the heat and noise and mud and life, to get the whole hot, seething pain on paper! God, what a picture!"
Something came into Jean's throat and hurt.
"It would be glorious." She felt that Herrick had been granted a fineness of spiritual vision she could never hope for. It coarsened her that she had seen only the dirt and squalor of the vice, while the man beside her had grasped something beneath that linked it up with reality even as they both knew it, a kind of cosmic unity too finely toned for her ears.
"You must do it. Youmust. Don't let an impulse like that die. It's worth any sacrifice, anything. Can't you really get at it?"
Herrick looked quickly away. "Perhaps," he said shortly, "some day, if the conditions are right, I may."
He did not take Jean's arm again and in a few moments they came to an old loft building with a dark, yawning entry.
"Here we are." They turned into the blackness, and Jean felt it close about them.
"It's a rickety old hole, but Flop would suffocate any place else. Perhaps I'd better take your hand. The stairs aren't all they might be and you don't know where the broken places are."
Jean gave him her hand and they went up through the blackness together. At the bottom of the last short flight they stopped.
"Flop usually lights the lantern. He must have forgotten. Just wait a moment." He left her and ran lightly up ahead. Jean could not see him, but she could feel him looming above her on the landing, and hear the low rustle of his clothes as he felt hurriedly through them for a match. She had never before been so alone with a man.
"Oh, shucks!"
The word dropped on the tensity of Jean's mood like a drop of ice water. She wished he had said "damn." It was like hearing a lion say "Tut!"
"I guess I'll have to lead you. I haven't a match and there are none on the ledge. Flop must be out."
They went up the few remaining steps, along a narrow hall to a door at the end of a passage. Herrick turned the handle and stepped back to let Jean enter. But Jean did not move.
"Oh," she cried softly. And again: "Oh."
"I'm glad you like it," he whispered after a moment, and drew her gently across the threshold and closed the door.
Every cent that Flop had made for the last three years, and much that he had borrowed, had gone to the fitting of this room. The walls were of gray, satin-smooth eucalyptus. Soft, worn rugs lay before great couches piled with pillows. Along the west wall, wide windows ran the length of the room, from the rough stone fireplace to the glass door that opened on a tiny iron balcony. All the windows were shaded now with heavy green curtains run on silken ropes. The afterglow of a scarlet sunset came in rose and pale gold through the curtain openings, and lay in pools of light on the dull rugs.
Herrick's hand took Jean's without pressure, so that it seemed part of the quiet beauty of the room, and they crossed to the window. The hills beyond the Bay etched themselves in faint purple and amethyst on the paling sky. They stood silent, looking out across the low roofs, to the Bay, with its wall of hills and the white ferryboats moving majestically in the dignity of distance.
At last Jean turned back to the room.
"One could do great things here," she said slowly as if thinking aloud, unconscious of Herrick's presence.
"Yes. One could do great things,ifone were happy."
The emphasis drew her attention and she looked at him.
"Isn't he happy? It doesn't seem possible, quite, to live in a room like this and not be happy."
"Flop? I don't know. As happy or unhappy as every one else, I suppose."
Herrick's eyes sought the Bay again. She was impossible as a grown woman. She was more like a boy, with her annoying way of looking straight into his eyes, and her silly, impersonal interpretations. No doubt she thought that all Flop needed was a room like this, and twenty-four hours a day, to paint masterpieces. And Herrick thought of all the love and hate, the reckless joy and pain that had been born and killed among the soft rugs and old tapestries and small, pure marbles.
"I don't know that it matters so much, after all, whether we are happy or not, as long as we arealive."
Jean spoke with difficulty, for Herrick's sudden turning away made her feel that she had really known him only two weeks, and knew nothing whatever of his life. In the shadow of the green curtains, his face looked whiter and the soft curve of his lips hard, as if he were remembering something that hurt very much. A tremendous necessity to comfort him swept Jean into speech, to make him see that nothing mattered except being alive as he must be, not hampered and swaddled with the crowding of uncongenial personalities. She contrasted Herrick with his ability and definite ambition and friends, with the long, dead evenings and the killing Sundays with Tom and Elsie and her mother.
"'To see Life clearly and see it whole,'" quoted Jean, and her voice shook slightly with the force of her own conviction.
The blood rushed into Franklin Herrick's eyes, and he shook his head as if to clear them from the mist. Again he felt that Jean was eluding him, slipping away from the niche in which he had just placed her. But this time she was flitting ahead of him, tantalizing in her promised capacity to feel. He wanted to put his hands on her strong shoulders and force something into those clear gray eyes, filled now with confusion at her own unusual enthusiasm.
"We'll straighten out all the philosophy of the world some other night," he said abruptly. "But now I want to show you Flop's latest. And, whether he's happy or not, it's great stuff."
Herrick brought the canvas from the easel, propped it on a table and lit a small bronze sconce, which he held so that the light fell on the picture and on Jean's head.
From the shadow of a dusky, smudged wood, the nude figure of a woman stood out with startling whiteness. At her feet a little brook ran over white pebbles. There was a feeling of moonlight among the trees, as if somewhere a full moon were shining in the warm night. But the little brook, deep in the heart of the wood, was cold, and the woman longed and at the same time dreaded to enter it. The warm blackness of the trees held her, like the embrace of an unseen lover. But the cool voice of the brook called steadily and one felt sure that in the end she would go. She was bent a little forward as if listening to the brook, so that the curves of her slim body, the small, white breasts, partly veiled in the red-gold hair that fell about her shoulders, leaned into the darkness.
"She's alive," Herrick whispered, and going to the canvas passed his hand lightly from the red-gold hair to the small, white feet deep in the damp grass.
The blood flooded Jean's face. Instantly Herrick was angry with himself, but the call had been too strong. He covered his anger with surprise as he looked quietly at Jean.
"Come. I want to show you the rest of the things, too."
Holding the sconce high, he moved about the room, pointing out his favorites among Flop's work.
Jean followed, making flat comments on the things he showed her. She wanted desperately to go back to the first picture, and discuss it in a rational manner, for there was nothing in it to shock or repel. It was too perfect for that. Again she felt that she had been crude and childish, just as she had been about the painted women and the sordid ugliness of The Coast, and that she had fallen short of Herrick's estimate and disappointed him. She wanted to say something, but did not know in what words to open the subject nor how to make Herrick understand without. Slowly they made the rounds of the studio and came again to the glass door opening on the balcony. Herrick put out the light.
"It's only a quarter to and it won't take five minutes to get there. Shall we stay here or go and wait for the rest in the restaurant?"
"I'd rather wait here."
Jean hoped that some opportunity would offer to correct what must be Herrick's impression of her, but none came. Herrick sat silent.
As she rested against the pile of cushions Herrick had arranged, and watched the quick western twilight blot the world to night, Jean felt as if for the twenty-four years of her life she must have been fast asleep. All about her men and women had been loving and hating and misunderstanding and hurting each other, and she had been studying books like a child. She had used up much energy and bitterness longing for the moment when she would get out into life and earn her own living, make one of the army that fought its way back and forth each morning and night on the boats. And all the time the real thing was not that at all. The real thing was human relationship, the relations between men, and between women, and between women and men. There were thousands of sensations and cross currents and impressions. There was ambition, not vague ambition like hers, but a focused force like Freeman's and Harcourt's and Herrick's. There was struggle and disappointment and the pain that so evidently Herrick had known, and Flop too, not the petty annoyance of Elsie's whining, but sweeping pain that left one bigger. There was loneliness even in a glorious room like this and pleasant interludes of chance meetings with kindred souls.
The wonderful romance of friendship gripped Jean. From the ends of the earth two people, of different tradition, it might be of different race, met accidentally and their lives forever after were different. From the silent dark streets below, all the personalities of all the thousands she had never seen, came close and touched her, so that she felt that in some hidden way she was being influenced by every one of them. There was nothing in life insignificant, nothing unimportant, nothing unrelated to the whole.
Every one was bound to every one else by achievement and encouragement and understanding. Each of these was a definite thing, like a thread, made up of millions of minute strands, passing glances, chance handclasps, too fine to be caught and held in words and yet each so strong that it could bear the weight of many disappointments.
And there was the web of the whole with its radiating threads of the bigger social relationships, made from these fine, thin filaments of everyday occurrences.
She thought of herself and of Pat, of Tom and Elsie and her mother, each weaving his own pattern. Pat wove carelessly with whatever thread came to hand, singing as she wove, while Tom and Elsie fought over the threads that broke under their ceaseless nagging and left the pattern torn and frayed. And Martha, so sharply did the figure of a weaver present itself to Jean, that she saw as clearly as if her mother had been there, the patient figure sitting before its loom, weaving only the dark gray threads, gently thrusting aside with small, tired hands the golds and reds. And so vital did the need come to Jean of choosing the best threads, weaving the most glorious pattern she could, that she clenched her hands and whispered aloud:
"I will do it. I will."
"Do what?" Herrick bent to her and took both hands in his.
Jean laughed. "Did I really say it aloud?"
"You certainly did, whatever it was that youwill. What is it?"
"I'm afraid I couldn't put it into words. It was just the feel of being up here above all those dark streets and—and——"
"'And all about with wings the darkness stirred.' Was that it?"
"I expect it was."
Herrick jumped to his feet and swung her to the floor beside him.
"My, but you're strong!"
They stood smiling for a moment. Then he moved to the door.
"We'll be late after all. But I guess I was dreaming too."