CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Late in December the rains set in. Heavy gray clouds hung low over the city's hills, pressing all the joy and color from life, flattening the world to a monotone of black umbrellas.
At New Year there was an interval of pleasant weather and then more rain, steady, deliberate, endless rain. The street cars were crowded with damp people, all trying to keep as far as possible from each other, all peevish and nervous under the strain. Gutters broke and streams of water ran everywhere. The streets were rivers of thick, black mud and buildings reeked with the odor of woolen clothing drying in steam heat. From the middle of January to the middle of February the world woke in the morning to rain and went to bed at night with the rain steadily pouring in long, gray lines from the leaden sky.
Against the background of the rain, Jean's days ran together in a blur. She created a false enthusiasm and, under this self-imposed stimulus, got so many words on paper. Sometimes she wondered how long she would be able to keep it up. She thought now more and more often of Pat steadily plodding in her mountain school, and of her mother, trotting through each day's task, every crevice of her life filled with the knowledge that she could do no more than she was doing, nor do it better. Most of all she thought of Dr. Mary, buoyant and vital among her people, holding to her purpose and working toward it surely. She wondered whether Dr. Mary would remember her if she went.
There had been no mention at all of the night that Herrick had stood long at the window with his face in his arms. The thing that had been killed had been decently buried, so decently buried that it might never have existed at all. Herrick worked spasmodically on a short story, but he rarely worked in the evenings. They often went to the theater, and at long intervals to Flop's. Once Jean had quite enjoyed herself and they had gone again the following Sunday, but the out-of-town visitors had gone away and it was duller, more noisy, less sincere than ever.
Through the four worst Sundays of rain Herrick wrote and when he had finished went over the result with Jean. They haggled each point with a desperate show of interest. When Jean said a scene did not ring true, she explained very elaborately and carefully and Herrick listened and argued and in the end usually agreed. Jean often thought of Robert as some one who had died far away in the jungle.
In March the fury of the rain lessened, wore itself out in a succession of damp, drizzling days almost harder to stand than the steady downpour. Then the hills stood out once more softly green and clear against the blue sky. With the coming of spring, Herrick gave up his pretense of winter. The unfinished short story went into the waste basket. Jean was glad and the tension of her nerves relaxed.
It was a lovely day in May, when Jean's work brought her close to home about one o'clock and she decided to do the writing in the studio instead of going back to the noisy office. As she opened the door she pushed back an envelope of the gray paper that Pat used. Jean pounced on it and without waiting to take off her things, tore it open. There were only a few sentences on a half sheet:
"Will be down on the sixteenth.
"Train gets in about three. Don't meet me or upset your day in any way.
"Leave the key where I can find it. I like doormats best."
Pat was coming.
For the moment Jean could grasp nothing else. Pat was coming. She would be here in that very room. They would talk. It was years since they had talked. No, not years. Not quite two yet, since she and Pat had sat together and swung their feet from the sink board of the Girls' Rest Hall, and she had been almost hysterical because there was nothing in the world but teaching. Jean's eyes filled with tears and she dabbed angrily at them.
"You old fool! What do you expect? To feel the same always? No doubt Pat feels older and has changed a lot too."
But the idea of Pat's having changed frightened Jean. Pat must not have changed. She must be just the same sane, practical, efficient Pat. She would be. And she was coming, coming on the sixteenth and the sixteenth was to-day.
The next moment Jean was pounding out her interview on the machine. It was done in a space of time unsurpassed even by the concentration of Mr. Thompson. Jean sent a messenger with it to the office and began cleaning the studio. By half past two the place was so clean that Jean could not find another thing to do, not even rearrange for the fourth time a vase of roses. She took a book to the window seat and sat down.
"Now you compose your mind and act like a rational human. She won't get here any sooner if you flutter about like a demented hen. 'Flutter like a demented hen'—it must be the effect of Pat's coming!"
By sheer will Jean succeeded in sitting still, but no effort could keep her attention on the print. Her thoughts got away from her and ran back down the months, fetching up in days she and Pat had spent together; in graduation day, that seemed so many years behind her; and courses they had taken together, that for some reason seemed closer now, than when she had taken them.
In the glow of Pat's coming, forgotten things became recent and clear, while recent things seemed unreal and far away. In this inversion, the past winter, with the strained atmosphere between herself and Herrick, blurred into a memory of some very disagreeable period she had lived through long ago. Perhaps that unobtrusive, ever present third presence that had moved so silently between them through the long weeks of rain, and against whom she was ever on her guard, was not so real as she had fancied. She had accepted the thing she did not want to believe and believed it for fear of being a coward in not facing it.
"I'm an idiot, and a conceited one at——"
"Haven't a doubt about it, old girl. Didn't I always say so?"
Jean tumbled from the window seat and Pat's arms closed about her.
"Oh Pat—Pat."
They stood so for a moment. Then they separated, Pat wiped her eyes and they grinned foolishly at each other.
"I knew I'd be glad. But I didn't know I'd be like this. I guess I've been suppressing all the way down in the train, in case you'd changed a lot, and you haven't changed a bit, not a single bit."
"What did you expect? After all it's only two years, even if it seems a million."
"I guess I was trying to do one of mummy's tricks, get all primed up just because I didn't want to. Jean, if you had changed, I'd have busted on the spot."
"Well, you can stay whole then because I haven't. Now get off those things. I feel as if you had dropped in for ten minutes."
"I haven't, so get rid of any such hopes. I am going to stay a week or more. I don't care whether it's convenient or not. During the day I shall be out on my deep and serious mission, but I expect the evenings. Oh Jeany, do tell me what he's like. I've been expiring for months. You never did describe him to me, you know, and I was too delicate to ask. He might have only one eye or be bald. Is he?"
"No. He's neither lame, halt nor blind and I won't tell you a thing until you get those things off and I make some tea."
When Jean had drawn the tea table close to the window that looked out across the tops of the roofs to the crown of the Berkeley Hills, Pat demanded:
"Now, go clear back to the beginning and tell me everything. Your letters on the subject were the most unsatisfactory things ever penned by the hand of man. Get out that mental searchlight and turn on the analysis. Why did you fall in love? How does it feel? Were you swept off your feet or did you just get dragged under? Begin."
"I don't know, Patsy. Honestly, I don't know."
"Good Heavens! If that isn't the most Jeanesque performance ever! Here you can spend years rooting about in your soul for the whys and the wherefores of some silly thing that doesn't have a why or a wherefore, and for a big thing like getting married, you don't know why you did it! It sounds to me as if you had fallen so head over heels into the sea of love that you blinded yourself."
"No, I don't think I did that." There was no answering laughter in Jean's eyes and the twinkle vanished from Pat's. "We had a lot in common and used to have such glorious days out of doors together and he wanted to write and I believed I could help him. He'd always been alone and no one had ever taken any interest in the things he cared most deeply about until we met, and it seemed to me, from the very first moment, as if I had known him always."
"That's a symptom, I've always heard." Pat's tone brought Jean from a path in which she seemed to be wandering by herself.
"I mean that I didn't lose my head and go around raving like Alma Perkins did when she was engaged to Porter. Do you remember the spectacle she made of herself? Of course, I loved Franklin. I wouldn't have married him if I hadn't, would I?"
"No, I don't suppose you would," Pat answered, after an imperceptible pause. "How did mummy take it?"
This time Jean laughed. "Pat, it really was funny. Mummy was divided between being grateful to Franklin for being a 'burden' and dislike of him personally."
"Doesn't she like him? Didn't she ever?"
"No. And you should have seen the wedding breakfast. Not even in the days when she wasn't sure whether you were 'a good influence' did you ever inspire such food."
"Why didn't she like him?"
"I don't believe she really knows. I was silly enough to describe the first evening I went out with him and the people I met. When she saw him, she said he had 'the flesh and the devil' written all over him. You know how she condemns people to death on a technicality?"
"Haven't you got a picture of It? I'll die before I see It."
"Oh no you won't. But I'll 'phone in a few moments and tell It to come home early. We usually eat out, but we won't to-night. I want to talk and talk and talk. Now, tell me what you've been doing and what you expect to do, for you haven't been so very explicit yourself."
"Well, in comparison to turning my life inside out as you have done, mine's very tame."
"Well, go on."
"Oh, there's nothing to tell, really. I've been trying to see if I couldn't raise the personal standards of some of the people in my mountain fastness. That's all. It's kind of hard to explain if you don't know the conditions. You see, most people think of the country and country children as I did when I first went up there. I expected them to be behind city children in some ways but I did not expect them to be ahead of them in the ways they are. Jean, there's more rubbish talked about the morality and health of the country than a million books on the subject could get rid of in a million years. The purity of the country is a myth! There are just as many underfed, subnormal, dead, inert objects of pity among my people, big as well as little, as there ever was in a congested city slum. Why, it took my breath away. I just wouldn't believe it at first. I was all filled up on this 'pure air' and 'God's out of doors' dope until I wasn't fit to teach a goat. But I got it banged into me at last. That's why I'm here."
"Elucidate. You've jumped a few steps that my 'logical mind' needs. Why does the immorality and stupidity of a mountain district school bring you to town?"
"Because I want to talk to a woman I've never seen, but from reading everything she ever wrote and every report she ever made before all the societies there are and aren't, I have come to feel that she knows everything on earth that's worth while knowing. She may have struggled with bovine intellects in a mountain district school or she may not, but I know she'll have something worth saying. Ergo, I come."
"Pat, as I have remarked many a time and oft, you are the joy of my soul. Now who on earth but you would be so unspeakably efficient as to come down here—I see I can't flatter myself that I had anything to do with it—in order to consult an ideal on something she probably doesn't know anything about? Idealism and efficiency go hand in hand."
"I don't care. Laugh if you like."
"Who is this prodigy? May I go and sit outside and listen to the pearls of wisdom?"
"'Listen to pearls of wisdom.' Not so bad! Well, the name of this remarkable woman is Dr. Mary Mac Lean."
"What?"
"Don't you like it? Sounds like a good, common-sense Scotch name to me. Not in the same class with Jean Norris or Patricia Farnsworth, but no doubt quite respectable in its way."
"Dr. Mary? My Dr. Mary!"
"Yours? What do you, married parasite, Bohemian newspaper woman, know about Dr. Mary?"
"More than you do."
And Jean related in detail her one visit to the Hill Neighborhood House.
"And you needn't think that you are going up there alone. I've been thinking about her and wanting to go terribly, but I let such a long time go by and then it seemed rather—oh, I don't know. I just haven't been."
"Well, we're going and we're going now. If I can't see Franklin right away, at least I can see her, and they're the two people I'm most excited about at the present moment. 'Phone your husband instantly and come along."
Jean got Herrick on the 'phone and astonished him more than he had been astonished for a long time by demanding that he come home to dinner and come early. She would give no reason but chuckled happily as he had not heard her chuckle for months.
Herrick went back and sat a long while at his desk without doing anything. Then he telephoned to Flop, whom he had met accidentally early in the afternoon, that he would not be able to help in the celebration of Magnolia's birthday, as he had promised. After which, he smiled and wrote five hundred words of very good editorial.