CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jean propped her note to Herrick on the desk where he would be sure to see it as soon as he came in, and caught the six-fifteen train.
When Herrick came at half past six he found the note, read it three times and tore it into bits.
"Taking the six-fifteen to Belgrave on a case. May be away a few days.Jean."
"Taking the six-fifteen to Belgrave on a case. May be away a few days.
Jean."
It was eight before Herrick stopped pacing up and down the studio, took his hat and went out.
Giuseppe's was crowded. The air reeked with smoke and the heavy odor of highly seasoned food. Not a place at the long table was vacant. Flop was denouncing the low standards of American art, exemplified in the flat failure of a recent exhibit of his own, and the others pounded the table in the old way and shouted their approval. Flop caught sight of Herrick first, stopped in the middle of a sentence, and then, with a shout:
"Well, I'll be damned! Look who's here," got up and dragged Herrick forward as if the latter had been trying to get away.
"Boy Blue! Franklin! Herrick!"
The racket was deafening. The Outlanders jumped on chairs to see what was happening. Flop corraled a waiter hurrying by with a demijohn of wine and took it way from him.
"This is on the house, Pietro. We drink to the return of the lost sheep."
A waiter brought Herrick a chair. He took it, and walking deliberately about the table, placed it next to The Kitten's. There was much laughing and some quick looks interchanged and The Kitten shrugged as if the matter did not concern her in the least, and continued to talk to another man across Herrick's back. The enthusiasm, diverted for a moment from its channel, went back. The Kitten finished what she had been saying and was forced at last to meet Herrick's eyes. She tried to hold the contempt in them, but it was useless. The corners of her scarlet lips trembled. Herrick's hand took hers under the table.
"Don't be silly, Kittycat. We wouldn't keep it up, you know...."
Two hours later The Bunch went singing up the hill to Flop's. Herrick and The Kitten turned down a side street. Herrick walked with the light, springing step that had reminded Jean of the earth and wide spaces. The Kitten skimmed along beside him, clinging to his arm. At the foot of the stairs he lifted her, and carried her up. He put her in the Morris chair and knelt beside her. Every motion was a repetition of the last time he had knelt so. It was all exactly the same, even to the bar of light from the street lamp, and the fine, tired lines about The Kitten's mouth.
The Kitten bent and lifted his face from her knees.
"Why did you do it, Boy?"
"I don't know, Kitten."
She drew his head to her shoulder and stroked his hair quietly. There was no claim in her touch, no insistence, only peace. The Kitten was weary, too.
"Tell me about it," she said at last.
Herrick smiled. "She's straightening out all the misery and sin and ugliness in the world, Kittycat, and it keeps her rather busy."
They talked for a while of Jean and the little doctor and the futile, foolish tasks at which they labored.
"It makes me tired to think of so much energy." The Kitten yawned. "I'm glad I have no 'work.' I wouldn't 'improve' a single living human being, even if I could, not even you, Boy Blue."
"Most wise Kitty." Herrick drew her to him and kissed her passionately.
The next day they slipped away for the week-end to the cabin on the Portuguese ranch where he and Jean had spent their honeymoon.
"It was the first place we ever went, Boy, and I want to go there again," insisted The Kitten. After a moment's hesitation Herrick agreed.
The dairyman and his wife showed no surprise. They were as dark, as silent as ever. The woman wore the same bright red skirt and the same dirty white waist. She brought food to the cabin as she had brought it before, without a word. There was the same full, silver moonlight brimming the bowl of the little canyon, and the same quiet cows wandering over the hills.
They stayed two days and went back. Herrick wondered what he would say if Jean had already returned, and gravitated, according to his mood, from a lie he knew would not deceive her, to the truth.
But Jean had not come. Nor did she come the next day, nor the next. For the Mayor of Belgrave had a cold. Years afterwards, Herrick speculated sometimes, what his life would have been, if James Martin, Mayor of Belgrave, had not had a cold.
But the Mayor did have a cold, and not even Jean's most Machiavellian tricks succeeded in getting at him. In a small neat house, behind a small neat lawn, a small, neat wife guarded his civilian privacy and Jean was forced to wait until the fourth day, when protected by an overcoat and neck muffler, in spite of the glorious fall sunshine, Mayor Martin again took up his official duties. Almost as soon as the office was opened, Jean forced herself beyond the secretary and confronted the Mayor, small and neat like his wife and the baby Jean had seen being aired on the lawn.
In words as few and stark as Amelia Gorman's she presented the case.
"Now, what I suggest, Mr. Martin, is that you send to us monthly fifteen dollars, for which we can board your child in a respectable family. When he is fourteen, if he shows promise of making more than a grammar school education advisable, this amount to be increased to twenty. He can make up the rest himself until he graduates from some technical school. In the event of your dying before he has reached the earning age, this amount is to be continued. You can arrange it as a bequest to us and need not mention the child."
The little man sat staring at Jean. Behind his flat, frightened eyes, she could see the procession of his small hopes, running to their death. He would do as she asked because he could think of no way of escaping with the dignity that befitted his office. He would cover his terror under the cloak of his mayoralty and submit to supporting his child, as he might have contributed to the erection of a public library. But for all the rest of his life he would enjoy the memory of this morning. Once the danger of publicity was removed, he would come to regard himself as a bold, bad man of the world, and from the pinnacle of his knowledge of evil look down upon the sober, uninteresting members of his town and of the church, where he went every Sunday morning in a neat black hat.
"Well, Mr. Martin?"
Jean gathered up her gloves and handbag and rose. He reached out as if forcibly to detain her, almost as if he expected, should he refuse, that she would go through the town with a bell, proclaiming him in public.
"Of course, I wish you and your office, to understand that I do this through no legal, or, I may say, moral compulsion."
He was like a vicious terrier taking a last nip at some one's leg, before being dragged away on a rope. "I have many demands made on me, both public and private, and my income is not large."
"Fifteen is not much, Mr. Martin, for food and clothes and schooling. You will find later that your present baby will require all of that."
At the mention of the baby, the Mayor frowned.
"I never shirk an opportunity, Mrs. Herrick, to make another happy. I will remit the amount to you monthly by check. It is to be booked as a contribution to your work."
"Certainly, Mr. Martin."
The Mayor escorted Jean to the elevator, rang the bell for her and, as she stepped in, bowed elaborately. Jean chuckled. Already he was assuming the manners of the bold, bad man.
The train got in about eight. Jean went straight to the studio, after finding that Dr. Mary would not be back until the morning. It was dark, and when Jean turned on the light she saw that the dust was thick on everything. Herrick had evidently not straightened it out since she left. It looked forlorn and struck through the exhilaration of Jean's mood unpleasantly. As always, successful accomplishment gave Jean a sense of physical well-being that she enjoyed as deeply and as consciously as ever Martha did her moods of spiritual exaltation.
When she had put away her things, she turned off the light and stretched out on the couch. Through the open window she could see the stars, and their peace quieted the inner excitement that had held her ever since she left Mayor Martin's office. She had done a good piece of work with which Dr. Mary would be pleased and because of which Amelia Gorman would die happier. But beyond this, the thread of her action stretched down the years, binding together lives of which she knew nothing. At a moment's notice she had entered these lives, just as she might go to the window and call a stranger into the studio, and never would life be the same to these strangers as if she had not done the thing she had. The Mayor would grow old and die, a different man than he would have been if every month he had not sent fifteen dollars for the support of Amelia's child. And all the lives he touched would react to this secret check. Jimmie would grow up in some workman's family and their lives and his would be altered. She remembered how once she had thought of each person, weaving before his own loom, deliberately choosing or rejecting the threads that Life offered. Now she saw myriads upon myriads weaving before a high loom whose frame was lost in the immensity of time and distance.
She started as the door opened and Herrick entered. He did not see her, but came over to the empty fireplace and stood leaning his elbows on the mantel shelf. He looked tired and there were lines about his mouth. Compunction for she knew not what seized Jean and she rose quickly.
"Begee!"
Herrick whirled. Jean had been the last person in his mind.
"You!" he demanded stupidly, and instantly recognized that his tone gave the natural meeting the proportions of drama.
Jean laughed. "Sure. Who else?"
"Your note, you know, wasn't very illuminating. I didn't know whether you were going for a day or a month."
"I know. But I was so excited and I didn't know myself exactly."
Jean saw that her abrupt going had hurt Herrick and she tried to make up now. She came closer and laid a hand on his.
"I'll make some chocolate and then I'll tell you all about it. It would make a perfectly ripping story."
Herrick looked down on Jean's hand resting upon his and it seemed to him something disconnected from both of them. He wished she would take it away. To his jangled nerves it was a real weight, pressing heavily upon him. It was force, that strong, white hand, a mechanical force for pushing obstacles from her path. It would push him and her mother and all who did not see things as she saw them, all but the fat, mannish little doctor with her stupid generalities. With the merest touch of those firm, cool fingers it would push The Kitten into oblivion.
"A corking story?"
Jean resented Herrick's mechanical interest but tried not to show it. She had been wrong and had said so and it was trivial of him to let the memory rankle.
"Wait till you hear it. It's a regular Thomas Hardy novel. It ought to be set in the granite hills of Devon."
While they drank the chocolate, Jean told him of the woman propped on her pillows in the miserable room, with the wind blowing over the stony hills; of the frightened Mayor with his overwhelming respectability. Her eyes glowed and the strong, white hands moved in unusual gestures, as if from the slough of human weakness and suffering into which they were plunged, she was drawing quivering bodies and setting them on a stage. Herrick's bitterness saw none of the drama, only Jean's own safety from any suffering. There she sat, glowing with interest in her "case," a stupid, everyday matter of seduction. She could work up a tragedy about a scrubwoman overcome by physical desire. But for him, for his needs, for The Kitten, for Flop, for any one whose way of life was different, whose clothes did not please her, whose manner did not suit her, she had no sympathy and no understanding. Herrick laughed.
"It's a scream, simply a scream! A lot of women puttering about, fiddling with the forces of Nature and getting paid for it!"
Jean's face went white.
"I might have known," she said and sought for words that would hurt him most, "that you could not possibly grasp the spiritual significance."
Herrick's face flushed and his eyes were two black slits as he bent across the table.
"You're a fool, Jean, you and Dr. Mary and all the other dead, marble women she has trailing in her train."
It seemed afterwards to Herrick that they stood for hours looking at each other across the table, before Jean turned, and without a word went the length of the studio and closed and locked the bedroom door behind her.