CHAPTER TEN
Whenever Jean looked back on that night she could remember every detail of the dinner, everything that had been said, almost the order of its saying. Thrilled by the happiness and vitality of Jean and of the emotional response Dr. Mary had waked in her, Herrick let himself go in the delight of answering completely to her mood. Something of the sensation of flying entered them both, as if they were skimming all discord, all the petty misunderstanding of ordinary intercourse. Long after, Jean smiled as she remembered how strongly this feeling had held her and how sure she had been of it.
It was a gay dinner and they sat on in the little restaurant until almost nine. Whenever Jean found a good phrase or Herrick had an illuminating idea on the structure of the article they jotted it down. When they finished there was quite a sheaf of these notes.
"It's a shame to let them cool off. We ought to whip the thing into final shape to-night, lock it up forever in typing. Besides, if you're not used to working in a racket, you may not be able to do it in the office to-morrow. And if you put it over you've got the job cinched."
"I know. I'll sit up all night, I suppose, and it can't be so bad just to have to copy it in the office."
"I'll tell you a better scheme than that. We'll go up to my place and type it now."
Jean had never been to Herrick's rooms and for a moment she hesitated. Then the absurdity of her convention struck her. She had been alone in Flop's when she scarcely knew Herrick at all, and for hours in the hills.
"Fine."
Herrick paid the sleepy waiter and tipped him so generously that he woke with the suddenness of a marionette. They departed, laughing under his effusive thanks.
Like Flop's, Herrick's room was the top floor of a dilapidated building that had once been a place of business but was now filled with cheap studios. It was large and barely furnished, with a long table, a desk, a couch and a few chairs. There were no curtains at the windows, and a tall office building, like a back-drop, cut into the night sky. It had never occurred to Herrick to think about the bareness of his room until he saw Jean's look of approval.
"A real workroom, in which we are going to write the hit of the Sunday edition."
He uncovered his typewriter and pulled the drop-light over the desk.
As Jean laid her things on the couch and took the chair Herrick drew up for her at the table, she thought: "It's like a large cell. In another age he might have been a monk."
They worked rapidly and well together. Jean dictated and Herrick typed. When it was done he read it aloud.
"That's great stuff. I'll see that Thompson stands me a drink for finding him such a prodigy."
"But it isn't all mine. I could never have done it alone. I should probably have blurbed all over the place but for your restraining influence, or become disgusted and given it up."
"You see, it's not easy to do things alone, even when we're very full of them and want to very much. Is it?"
He looked up suddenly and Jean saw the loneliness that she had glimpsed so often below Herrick's moods. The loneliness of the small boy in the bare fields and of the grown man with The Bunch.
"No—I don't suppose it is."
There was a long silence and then Herrick said, as if they had often spoken of it before:
"Do you know, sometimes I have felt that you think I am weak or that I don't want to do the novel very much, and it hurts to have you think that. I suppose if I were a genius, or had the will of I don't know what, I would sit up here and write and write and write. But I'm not made that way. To go week after week, month after month, alone, believing in yourself, fighting through those horrible moods of depression when all your work seems piffling and insincere, beginning again—ugh." Herrick shivered as if his own words had opened a window through which blew a cold blast of memory. "I don't doubt there are people who could. But I can't."
"I don't think I ever thought you were weak, or that you didn't want to do it, but I have wished often that you would."
Jean forced her eyes to meet Herrick's. She felt that she owed him something and that words were not enough. The color ran under her smooth skin and her eyes were shy. Herrick came nearer but he did not touch her. The lines of his face were clean and sharply chiseled and his eyes burned. He spoke simply, making no personal demand, even for sympathy.
"I do want to do it, Jean, very, very much. More perhaps than I can make you understand. But if it is ever written, it will be because some one believes in me."
"You have friends—and they believe."
"Do 'they'? Maybe they do. But I can't imagine Flop, or any of them, stopping long enough from their own affairs to listen to a single chapter. Besides I don't believe it's the kind of thing they would like. It's not 'strong.' I doubt it's even the 'real stuff.'"
Jean held down the unreasoning joy rising in her. Calmly and naturally Herrick was justifying her faith in him.
"Perhaps you're not quite fair. If you've never tried them you can't be sure. Sometimes I've thought that The Kitten, in some moods, was awfully tired of it, the noise and heat and—and——" Jean broke off in her clumsy effort to be perfectly just, for Herrick was looking at her in a strange, piercing way and she felt that again she was falling below the standard of honesty he had set for her. Her eyes dropped. Herrick laid both hands upon her shoulders and she could feel their cold grip on her skin.
"If the novel is ever written, Jean, it will be because some one cares for me and believes because of caring. With a woman like——"
"Don't," Jean whispered.
"It's so lonely, so damned cold and lonely and hideous," Herrick went on, as if he were not speaking to Jean at all. "We're like a lot of lost shades, each locked in the isolation of his own personality, wandering about in a fog. We never really meet or touch, but grope about blindly, never finding because there's nothing really to find."
"Don't. It's too cruel, and it can't be true. There must be something, somewhere."
"Where?"
Jean thought of her own groping and of her mother, the tense little figure praying to her God.
"I don't know."
"There is nothing. Free will? That's only the power to choose between one dead deed and another."
Jean thought of Dr. Mary.
"It isn't true," she cried eagerly. "We are not locked in alone. We're bound tight to every other living soul on earth. We're not blind or lost in a fog. There's nothing so ugly in the whole world that we can't make beautiful if we want to."
Herrick drew her a little closer. "Can we, Jean? Maybe. But not alone. I know. I have been alone all my life—until I met you."
His voice vibrated with the passion that was carrying him beyond his control. He was like a man borne on a swift current past familiar banks, unable to stop. And on the bank stood all the women he had ever known, mocking, hating, amused. Plainest of all was The Kitten. Her eyes were calm, and he heard her say quietly: "You will have to marry her."
"That's why I have done nothing, Jean, because I have been always alone. Will you help me, Jean?"
"Yes." Jean spoke gravely. "I will help you as much as I can."
"Will you marry me?" he asked quietly. "I need you so."
"Yes." She said simply. "We will help each other."
Herrick thrilled with her power and for a moment rose to it.
"You wonderful big, white woman! We will love and work together."
The color burned Jean's face. Laughing, Herrick's arms closed about her.
"Kiss me, Jeany."
Jean turned her head and laid her cool lips on his cheek. Herrick's hold tightened.
"Jean, I believe you're a flirt. That's no kind of a kiss. I want a real one."
Jean laughed a little tremulously. "That was a real one."
The edge of Herrick's joy dulled. Did she mean it? Was that a kiss to her?
"All right, dear. It is—if you mean it that way." He tried to smile but Jean felt that in some way she had hurt him.
Very dimly she sensed depths in the relationship of men and women of which she knew nothing.