For two days Roger Barton luxuriated in his escape from the law.
At twenty-eight all experience had to him the nature of a material
thing. It was to be grasped, used to his need, and when it failed him,
dropped. He absorbed what his mind needed at the time and went on, as
an animal leaves a food supply, its wants satisfied. University and
law school had been the road to an education offered by a distant,
childless relative with an ambition to have a profession in the family.
Roger now wrote and told this relative he had given up the law, but the
old man's irate answer did not disturb him in the least. He did not
feel that he had been ungrateful or that he owed anything beyond the
power of his own conscience to pay.
He had no definite plans for the future, except a general feeling that
he was about to enter a real and interesting world. In this world there
were fine, high things to do, and he would probably be poor, for John
Lowell's office had convinced Roger that ideals do not pay and that
nothing else is worth while. He took long tramps through the Marin
hills, or lay on the sand at Land's End listening to the waves, and
dreamed. In these dreams he thought often of Anne, standing on tiptoes
before John Lowell. Now that he would probably never see her again he
wished that he knew her better.
There could not be many women like Anne. She gave so fully of her time
and interest, and yet there were unstirred depths beneath. Roger had
always felt them in sudden, sad looks that passed across Anne's eyes,
in the catching of the breath that marked an almost painfully keen
interest, in small, quick motions and physical responses that he had
accepted as mannerisms, but now saw as revelations of that courage and
ideality that was Anne.
"It wasn't easy for her to confront that rotter, but she did it, the
slip of a beauty-loving thing! How she must hate an office!"
And she would probably go into just such another in a few days, perhaps
a worse one. She might already have found a place. While he lay on
the sand, facing the full future, she might be bent above a machine,
her fine enthusiasm leashed to the narrow demands of price lists, her
physical rarity the object of some cad's coarse admiration. The thought
sickened Roger when it first came to him clearly, an employer trying
to touch Anne's hand, pressing her knee as he forced her to needless
proximity for dictation; Anne, the hurt and quivering object of those
advances he had seen other girls welcome with feigned annoyance and
sidelong glances. He rose quickly to escape it, although he had come
to his favorite cove with a book for the whole afternoon, and began
walking again across the dunes. But the picture moved beside him.
"By Jove, it isn't right. A man has a hard enough time hanging to his
principles, but a girl, a worth-while girl like that who has something
beyond the idea of attracting men--it's a shame."
And he could do nothing to prevent it. He could not even call Anne a
friend. He did not know where she lived.
"What a simp!" He stopped and kicked the sand viciously and marveled at
his own stupidity. For six months he had worked with Anne and had never
asked her to go anywhere with him, or tried to know her better. He knew
now that he had looked forward in the mornings to seeing her, soft and
small and silvery fair at her desk. He had snatched every opportunity
to talk with her. And had made none! Seen so, now, from the outside,
it was incredible but true. He knew nothing of Anne whatever. Nothing.
She might even be engaged to some man, no better, under the veneer
with which men, physically desirous, deceive girls, than John Lowell.
Perhaps worse.
Roger strode on, his shoulders hunched now as they always hunched
against obstruction and defeat. He would do something to prevent the
waste of Anne. He would find Anne a place where that rare fineness
would not be quite wasted in the mechanical routine of mercenary
ambition. At least he could do that.
Anne quivering with hurt of ugliness, seeing the bay at night, the
jewel-like islands, the stately white ferry boats, clinging to them for
people she had never known! He would find a place for Anne and see her
in it before he went out into the fullness of the future waiting for
him. The possibility of Anne's engagement to a worthless man, Roger had
finally to push aside, with reluctant concession to his own ideal of
her. If Anne were engaged, the man would have to be worth while.
For a day and a half Roger sought a place for Anne. His own mail
remained unopened, telephone messages unanswered. About twelve o'clock
on the morning of the second day he found what he wanted. It was with
a publishing firm and the duties involved a wider scope than the usual
stenography. The surroundings were as pleasant as any office could
offer, the hours easy, the firm established, conservative to a degree
that had always rasped Roger's youthful enthusiasm, but satisfied him
when he visioned the two white-haired, old-fashioned gentlemen as
Anne's employers. At the end of half an hour he had forced the salary
up five dollars a month and secured an option on the opening for two
days.
From old Morrison he got Anne's address, and ten minutes later
so astonished Hilda by his insistence that he must know Anne's
whereabouts, that she forgot the definite orders to tell no one and
described the Saunders home at Quincy so minutely that Roger could have
found it blindfolded in the dark.
Three hours later Roger got off the train, the sole passenger for the
windswept little wooden box upon the dunes. To the north and east
the dun sand swelled to mounds and rounded hummocks, held from their
eternal drifting by bunches of coarse, gray grass. Across the narrow
bay, low hills, dense and black with chaparral, each guarding at its
base a tiny white beach, ran westward to the sea, beating on the rocky
coast in long, sobbing protest against the lashing wind.
In the vast, clean loneliness of sand and wind and sky, a fear that had
touched him on the way up that Anne might think it strange for him to
appear suddenly like this, dissolved. The silent emptiness absorbed the
misunderstanding of motive, and Roger knew that if Anne did not wish
the position she would not think him intrusive. He easily found the
half-obliterated wagon-road Hilda had described and took it across the
dunes.
As the front gate creaked on its sagging hinges, Barbara Saunders rose
from the floor, where she and Anne had been trying to force a faded
blue dimity to contain a yard more material than it had ever had.
"I simply will not wear the thing as it is. Janet can say what
she likes--she doesn't care what she wears--but I've been to six
Quarterlies in it--and I've reached my limit."
The gate slammed and Barbara turned to the window.
"Anne! It's a man!"
Anne looked up, still puzzling over the impossibilities of the faded
dimity. "Do you know, Bab, I believe if we ripped the whole thing and
turned the top to the bottom and gored it, we could take all the scraps
left over and----"
"Come here," Bab whispered as if the person below could hear through
the glass. "He doesn't look like an agent. Who on earth----"
Anne came and stood beside her. With nose pressed to the glass she
could just see the top of Roger's hat. A loud knock echoed through the
house.
"In a hurry, rather, isn't he? Who----" Bab turned. "Why! Anne! Do you
know him?"
Before the burning self-consciousness in Anne's eyes, Bab stepped back.
"Will--will--you open the door? Yes, I know him. It's Mr. Barton.
He--used to be in the same office."
Barbara's sallow cheeks flushed and her eyes scorned Anne's
insincerity. For five nights Anne had let her go on, in the
dark intimacy of the same room, piling up the mass of her small
perplexities, the annoying efforts at adjustment between herself and
Janet and her mother. And all the time Anne had harbored a romance.
Anne was not the small, shy cousin, so different from Belle, so like
themselves in spite of her daily contact with the great world of
business. Anne knew men. When deprived for a few days of her society
they came long distances to see her.
"Very well, I'll open the door. But don't be long, please. Janet's
cleaning out the chicken house and looks like a fright. My other waist
isn't ironed and mother's asleep."
She went. Anne heard her open the door and lead Roger down the creaking
hall to the dining-room, a bare, dilapidated room, with sagging floor
beyond the skill of the manless household to repair, and woodwork
painted streakily by Bab and Janet.
Anne tried to hurry, but her cold fingers fumbled. And even when, at
last, the hooks were hooked, the hairpins all in place, and Anne stood
with her hand on the knob, it seemed impossible to turn it.
Why had he come?
Was Belle right? How had she known?
Roger Barton looked up as the rear door unexpectedly opened and Anne
came toward him, with just the degree of welcome to express her
surprise, and the exact amount of pleasure at the sight of a friend.
Her greeting angered and disappointed him. Anne thought she did it very
well.
"Hunting?" She tossed the word off lightly, as if she had many male
friends all deeply interested in the sport.
"No," Roger snapped, annoyed at this assumption of social manner in the
stark, unfriendly room, with its stained walls and broken floor. "No. I
didn't bring a gun. Besides, it's not duck season yet. I never heard of
any other game on the marshes, did you?"
"No. I don't think I have." Anne flushed.
Her embarrassment at discovery did not soften Roger; he had been too
hurt by her greeting.
"No. I have no excuse except one you may think presumptuous. I heard,
accidentally, of a place I thought might suit you. But you'll have to
let them know by Tuesday, to-morrow if possible. It's with Wilmot &
Brown--twenty-five a week."
Anne tried to look as if she were seriously considering, but she had
scarcely heard. She had not thought of this and now she saw so clearly
it could have been the only reason for his coming. He had a deep, human
kindliness for all misfortune, and she had been unfortunate. She, a
working girl, had given up her place. He had found her another almost
instantly.
"Thank you. It was very kind of you. But I'm not sure I'm going back to
town directly. My cousins," the word contained the broken floor, the
scratched wall, the worn furniture, "want me to stay for the rest of
the month. I may do it."
Through the window she saw Janet wheeling a refuse-filled barrow from
the chicken run. Bent against the wind, she moved, almost doubled above
the vile load. Bab followed with a pitchfork. They disappeared behind
the barn. Anne looked straight at Roger:
"There are no men on the place and the school vacations are the only
time my Cousin Janet gets enough leisure to do anything. We have been
talking about fixing the fences and mending this floor. If you'd come
to-morrow instead of to-day you'd have found us calcimining."
Roger's eyes came back to Anne, flushed, defiant, so unmistakably proud
and hurt.
"I didn't mean it intrusively," he said quietly. "I just couldn't stand
the thought of you taking any old thing--another rotter like Lowell,
perhaps--where anything but a machine is wasted. Please believe----"
A sound from beyond the thin partition struck him to silence. It was a
high, querulous voice calling, "B--a--b."
Anne started. In another moment Aunt Harriet would come trailing in,
her frail hands moving gracefully to insure safety, her sightless blue
eyes staring before her. It was years since Harriet Saunders had talked
to a city man, a professional man, a man worthy of her own Harrington
culture, a culture guarded through long years with Hilda Mitchell's
brother, kept undimmed to hand down to "the girls." In another moment
she would be there, winding about him the snake-like coils of her
selfish monopolization.
"Would you mind if we went outside?" Anne whispered, partly because she
could so convey the need for instant action, partly to bear out the
quickly invented reason. "Aunt Het is rather an invalid and she has
been asleep. If no one answers she'll drop off again, but if she hears
us----"
"Certainly," Roger whispered back, and they tiptoed from the room
together, out through the nearer kitchen to the yard. And there Anne
paused. Where could she take him? There was no spot on that windblown
dryness, no garden nook. For a moment she thought of the barn, a
favorite place of her own. But it was so overtoned; herself and Roger
Barton, who had come to tell her of a position, sitting in the hay!
"It does seem inhospitable to drag you out on a day like this," she
began, but Roger cut her short.
"I like gray days, and it may be an extraordinary taste but I love the
wind--in the open. Not city wind filled with dust, like the dead hopes
of people blowing in your face, but clean, open wind like this."
Anne's face lighted with the pleasure of a shared sensation.
"So do I. It seems to blow all the tangles out of the world and give
every one a chance to begin again--simply."
"I guess--maybe--that is it--only I hadn't thought of it as a beginning
again. It always makes me feel courageous, like plowing straight on
through everything, just as it is."
Anne did not look toward him instantly, but she felt him very sharply,
so much taller than herself, broad, with that courageous, crisp hair,
and his clear blue eyes that could look so different according to his
mood. They would be wide and blue now, with a light in them as if Roger
were turning it upon this "everything" through which the wind gave him
the courage to plunge. He would be looking straight ahead, his chin up,
ready. Anne turned a little, and he was looking exactly like that. She
felt that she knew him very well, and then, that he was rushing into
the wind, away from her, leaving her behind.
"I think you will, because--I don't believe you're ever afraid, are
you?"
"No--I don't believe I am. You see," he seemed to be feeling his way
carefully through this new experience of dissecting his own impulses,
"there is really nothing to be afraid of in the world. Of course there
is sickness, but when you're well you don't go about fearing a possible
illness; there's hard work, but that's fun."
"There's poverty."
"Yes, I know there is, but, somehow, the poorer I am the freer I feel."
"But it's so ugly--always skimping and twisting and thinking about
money. It--it's stifling."
"But you don't stay in a state of poverty for long," Roger laughed.
"You get busy getting out of it. But while it lasts there's something
exhilarating in being broke and not knowing what's going to happen. You
know how it feels on a clear, cold, sunny morning of north wind, when
the bay's all white-caps and you can almost see the windows of every
house in Oakland? The air seems more alive than at any other time, and
everybody goes round with his head up, smiling. Of course the feeling
wouldn't last forever, but, for a time--it's like being suddenly
freed from all binding restrictions, being lifted from a groove and
thrown suddenly out into new possibilities--like being picked up by
this wind and carried--off to China. There's something safe--and
depressing--about a steady income."
Anne tried to smile in return. But the tissue-wrapped allotments of her
childhood were too vivid.
"I don't think it's the having nothing that exhilarated you, it's the
excitement of getting the next thing."
Roger stopped and the wind wrapped them about. "I never thought of it
that way," he said slowly, "but perhaps it was."
They went on again in a moment, their relation somehow readjusted.
Roger felt masculine and dense; Anne protective and feminine. Roger
felt her sensitive and intuitive reaction to hidden impulses, and she
his need to be looked after.
Anne became conscious of this readjustment first and tried to find an
impersonal path back to the reason for having come out at all, but
could not. She grew gradually so conscious of the physical motion of
walking that she felt she was obeying a natural law as inescapable as
the force of gravity. She would put one foot before the other until
they had reached the moaning sea two miles away.
By a tremendous effort she stopped. And then the alternative of going
back to the house and watching Aunt Het's python-like embrace of Roger
in general conversation, emerged from subconsciousness.
"There's an old Indian graveyard back a little; would you like to see
it?" Without waiting his agreement, Anne turned into a depression
between the dunes and led the way. "When I was a little girl, I used to
think this was the most wonderful place in the world. We used to dig up
beads and arrow heads and invent the most conventional Indian stories
about braves and princesses."
Roger did not answer. The wind swept across the dune tops, leaving
them in the warm seclusion of a sandy depression. Anne went lightly
just before him, small and silvery blonde, her arms white and quiet
by her sides, no physical effort disturbing her swift, quiet way over
the shifting sand. A sudden turn brought them to it on a slope above
the dunes. Anne stopped and waited for him. Together they climbed the
short distance to the small square of parched earth, with its broken
fence, once whitewashed, now peeled by sun and wind to leprous patches,
like the little wooden crosses that marked the mounds within. At the
corners four gaunt gum trees sighed and bent, chieftains wailing the
degradation of the Christian burials below. Anne passed through an
opening in the fence and Roger followed, tense now with the realization
of Anne, of the moaning trees, of the wind searching over the earth,
and, far away, the sea crying its everlasting plaint to the rocks.
Up one row and down another they went, Anne trying to read the
rain-washed names on the tiny crosses. "You see, many of them were
half-breeds, and Father Crowley was the only friend they really had
among the whites, and so he managed to baptize most of them and bury
them at last with the rites of the Church. I wonder what they really
felt while he annointed them."
"Like fakirs, I suppose," Roger said quickly, and moved a little nearer
to Anne.
She shook her head. "No, I don't think they felt like that. They're
all gone now except one or two, but when I was a little girl there
were a lot scattered through these hills, and I knew some of them. One
was very old, wrinkled like an oak leaf, with the most piercing black
eyes. I used to feel as if he had died, all but his eyes. We called
him William Black, but he had a wonderful Indian name we never could
pronounce and he would never tell what it meant. Most often, when we
asked, he would grunt and walk away, but once he told me that his name
was dead, and if he told it, it would come back and kill him. I didn't
know what he meant, but now I think he was sad and ashamed of his
people and despised us too much to even tell us what he had once meant
among them. He was the only Indian I ever heard of who refused to be
baptized. Nevertheless, when he died Father Crowley buried him over
there. It was really just on the edge of the consecrated ground then,
but one night the fence in that corner was broken down, and when they
put it up William Black was outside. I think the others were very proud
of William, but not so strong as he."
"Very likely," Roger muttered, and stepped nearer still.
She felt him so close that the slightest motion on her part would touch
him, strong and alive against this eternal sleep of a dead race.
"On--on--a clear day--you can see the sea--from here, and the
spindrift--high as the cliffs--in a rough surf." Her arm, so slim,
so white, like a wisp of the fog caught in form, pointed toward the
muffled calling.
Leaning over her, Roger's hand closed gently on the cool flesh. He drew
her slowly round and they looked silently at each other.
"I think I have always loved you," Roger said at last, like a child,
whispering a confession strange to itself, born of the tender knowing
in its mother's eyes. He did not understand this thing himself,
revealed with such sudden swift quietness, but the earth understood,
and the fog, and that old, old race asleep. As if the mist had parted
and revealed it to him, so this love was revealed, something concrete
in that wind-filled emptiness, something definite and shapeable, a
thing he could cup in both hands and offer to Anne.
It had come. Belle had been right and so utterly wrong; Belle, with her
cheap experience, her world-eaten deductions from sickness and disease.
Roger Barton loved her. The wonder of it held Anne to the exclusion of
her own feeling.
Roger dropped her hand and Anne looked up quickly.
"I'm pretty clumsy, Miss Mitchell, but----" the pounding in his throat
choked him. A piercing shaft of joy shot through her.
"You're--you're not clumsy at all. And I--I would like to marry you
very much."
Sudden awkwardness descended upon them. They looked shyly at each
other, Anne waiting for Roger to draw her close and kiss her, Roger a
little frightened.
Wasn't he going to kiss her? Chill crept over Anne. And then he was
drawing her to him. The surface of her body broke into tiny pricks of
excitement, triumph, awe. She could feel his breath on her face, see
the inevitable approach of his lips. Now he was too near to see. His
lips were on hers. Suddenly, driven by the need to reach through to
something beyond them both, Anne returned their pressure. Roger felt
their clinging with faint surprise, deep tenderness and awe.