closer. The great paddle-wheel churned a rhythm to Jean's thoughts,
pictures of the day, from the time she had met Herrick and had walked
through the crowded streets, to the present cool emptiness of the upper
deck with the night wind touching her face and thousands of stars
above. To Jean it had been the fullest day she had ever lived.
Gently Herrick's hand claimed hers and she did not withdraw it. The
contact seemed only a finer communication, a surer speech than the
clumsiness of words.
CHAPTER SIX
Soon after the first dinner with The Bunch, Herrick finished the series
of articles and no longer came to the library. But often Jean found him
waiting at the closing hour and they walked to the Ferry. Several times
they had lunch in a little Mexican restaurant with a sanded floor and
strings of red peppers hanging like stalactites from the ceiling. Jean
always came from this place with the feeling of having been to another
world and touched another life. And there was always the feeling of
having shared this happy strangeness with Herrick.
On Sundays, sometimes Herrick called at the house for her, and
sometimes she met him at the Ferry, and they went to Flop's. Martha
made no comment, but Jean knew that after she had left the house, her
mother cried, and because she never mentioned Herrick, Jean knew that
Martha disliked him. In the studio Jean made a great effort to enter
the spirit, for although she felt more and more strongly that Herrick,
too, was bored, she clung to the belief that there must be some charm
her own narrow training could not discover.
There was always the same enthusiasm about the same things. Whenever
interest flagged they wound it up with the thin, red wine and with
more and more cigarettes which they threw away partially smoked. Men
and women made open love to each other and there was much kissing and
imitation jealousy. Their insatiable need to be different had become
a scourge, which drove them along the road of personal eccentricity.
In the more or less worthy rebellion of their youth they had adopted
Windsor ties and become Bohemians for life.
Through the remaining winter and early spring, Jean and Herrick
continued to go less and less often, and in April stopped altogether.
Now, on Sundays, they took long walks over the hills. They built
driftwood fires in lonely coves and raced like children across the
dunes. And always, Jean led the talk to Herrick's novel and the things
he would write, so that these vague dreams took form between them. It
was as if Jean, reaching down among the qualities he believed he had
thrown away, found a small, discarded jewel. Together they polished it.
Jean's attitude hurt and flattered Herrick and the combination was fast
binding him against his will. Remembering the hours he was alone with
Jean on empty beaches and among silent trees, the knowledge that he had
never kissed her made him hot with shame. Away from her, he marveled at
his own control. But with her, a genuine peace for the most part held
him, so that the control was not so great as it afterward appeared. In
some strange way she herself stilled the storm she raised.
It was June, but a high fog had covered the sky all day. They had been
walking since morning and now, in the late afternoon, came out through
the trail that wound between the hills to the cliffs that edged the
sea. Up from below long white arms tore at the cliffs, dropped, reached
higher in new effort. While, farther out, the inexhaustible army of
waves rushed in, line after line, flung themselves on the cliffs, sank
back, rushed in again. Over it all the gray sky shut as if to keep
the din from the ears of God. The world was strangely alone, shut in
by itself, like a madman locked in his cell. Driven from infinity,
rushing on to infinity, the wind tore by them on its ceaseless quest.
Herrick took her hand and they began to run to a little beach wedged
between the cliffs. As they ran Jean was filled with a deep sureness,
as if she could run so forever, swifter and swifter, never halting or
stumbling, borne up by a strength within; a strength that was beating
out against the whole surface of her body, in an effort to join the
main current of all life, that touched her on every side.
At the foot of the bluff, Jean dropped to the floor of the cove, and
for a moment Herrick stood above her. Deliberately he enjoyed the
feeling of physical power it gave him to stand so, to feel his greater
strength, to know that in spite of her superb body he could bend, lift
and throw this woman into the sea. He could see her breast rise and
fall under the thin waist, and the base of her throat throb with the
breath that still came quickly after their swift run. For a moment, all
the artist in Herrick rose in appreciation of the picture, the unity
that bound Jean's body, the silent power of the gray cliffs yielding
so little to the centuries of rage tearing at them, to the eternal,
ever-changing sameness of the sea. There was much of them in Jean, so
that, as he looked, he felt tired and worn. He went and sat down a
little behind her, and drawing his knees to his chin, circled them with
his arms.
It was almost eighteen months since he had first brought The Kitten
here. They had raced down the hill too, but at the foot he had swung
her to the circle of his arms and kissed her madly. She had returned
his kisses, until, both a little exhausted, they lay on the sand, his
head in her lap, and her fingers had wandered in his hair, coming,
every few minutes, to rest hotly on his lips.
Herrick looked at Jean and wondered. She had never kissed a man as
The Kitten had kissed him. Would she ever? What was she thinking of,
smiling out over the gray sea? In that passionate, throbbing emptiness
she seemed as unconscious of him as if he were one of the gray cliffs.
She was as far away and impersonal as the wind sweeping indifferently
over the friendly little grasses.
In obedience to his unspoken wish, Jean turned.
"It's the sounds," she said, as if Herrick must have been following
her thoughts. "If there weren't any sounds in Nature, pagans would
never have invented a God. It's so impossible to imagine a silent Force
creating a world where the wind shrieks and the sea roars and you can
almost hear the earth breathe. It seems as if there must be a personal
god somewhere, a huge, powerful man who needs these voices to talk
with."
She had been thinking about God!
Herrick, without answering, drew farther back into the cove. He turned
from Jean to the open grayness, and a terror of its immensity forced
through every effort to keep it out. In the whole world there was
nothing but loneliness, an actual, positive, palpable loneliness, as
gray and chill as the sea, as all pervading as the boom of the surf far
out on the rocky bar.
"'And who knows but that God, beyond our guess,
Sits weaving worlds out of loneliness.'"
"Did you write that?"
For a moment Herrick stared and then he laughed. She would always do
it, make him feel old and spotted, and then whirl him up to the heights
by a belief in his power.
"It's absolutely perfect. God,--weaving worlds because He is lonely."
"No. It's not mine, I'd give a good deal to be able to claim it, but
it belongs to one Arthur Symons. Do you know his stuff?"
"No. Is it all like that?--'Weaving worlds out of loneliness.'"
"Not all. But he saw rather far into the heart of things." Without
further comment Herrick began to quote--whole poems, fragments, single
lines. It was all sad and beautiful and sensuous, filled with the
hunger of soul and body.
His voice took on a depth it did not have in usual speech. It fitted
perfectly with the sad booming of the surf and the whimper of the
little waves that ran in terror among the rocks. For the first time in
her life Jean felt the ache of physical beauty. She wanted to cry.
Toward sundown the wind died, the high fog parted and the sun sank in a
wine-red sea. Out on the ledge Jean and Herrick watched it dip over the
edge of the world.
When the coming night had stolen the last thread of color from the sky
they went back to the cove. Herrick piled brush and covered it with
great logs of driftwood. At the touch of a match, crackling flames ran
out and instantly the savage loneliness of the sea was shut away and
the cove became a home.
While they ate the sandwiches they had brought from the ranch-house
where they had stopped for dinner, they talked of everything and of
nothing. From time to time Herrick went after another log and Jean was
left alone, conscious of his absence, of the blackness beyond the fire
and the warm security of the rock walls, lit by the firelight. Each
time he returned Jean felt that she knew him better.
Stretched on the sand, his head on Jean's spread skirt, Herrick told
her of his boyhood and his passionate longing, even as a little child,
for the warmth and beauty he had no reason to believe existed.
"We had one of the poorest farms in Connecticut, and if you don't know
Connecticut you can't know what that means. There were just a few bleak
fields, enclosed by fences of stones that my father had picked from
the earth. We grew a little corn and some potatoes, but whenever the
crop was good there was no demand, and when prices were high something
always killed the crops. We had a few lean cows which I could never
believe had been calves. I could never imagine that anything on the
place had ever been young. Even my father and my mother. It seemed to
me as if they must have always been old and lived in the rickety house,
in the bare fields, with the lean cows and the failing crops.
"On each side of us the farms had been deserted before I was born.
Sometimes I used to wish there were other boys in them to play with,
but for the most part I accepted it just as I accepted the whining
complaints of mother, dad's stooped shoulders and the feeling of never
having all that I could possibly eat at one time.
"But one day a strange man drove up. He was fat, with a red face and a
gold watch-chain. He came in and clapped father on the back, and began
to talk faster and laugh more than any one I had ever heard. Even dad
and mother smiled as they listened. When mother told me he was going to
stay all night I went out in the barn and cried."
Herrick stopped and looked into the fire. He forgot Jean, everything
but the memories called to life by his own words. His face was hard
with hatred against that starved childhood and against his parents, for
always Herrick's hatred was deep against the thing that hurt him. There
were shadows about his lips, and his hands clenched until the cords
rose on his wrist.
"You poor, lonely, little boy," Jean whispered.
"I was. For you see, until that night, when Ed Pierce came back, I
didn't know there was anything else. I used to feel those stone fences
closing in like a grave. I didn't know but that the whole world was
flat and bare and stony. I thought that the Pierces and Thompsons had
just died under the strain, and that some day father and mother would
die too, and then I would be left alone.
"After dinner we sat round the fire. They had done all the gossiping
and Ed Pierce began to tell of the Far West. You must say it just like
that--The Far West!
"I can't tell you what it meant to me. It was a mixture of Heaven and
pirate expeditions in tropic seas and gold mines. But the thing that
stunned me was that we could go. It was on this earth and we could
get there! We could have it all, if father would only go and take it.
I can hear Pierce's big voice now: 'Take a chance, Bill. Don't be
scared. You're young enough yet. You'll make good with a quarter of the
strength you'll waste on this hole.'
"And my father sat there with his head sunk and his shoulders bent,
shaking his head!
"I crawled over to his chair and got hold of his knees. I begged him to
go. I believe I screamed. Father loosened my hands and told me to shut
up. But Pierce said:
"'Listen to him, Bill, the kid's got more sense than you. You've stuck
here so long you're plumb scared to move.'
"I got hold of his knees again and begged him not to be scared. At last
he took me by the arm and dragged me to the door and locked me into the
cold hall. I never forgave him. In the morning Ed Pierce was gone. For
a few days they mentioned him. Then they stopped talking about him.
There was nothing left but the stones and the hope of The Far West. And
all the weary years till I could get there."
"And you got here."
"Yes. I got here." There was no triumph in Herrick's tone.
Jean held out her hands to him suddenly. "You see, you _can_ do what
you want."
It was the first physical response Jean had ever offered. Herrick took
both hands in his and laid his cheek on them. Then, without a word, he
got to his feet and helped Jean up.
From the top of the hill they looked back. The fire glowed a deep red
hummock on the black beach. The white crescent of a new moon hung in
a rift of cloud and touched to silver the crests of the long swells.
Herrick walked ahead along the narrow trail and they scarcely spoke.
But at the gate, under shadow of the acacia that drooped its long
yellow blooms close to them, Herrick put his arms about Jean, pressed
his lips fiercely to hers, and hurried away.
Jean lay awake a long time, feeling the hot pressure of Herrick's soft
mouth and wishing that he had not kissed her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Herrick was happier than he had been for a long time as he sat
bareheaded on the upper deck and thought back over the day with Jean
and of how she had looked as he kissed her. It excited him and made him
tender to remember the look in her eyes, and the faint smile deepened
as he wondered what she was thinking now. Her lips had not responded
in the least, but she had seemed neither angry nor frightened. She had
accepted it as she would have accepted a leaf falling from the acacia
above. And yet he was sure that she had not often, if ever, been kissed
by a man. In some ways she was strangely primitive and in others she
seemed to have lived through and left behind in ages past the ordinary
emotional reactions. Herrick's brain was on fire with expectation and
curiosity. The memory of the kiss quickened his mind more than his
body, and his own reaction thrilled him with a new sensation.
He was happy. So happy that he could not go quietly to bed. Nor could
he walk alone in the empty streets. His nerves wanted the relaxation of
companionship. The perfect day wanted a touch of contrast to finish its
perfection. He needed to frame the memory of Jean's cool lips, possess
it alone in another setting.
A few moments later he crossed the studio amid the shrieks and catcalls
of The Bunch, straight to the couch where The Kitten was curled alone.
"So you thought you'd come and see whether we were alive. It's awfully
good of you! But you know we're hard to kill. Skin's so thick the
little stings and arrows don't get through, somehow."
The Kitten drawled between puffs of her cigarette and did not move to
make room for Herrick.
He lifted her, deposited her farther back among the cushions and tried
to take her hand. She was so furious and making such a ridiculous
pretense, just as she used to, that Herrick's feel of youth and
well-being increased. It was as if the memory of these old tricks, now
powerless to hurt, gave him back three years of time. At thirty-three,
Herrick wanted the past.
"But claws do, Kittycat."
"If we'd known you were going to honor us," persisted The Kitten, "we'd
have ordered champagne. As it is, we only had the same old ink, and
that's gone."
"A cigarette, a jug of ink and thou!"
"You--you----" Then, fearing she was going to cry, she stopped.
Across the room a tall girl with flat, red hair and small red-rimmed
eyes like glowing embers in the white ash of her face, broke off a
sentence in the middle.
"Who's that man over there, just come in, with The Kitten?"
Flop glared at this interest on the part of his newest inspiration.
"Franklin Herrick, alias Boy Blue. He used to be the real thing, but he
hasn't been round for ages."
The girl still stared. "I'd like to model him," she said slowly. "He
walks like a panther, has the forehead of a saint and the mouth of a
gutter rat."
"Great! Why don't you tell him? He'd be furious inside and look as if
he were going to kiss you."
"Maybe I will--if I get a chance."
"You won't. The Kitten's been sharpening her claws for months."
On the couch Herrick was holding The Kitten's hands, stroking them
softly.
"Who's the other woman?"
Flop's laugh bellowed above the noise. "You female Conan Doyle." His
voice dropped. "A serious impossibility--bromide to the limit--but she
has a good skin."
"Brains?"
"Oh, don't ask me."
"What's he see in her?"
"What are you so interested for? How do I know what any man sees in a
woman? You're all alike. I suppose when Herrick tries to kiss her she
screams, and that'd be enough to interest him."
The girl smiled. When she smiled the corners of her lips turned up over
small, uneven teeth. With a shrug of indifference she slipped her hand
into Flop's and they turned toward an excited group at the other end.
Here a slight man in a brown flannel shirt and red tie, with gestures
preserved from his student days in Paris, was arguing a technical point
in Verlaine. But as none of his listeners understood French, he was
finding it hard to maintain the requisite heat. When he caught sight
of the girl he appealed to her excitedly in a French whose studied
correctness made her laugh. She answered in a flood of rapid patois
incomprehensible to him. A smile ran round the group. Instantly the
girl's mood changed.
"Listen. It is impossible to translate. But listen. You will hear his
heart beating, throb, throb, in the French."
Her arms dropped to her sides. The heavy white lids lowered over the
red eyes. For a moment she stood so, artificial and decadent. Then she
began in a low, sweet voice that seemed to have nothing to do with her
body.
Her voice flowed in waves across the great room and melted into the
shadows. Flop listened with his hands before his face. The strutting of
the man in the brown shirt ceased. The Kitten hid her face on Herrick's
shoulder and his arms closed about her.
The girl went on, poem after poem. Herrick's eyes filled with tears
and his hold tightened on The Kitten. She shivered, pressed her lips
deeper into his neck, and kissed him with sudden, sharp kisses that
bit like hot coals. For half an hour the voice continued. It burned
away the memory of the day behind, of the sea, of the exacting faith in
Jean's gray eyes. This was the reality, this passion that throbbed in
the poet's words, the girl's voice, the scorching kisses of the small,
quivering figure in his arms. To feel and feel and feel.
The voice stopped as suddenly as it had begun. With the shudder of
a medium coming from a trance, the girl opened her eyes. Instantly
the purity of the listening silence was spotted with exaggerated
exclamations of delight. They crowded about her. Flop brought a glass
of wine, and sitting on his knee she sipped it, while her eyes wandered
to the corner where Herrick had sat and stroked The Kitten's hands. The
corner was empty. She grinned, and at Flop's request kissed him lightly
on the lips.
As they walked along, choosing the darker streets, neither The Kitten
nor Herrick spoke. Her fingers locked tight on his and Herrick walked
as if in a dream toward a fixed point. At the corner of the street
where Vicky and The Kitten had a small flat, Herrick stopped.
"Is Vicky home?"
"No. He went to Tulare a month ago."
The room was dark except for a long, white bar across the floor from a
street lamp outside. Beside the Morris chair Herrick knelt and put his
arms about The Kitten.
All the miniature independence was gone. She clung to him sobbing:
"I can't stand it any more. I love you and you're cruel, terribly
cruel."
There was all the old abandon, the absolute surrender in the figure
trembling at his touch. Of all the women he had known The Kitten had
loved most passionately, most recklessly, finding no flaw, asking no
change, holding him to no path. She loved him absolutely, utterly, as
he was. And it had bored him.
"I know, Boy, you only did it to hurt me. You don't love her. You know
you don't. You can't. Boy Blue," she whispered, her lips against his
cheek, "promise your Kittycat you'll never see her again. Then I'll
forget all the hurt--every single teeny bit."
With his arms about her, Herrick looked into the dark and saw Jean as
he had left her, only a short time before, under the acacia, part of
the clean night. In the gray fog by the sea, made more vital by the
immense sadness and beauty of it. The generous giving of her hands
to the lonely little boy, such a small, pitiful and generous gift.
Jean with her unshakable faith, her courage and her coldness. He felt
suddenly old, and afraid of his own fear.
"Are you satisfied now, Boy Blue? You've hurt me enough--till I've made
a fool of myself. But I don't care. Silly, silly Boy, he ran away, and
then he came back. He will always come back, always."
Sure of him, she laughed while she held his shoulders and made pretense
of shaking him.
"But it was funny sometimes, only very few sometimes, it was like a
baby going out with a little spade against a granite cliff. That's what
she's like, Boy, a cold, hard, granite cliff. Maybe he bruised his head
a little bit against the nasty, bad cliff. Well, never mind, mummy will
make it well."
The Kitten drew his head against her breast. "There, there. Now it's
all better. Nobody could beat down the cliff, so he mustn't feel bad,
but just come----"
The Kitten bent forward from the shadows and, full in the bar of
light, smiled at him. The last four months had made deep lines about
her scarlet mouth. In the bar of white light she was ugly, with the
ugliness of the small and withering. Herrick stepped back.
"You're ranting, Kitten. You don't know what you're talking about."
She blinked stupidly. She was almost hideous in her hungry fear.
"You don't understand. You can't understand women like Jean."
The Kitten got slowly to her feet.
"But she doesn't love you. _You_ couldn't make a woman like that
_care_."
Herrick's face reddened.
"Love! Why, Kitten, you don't know what the word means. When women
like that love, it's like a prairie fire. A white fire that sweeps
everything clean."
"'A white fire that sweeps everything clean!' A white prairie fire,"
muttered The Kitten. "You fool! You poor, blind fool. Do you think I'm
going to stand by and never say a word? Do you think 'the white prairie
fire'--oh, Lord, what a figure!--would love you if she knew? Why, she
wouldn't even kiss you if she thought you'd held another woman in your
arms--the great pink-and-yellow baby! And Vicky knows. He has always
known. They all know. Vicky will let me go. I am willing. I am not
ashamed. I----" She felt blindly before her as if she were picking the
words from air.
Herrick moved beyond reach. "Listen to me. There is no question of
whether people know or don't know. You're talking like a lunatic. There
never was a question of whether Vicky would free you or not. We loved
each other once and now it's over. That's all there is to it."
Herrick was thankful for the fine wrinkles, for all the small dried
ugliness that made it easy.
The Kitten swayed, steadied herself, and said quietly:
"You will have to marry her." She stated it as a simple fact that
Herrick might have forgotten. The inference of its judgment infuriated
him.
"From women like Jean one does not ask, does not want, anything less."
Long afterwards he envied The Kitten her moment's strength.
"Will you go?" she said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The next day The Kitten joined Vicky in the country.
Twice in the next three Herrick went to the phone to call Jean, and
hung up in the very act of asking for the number.
"You can never make her care...." The Kitten knew him as no woman had
ever known him, and he hated her for this knowledge.
He went nowhere and saw no one. Through the lonely dinners, and long
evenings in the studio, Herrick worked himself into a fury that urged
him on and held him back. His anger spread from The Kitten to Jean, to
all women. He was sick of them, weary of the power they had always had
over him. He loathed the women who had yielded to him and the women
who had not. He hated his own inability to live his life independent
of them. If no woman had ever crossed his life, interfering in its
plan, destroying the dreams he had dreamed in those last years of
the Connecticut farm, he would long ago have written something worth
while. He would have succeeded as Freeman and Harcourt and the others
had done. He would be free of The Bunch in their hectic fight for
forgetfulness. His life would be ordered with calm poise. He had it in
him. Jean felt it. Could she even yet make him what he might have been?
Like an intermittent fever the conflict raged. Then, through sheer
exhaustion, it dropped away. Herrick wondered what it had all been
about and went again to call for Jean at the closing hour. She was not
there. Two weeks before Jean had lost her place.
The next day they walked again in the hills. Jean was whiter and
quieter than he had ever seen her. The two weeks had tried her nerves
almost beyond control. The last to come on the library staff, a reduced
appropriation demanded that Jean be the first to go. And, although
she had taken no joy in the work itself, she had been happy in the
security of having work to do. Now, after two weeks of following
every advertisement to its end, only to discover she had none of the
experience they all demanded, the old horror of teaching had come back,
and Jean was almost ill. The new baby cried incessantly and the house
was more cluttered than ever. Tom had at last been forced into a job
at a ridiculous salary and from morning till night Elsie predicted
starvation for herself and her "two helpless little ones." Through it
all Martha Norris moved, armored by prayer to gentle acceptance of
these petty annoyances that Jean felt closing about her forever.
Her independence weakened by fear for the future, Jean was another
person and Herrick thrilled at the new Jean, this unsure, rather
desperate Jean. She felt his strength and experience, so much greater
than her own, and his understanding and sympathy seemed to relieve her
from the necessity of maintaining the silence she had mapped out as a
shield against the atmosphere of her home. For the first time she told
him something of that atmosphere, of her childhood, not as poor and
bare as his, but filled with the same rebellion for something whose
name she did not know. Much of what Jean sketched in bare outline,
Herrick could fill in. It told him much that had puzzled him. He knew
her better than she knew herself.
As Jean sat, throwing pebbles into the almost dry creek at their feet,
he knew her eyes were full of tears. He took her hands in his and
forced her to look up.
"Don't, Jean. It hurts me terribly to see you unhappy. Something will
turn up. It always does. I've been there too, you know."
Jean smiled through her tears. "I know I'm an idiot. But I do loathe
the idea of teaching and yet it's the only thing I suppose I'm fitted
for. I mean I have a diploma, an actual proof on paper, that I've been
through the preparatory mill and I can wave it in their faces. I shall
kill the next person who asks me if I've had experience."
"Well, don't begin with me, please. You're positively glaring."
Jean answered his laugh and felt better.
"Because if you do you'll eliminate my valuable assistance, and I think
maybe I see light. How would you like to go on a paper?"
"What!"
"Oh, I'm not suggesting that you edit one, but there are several things
of lesser importance, things that don't need more than an ability to
write good English. If you have a sense of color, so much the better. I
think perhaps you have. You'd rather like it in some ways, especially
at first, but I don't think you'd ever be a howling success. You're not
what they call 'a born newspaper woman.'"
"I don't believe I'm a born anything." Jean made no effort to still the
quavering of her voice. She felt as if she had been struggling along
a hard road by herself and some one had suddenly picked her up and
carried her to a safe spot.
"Nonsense. Of course you are. Only it takes some of us a long time to
find out. Would you really like to try it?"
"I should like it more than anything I can think of. How do I go about
it? Just walk in and say: 'I'm not a born newspaper woman, but please
give me a job'?"
"Hardly, though it might not be such a bad way. Anything that startles
an editor looks like ability to him. But we'll be less original than
that. Thompson of the _Chronicle_ is going to start a new Sunday
section and he's looking for some one. He wants some one with 'a new
angle,' 'fresh viewpoint,' 'punch,' etc. These things to a real editor
are like the golden calf to the ancient peoples. He grovels before
them. His life is spent in a mad search for them."
"But I have no newspaper angle and no viewpoint at all."
"Patience, neophyte. That's only another name for a perfect greenhorn,
with intelligence and an ability to manufacture, enthusiasm for the
editor's pet schemes. Do you think you can do that, Jean?"
"I could drown in enthusiasm, genuine, hysterical enthusiasm over
anything that would save me from school teaching. If it gave me enough
salary to move mummy to the city and make it an eternal impossibility
for her ever to ask Tom and Elsie to stay five minutes, I'd drop dead
of sheer exuberance."
"Under that condition I may not speak to Thompson. But if you promise
to continue in this life I'll see him the first thing in the morning
and let you know by afternoon. I'm not sure what it is. You may have to
do Household Hints or Beauty articles or Society notes. You may develop
into the greatest Lady Teazle of the United States and have the New
York papers sending for you."
"Then, when my biography is written you'll be mentioned as having given
me my 'first chance.'"
"Is that the only capacity in which I figure in your life?" Under the
banter Herrick's eyes looked deep into hers. Jean blushed.
Again, when he left her, Herrick kissed her. This time her repulsion
was less. Jean was poignantly ashamed that it was there at all. To
the dead black and white of Jean's logic there was something wrong in
feeling as near as she felt to Herrick, and at the same time sensing
that slight inner revulsion at the touch of his lips on hers.
CHAPTER NINE
Thompson of the _Chronicle_ was a large, fat man who had cultivated
what he considered the proper editorial manner so that even in ordinary
conversation he snapped out his sentences as if he were ordering a
cub reporter to a fire. He prided himself on being able to do a dozen
things at once and his fetish was concentration. One gathered that he
could write a better article in a power house than in a library. When
Jean entered he was scanning the proofs of the week's edition, making
notes on a pad, smoking, and calling three numbers on the telephone.
Jean's nerves had worn her almost to the point of interrupting the
great man, before he glanced at her.
"I'm going to run a new feature. I want a series of interviews with
leading people who are doing things. I don't give a whoop what they do
so long as it's for the general good, 'our city,' 'civic betterment,'
etc. But I don't want slush. No sob-sister rot. Civic pride and that
dope. Herrick says you can do it. The first will be with Dr. Mary Mac
Lean. We've run her regularly about every six months since Settlements
got popular. You're to get a new angle. When you get the hang of it,
you'll have to find your own interviews."
He almost snarled the last word, glared at Jean as if she had taken
his time on a personal matter, and attacked his cigar as if he hadn't
had one for fifty years. Jean had never heard of Dr. Mary Mac Lean and
had no very clear idea of what a Settlement was, but she did not ask.
When she had gone, the Managing Editor made a hieroglyphic in his
memorandum, favorable to Jean.
As she sat waiting for Dr. Mary, Jean's courage came back. At the worst
the doctor could only refuse to talk to her, in which case she would
have to do the best she could.
"And an interview where the interviewed refuses to say anything doesn't
leave much room for slush."
Steps sounded in the hall and a stocky woman, in a walking skirt that
made her appear even shorter, with quantities of fluffy white hair
piled on a large head, stood in the doorway, peering nearsightedly
through gold pince-nez. She looked like a large, good-natured and
freshly washed puppy picking up a scent. Jean went forward.
"Dr. Mary Mac Lean? I am Jean Norris. I 'phoned you about an interview."
The pince-nez flew off as if Dr. Mary had pressed a button somewhere
about her plump person, and Jean smiled. Dr. Mary returned the smile.
Without the thick lenses of the glasses her eyes were small but very
bright. They were like two little searchlights, ready to be turned on
any fact. When she smiled, the corners crinkled into wrinkles.
"Well, go right on. I suppose you're primed to the hilt." Dr. Mary
took a deep chair and motioned Jean to another. "What's it going to be
this time? Poverty, sin, crime, religion, the Social Evil, the plague,
red or white, suffrage, minimum wage, I.W.W.-ism, organized labor,
inefficiency of the workingman, college education, or How I Went Into
the Work?"
"I don't know. You see," Jean answered in a sudden resolve to take
the doctor into her confidence, "I'm very specially at sea. I don't
know a thing about any of those things, not even enough to ask for
enlightenment. I never heard of you up till an hour ago and would hate
to be put on a stand to tell what a Settlement was. I know you do
wonderful things with the poor, but I don't know whether you pay their
rent, or make them send their children to school. It's because I don't
know anything about you that they sent me. They want something new that
won't drivel."
Dr. Mary laughed till the tears stood in her twinkling blue eyes.
"My dear, that's the most adequate explanation I ever got from an
interviewer, and the Lord knows I've sampled them all. So they're after
something new that won't drivel." She bent forward with exaggerated
caution. "Do you know, Miss Norris, I have imperiled my immortal soul
and ruined my vocabulary, reading those interviews with myself. They've
called me everything from Feminine Tolstoy to All Womanhood's Sister.
Now, would you like to be called All Womanhood's Sister because you
installed three washtubs in an outhouse for some poor women?"
"I should loathe being called All Womanhood's Sister for any reason.
But is there anything they haven't asked you?"
Dr. Mary cocked her head to one side like a badly proportioned bird and
nodded:
"Yes. Nobody has ever had sense enough yet to ask me if there isn't
something I want to tell them. They always come with their ammunition
ready and it amuses me to watch them shoot wild."
"Then I qualify for 'the new angle,' for I haven't a bullet with me.
Will you tell me, Dr. Mac Lean, if there's anything you want to say?"
Dr. Mary's face sobered. "Perhaps I can better show you. Come."
The next was a wonderful hour to Jean. She felt as if the doctor were
going before her, tearing down walls, opening worlds she had never
glimpsed. At the door of the last room, Dr. Mary paused.
"I want you to meet one of our girls. In some ways she combines all
the problems we have--economic, social, educational. And there are many
like her."
The doctor turned the handle and they entered a large, well-lighted
room, fitted with sewing machines. A dozen dark women were busy sewing,
and their laughter mingled with the whir of the machines. They all
smiled and gave greetings in strange broken phrases of English, as Dr.
Mary, followed by Jean, crossed to the farthest corner where a girl of
nineteen was sewing furiously. She stopped and looked up, smiling.
"Well, Carmen, how's Jaime to-day?"
"Oh, so well! He get fat." The soft voice blurred the words to a single
low note as the girl reached over to the wicker basket on the chair
beside her. She lifted the baby and turned with radiant face to the
doctor.
"See. Hees legs--so fat."
She turned back the coarse little dress and showed with pride the small
shriveled legs. The doctor bent over the baby, so fragile and withered
that it seemed something not new-born but something older than time,
and gave a few directions in Spanish. The girl nodded and, as the baby
began to whimper, buried her face in the wrinkled neck and crooned to
him. Over her bowed head, the doctor's lips motioned to Jean: "Blind,
but she doesn't know it yet."
Jean's throat tightened and she felt sick with the sadness of it; the
girl-mother and the baby, so old, so weak, so resigned, as if it had
accepted its burden far back down the ages. The girl put the baby,
quieted now, into its basket. It lay for a moment staring with its
great, empty black eyes, and then closed them wearily. The girl covered
him with a bit of mosquito netting and sat down to her work again.
Before they were out of the room, she was sewing furiously again.
Jean looked at the doctor.
"Carmen Gonsalez, but I call her to myself, Mater Dolorosa. She
has never been to school, although she was born right here in San
Francisco and has wanted all her life to read. She is just turned
nineteen. Before she was fourteen she went to work in a tamale factory
and learned first hand the existence of all the evil she did not
already know from her own home. At sixteen she left the tamale factory
because the foreman gave her no peace, and went to work in an American
overall factory. She thought American men 'were different.'
"They _are_ different. A Mexican of the same caliber makes no bones
about his desires, but Mr. George Farrel crept to his goal like a
snake. She loves him yet. She believes he will come back, although
she has not heard of him for months. Only once have I ever seen her
angry--I never want to see it again. It was like the crushing force
of a glacier. She was whiter than paper and so still. Some one had
told her that George had married a Gringo. It is true. Once I thought
I might tell her after the baby was born. But it was born blind. 'The
sins of the fathers upon the children, yea, even to the third and
fourth generation.'"
"I should think," Jean cried passionately, "that you would hate the
whole human race."
"No. You see, I have been very many years in this work and that
first rage has worn off. We all have it. Sometimes I think it is
what brings us unto it at all. We see the crime and sin and sorrow
and we are filled with a blind passion to straighten it out. It's as
instinctive, at the base, as emotional an act as jumping into a river
to save some one. And then, after a time, long or short according to
one's temperament, you learn what I sometimes think is the only thing
in the world worth knowing--The Colonel's Lady and Judy O'Grady are
sisters under their skin. Then you don't get angry any more at social
injustice, or very sad, not unless you happen to have indigestion or
try to burn the candle at both ends. You just go along and believe."
"In what?"
Dr. Mary laughed. "Sometimes I don't know. Often I think believing is
just a general state of being, like feeling well. It's not belief in a
personal God and it's not unshakable faith in man and most surely it's
not a belief in the tremendous importance of one's job. Belief in what?
I think in this--That the Colonel's Lady and Judy go round in cycles,
hand in hand at that, and each cycle is a needed cycle, because in the
end--it's going to make a spiral. At least that's as near as I can word
it, Miss Norris, and I try to believe it most of the time, the spiral
part, I mean."
She walked with Jean to the street door, but stood for a moment before
opening it.
"Now you know what it is I want to say and if you can put it into
words you can do better than I. But that's your business. I want to
make these people happier because I have lived. And I want to be
happier because they have lived. I want to take the blind passion of
the Carmens and hitch it to the aridity of the rich ladies who come
in their limousines to our committees. I want to beat some of the
primitive vengeance of a Sicilian fisherman into the George Farrels.
I want to teach the women not to make the sign of the Evil Eye when
somebody stops them on the street and looks at the baby, and I want the
person who stops them on the street not to have spasms because the baby
is swaddled in a fashion they have never seen. Personally, it makes me
sick to see flies buzzing over a baby, but no sicker than it does to
hear some of the comments of the people who come to visit us. Not half
so sick. Come to think of it, I'd rather have a baby swaddled to death
and eaten by flies than talk ten minutes to the flyspecked souls and
swaddled brains of some of our visitors. And if you can get it through
the heads of the public, Miss Norris, you will be doing a good thing.
In a way, a place like this is public and we don't want to keep people
out. But whenever a review of any kind appears we are always swamped as
if we were a sideshow. It wouldn't be worth while paying any attention
to, except that it does show a serious side of the whole attitude. For
it reflects very really what the Colonel's Lady thinks of Judy O'Grady
and it's bad for them both."
The telephone rang. Dr. Mary held out her hand. "It may sound vague,
but we're in earnest."
"It sounds anything but that. I feel as if you'd turned a white
searchlight on Society for me, and----"
"All right. So long as you don't call the article that. 'Gropings'
would be nearer the mark. But if you're really interested come and
see me sometimes. We're pretty busy all the week, but I usually have
Sunday afternoons to myself. It's the only time I have for my personal
friends. I want you to come."
"I certainly shall, and thank you."
Waiting in a drugstore at the foot of the hill, Herrick saw Jean before
she saw him. She was walking quickly, her head back, her eyes glowing.
"Good Lord, what's happened? She looks like a modern Joan of Arc."
Herrick stepped out and joined her. "I suppose you would have walked
right over me and not known it. You look as if you were just about to
step off the edge of the world into eternal joy. What happened?"
"She's the most wonderful person that ever lived!" Jean's enthusiasm
rayed from her in a physical current. Herrick smiled.
"No wonder the rest of us dry up and grow old. People like you and Dr.
Mary have cornered all the energy and belief in the universe."
"Don't mention me in the same breath. My enthusiasms and beliefs are
like--like specks of dust on a diamond compared to hers. I feel like
a puling infant beside King Solomon. Just think of it--to go on never
giving up, never weakening, always believing. To feel that you mean
something. Not that you just fit in, but that you have a place that
nobody else can take! To do things. To take human beings and make them
into something!"
"Do they have to be poor and dirty and foreign, Jean? Wouldn't just
plain needing be enough?"
The voice was wistful and Jean laughed rather uncertainly. "No, I don't
suppose they would have to be dirty."
"Just so long as they were miserable and weak and dependent enough?"
"Yes. I guess that would do. I suppose all women like to be needed. It
flatters our vanity and makes up for all the big things in the world we
can't get at."
Herrick gave Jean's hand a quick pressure and let it go. "Kind of
indirect action. Well, did this wonderful person come through with an
interview?"
"Yes. I suppose she did, if you call shooting a perfect ignoramus into
a new world, an interview. I felt as if I were out with a little kite
to gather all the electricity in the heavens. Just think of trying
to get that personality into three thousand words and hand it in
to-morrow."
"It'll look more possible after dinner, a large, soggy dinner. Nothing
like it for dragging the soul down within reach."
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.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
"So you are going to marry him." Martha picked up the toast that had
burned while Jean talked and threw it on the fire.
In the bright sunshine she looked old. Her flesh was pale and flaccid,
like the flesh of overworked people, or of the aged who have gone
without sleep. Her hair was twisted in a tight knot, but stray, gray
wisps escaped. Her throat was stringy and the chin muscles sagged.
Jean tried not to look at the discolored neck and the thin, worn hands.
They stood for all that her mother had missed in life. It roused
something in her sharper than pity, a kind of anger. With an effort she
went round the table.
"Mummy, don't look like that." Jean knelt and put her arms about the
rigid figure.
Martha did not move. It had come so suddenly, before she had found
strength to meet it. She had disliked Franklin Herrick on sight and
even this morning, at early service, had knelt long after the close of
mass and prayed that he might be taken out of Jean's life.
And now Jean was going to marry him. To take him for richer, for
poorer, in sickness and in health, till death parted them. She heard
herself saying the words that had bound her for life to Jean's father.
She had tried to do her duty, but death had come as a great release.
She had done her best and had had the sacraments of the Church and
prayer to help her. Jean had nothing. She was plunging blindly into
this state, the greatest personal martyrdom ordained by God. And with
Franklin Herrick. Martha could see no plan, no purpose in this thing
and battled to hold firm her faith.
"Mummy dear, don't. Please don't look like that, as if something
terrible had happened."
"Something terrible has happened, Jean. You are going to yoke yourself
for life, think of it, for all the years God may demand you live on
this earth, with a man who has no higher conception of life than an
animal."
Jean's arms dropped to her sides and she pressed her lips tightly
together.
"And he will lead you farther and farther away, Jean. He has a power
over you that I would never have believed, never. Ever since you have
known him you have been different. You're ready at his beck and call.
Have you ever refused to go anywhere when he has asked you? Long ago
you gave up church, but, still, you spent the day with some kind of
respect. But now, how do you spend the day that God Himself put aside
for His worship?"
"In the hills that He made." Jean almost prayed for strength to be
patient.
"And your friends? Infidels and wasters and adulterers, by your own
story. Oh, Jeany, Jeany, my baby."
Martha laid her head on the table and sobbed.
Jean rose. In spite of all her effort to do otherwise she could not
help it. She felt a physical nausea at the sight of her mother's
emotion. She tried to go nearer and could not. She could not comfort or
touch that quivering figure.
"Let's not talk any more about it, mother. It will only make us both
unhappy."
Martha struggled with her feeling as with an enemy and conquered. She
rose, too, and for a moment they stood facing each other.
"There is some good purpose in it all, there must be and He will show
me. Perhaps I have loved you too much and He has chosen this instead of
death. You must have patience with me, Jean. He will show me. Till then
I can only say blindly--Thy will be done."
Before the tremendous egotism of her mother's humility, Jean went
slowly back to the table and sat down.
"When are you going to be married?" Martha dried her eyes and, crossing
to the stove, brought the hot coffee and filled both their cups.
"Very soon," Jean answered wearily. "There's no reason to wait, and
Franklin wants to get settled at some work."
Martha winced at the name.
The next moment the door opened and Tom and Elsie and Tommykins came
in. Tom was even fatter and redder than usual and more offensively
good-natured. He insisted on guessing what had happened, until Jean
stopped the flow of his ridiculous suppositions with a brief:
"I am going to be married."
Elsie hugged her, and Jean gathered from the cataract of
congratulations that Elsie had never expected her to marry, that
marriage was the only thing in a woman's life, that it was one long
martyrdom. You were to be pitied if you did and pitied if you didn't.
Then Elsie dabbed at her eyes and they all sat down to the late Sunday
morning breakfast.
Tom made broad jokes about some people's luck and "turning new leaves."
He kept appealing for corroboration to Tommykins and going into spasms
of laughter at his son's stare. He wanted to know whether Jean would be
able to stand the family now that she was going to marry a highbrow
and whether she and Herrick talked in prose or blank verse. He tried
with genuine kindness and unfathomable stupidity to fill the silences
that settled more and more heavily as breakfast drew to a close.
As soon as it was over and the things cleared away, Martha went
upstairs for her Sunday rest. With all her heart Jean wished that she
had not told Herrick not to come. She had meant to give this Sunday
entirely to her mother, even to go to afternoon service with her. She
had known that her marriage would be a blow and had sincerely wanted
to ease it as much as possible. But Martha's reception of the news
had frozen the suggestion on her lips. Now Jean faced a hot afternoon
alone. Upstairs Elsie scolded at Tommykins who refused to be dressed
in his Sunday clothes and the new baby helped her brother's efforts
by wailing at the top of her lungs. From the hammock under the pine,
where he was trying to read the papers, Tom called rough directions for
managing the children and finally banged into the house to see that
they were executed.
Jean put on her hat, took some paper on which to write to Pat and left
the house. In the canyon back of the college grounds it was cool, and
Jean lay on her back in a tangle of green, her hands clasped under her
head, and wondered just where she would begin. She had so much to say,
and yet when she focused it all, it came simply to this:
"I am going to marry Franklin Herrick whom I mentioned to you once. I
have known him less than six months and will be married in three weeks."
Put that way, it sounded unreal, and she could hardly believe it
herself. She said it aloud and still it seemed strange, as if she were
speaking of some one else, not of herself. She wondered whether all
women felt that way, and whether her mother had felt like that when
she had married her father. What had her mother felt? Looking back,
Jean wondered.
What had been the relationship between her father and mother? Certainly
there had been no feeling of nearness between them, none of that
spiritual contact so strong between herself and Herrick; that thing
that made long hours of silence closer than words; that sense of
knowing what he felt.
Jean thought of the first time Herrick had kissed her in the spicy
darkness of the acacia and of the physical repulsion that had
frightened her. And of the other night, when he had pleaded, "A real
one, Jeany," and she had wondered what he meant.
How had her mother felt the first time her father had kissed her? Had
she known what a "real kiss" was? When she thought about it directly,
as she was doing now, she had no memories of her father's kissing
her mother, or of their ever sitting hand in hand as she and Herrick
sat often, watching the sun drop into the sea. She seemed to have no
special memories of them together at all.
Suddenly Jean sat up. She had one. It came to her with the clarity of
a photograph. She could see the streak of sunlight across the bare,
scrubbed floor, the brightly polished stove, the box of geraniums in
the window. She could smell the clean smell of the place and feel again
the stillness.
It had been a Sunday, a warm, blue day, like to-day. All afternoon she
had been in the garden trying to amuse herself and not succeeding. She
could recall, so sharply that it made her smile, the desperate effort,
and her final relinquishment of it. It was so useless to battle against
Sunday. Besides the monotony of her own home, Jean had always felt the
burden of the whole world, locked into the petrifying inaction of the
Blessed Sabbath, and struggling to rest and enjoy it therein. This
particular Sunday had been almost paralyzing in its peace, and Jean
could see herself, a small figure in a checked dress and pebble-goat
shoes, come shuffling along the gravel walk, scuffing her toes because
she had always been told not to. But the unusual sound, at that hour
in the afternoon, of her father's voice in the kitchen, stopped her at
the door, and she stood peering through the wire screening. She saw her
father come slowly across to her mother, who stood shrinking between
the table and the sink. For months after that, Jean had smelled the
dust in the screen and felt the rusty wire pressing the tip of her
nose, whenever she thought of it. Her father had come close to her
mother and stopped. His face was white and his lips trembled and Jean
had been afraid he was going to cry.
"Marty, can't you forgive? Aren't you human at all?"
The words had bitten into Jean's memory because it was her father who
was saying them in a queer voice and with a strange white face. Then he
had come closer and tried to put his arms about her mother, but she had
shrunk back with a sob that brought Jean at a bound into the kitchen.
Her father's arms had dropped to his sides. The blood rushed into his
face and for a moment he had stood with his mouth open. Then with a
shrug he turned away and said in his natural voice:
"You'd better ask that God of yours for a little common sense."
At that Martha had unclasped Jean's protecting arms and gone quietly
out of the room. A few moments later Jean heard the front door slam.
For the first time in her life her father did not come back to supper.
But, mixed with the tragedy of her mother's red eyelids and the silent
supper, was a tingling excitement that something had happened on
Sunday. It gave an elasticity to the rigid Sunday routine that for
months had filled Jean with a pleasant sense of possibility.
Shortly after that her father had died. Strange relatives had appeared
with an extraordinary attitude toward her mother, as if Martha had
suddenly become unable to think for herself. They had bustled about
whispering, and had tried to take direction of the funeral. But
their efforts fell useless before Martha's quiet determination. A
step-brother of the dead man's had become rather violent in his
objection to a church-service. But the long brown coffin had been
carried into the church nevertheless, and the priest had intoned the
mass and incensed the coffin in spicy smoke that had made Jean cough.
And afterwards, she and her mother had stood at the open grave, and
when the priest said, "Dust to dust," and all the relatives Jean had
never before seen sniveled or sobbed openly, Martha had held her hand
tightly and Jean had heard her whisper, "Father, forgive."
For a year Jean and her mother had gone early every Sunday morning to
church and Jean had prayed fervently that her father be forgiven. For
what, exactly, she did not know, but she remembered now that she had
linked it up to the Sunday that her mother had cried and her father had
not come home to supper; and that she had not felt quite honest praying
for her father to be forgiven. Living, he had never said a prayer nor
gone to church with them. But dead, they had him at their mercy.
What had he done? Why had they prayed so earnestly that he be forgiven?
Why did these two memories alone frame her father, when she tried to
think what life had been to him and to her mother? What difference
would it have made in her own life if there had been other memories?
In the quiet warmth of the brush, Jean shivered. It was wrong, wicked
to bring children up like that. What did it matter that she had
always had enough to eat and to wear and had gone to school, when the
deepest memory she had of her parents was her mother shrinking from her
father's touch, and the long brown coffin in the church to which her
father had never gone of his own will. It seemed to Jean that she had
been cheated and deprived of something that could never now be hers.
She pushed the hair back from her eyes.
"If I ever have children----"
Jean stopped. She could feel the blood creep up from her toes,
scorching her. If she had a child it would be Herrick's. It might have
Herrick's changing eyes and soft, full lips and the high, thin laugh.
Jean had not thought of Herrick's thin voice for months.
She jumped up. She did not want children. She wanted to do her work
in the world, and to help Herrick do his. There were too many people
in the world already. She thought of Dr. Mary and the problems she
struggled with, of Carmen and the puny, blind baby.
As Jean came into the kitchen Martha was getting supper. She looked
rested and Jean knew that she had been praying. Jean's anger of the
morning was gone, and as she looked at the small figure moving quickly
about, rather envied her. Had there ever been an emotional crisis in
her mother's life that had not been eased by preparing food for some
one?
"Mummy," she asked suddenly, "do you remember once my coming into the
kitchen, when we lived in the old Webster Street house, one Sunday and
finding father trying to put his arms round you and--you wouldn't let
him?"
As Jean asked it, she turned to take an apron from its peg and stood
so, for her mother had stopped in the act of lighting the gas stove,
let the match burn to her fingertips, scorch them, and go out.
"Yes--I remember," Martha answered after a long pause.
Jean waited.
"I think, dear, I'll warm the cold meat with a brown gravy. It makes it
go farther."
And Martha Norris lit another match.
* * * * *
Three weeks later Jean and Herrick were married. They were married
in church to please Martha and for the same reason made a pretense
of eating afterwards the elaborate meal she had prepared. Tom was
heavier and cruder than ever and Elsie more vapid. The new baby cried
incessantly and Tommykins took occasion to outdo himself as a general
nuisance. Jean was thoroughly glad that Pat had not been able to come,
and always remembered her wedding dinner as the worst meal through
which she had ever sat.
CHAPTER TWELVE
From the chaos of chance emotions, pleasure snatched at random, Herrick
settled down into the calm order of a life directed by a fixed purpose.
He was going to write the novel. It was all mapped out. He and Jean had
settled it through the long, peaceful afternoons of their two-weeks'
honeymoon at the Portuguese ranch in the Marin Hills. Spurred by Jean's
interest, Herrick had seen the thing clearly and they had worked up an
excitement about it that had given Herrick an exquisite sense of power,
youth, achievement. Her belief filled him with the conviction that it
was all he had ever needed.
The cool little kiss that had so disappointed Herrick on the night
he had asked Jean to marry him, delighted him now that he realized
the almost incredible depths of Jean's shy purity and ignorance. She
was like no woman he had ever known. Herrick was surprised at himself
and grateful to Jean for this surprise. The most precious thing, in
Herrick's scheme of life, was a new sensation and that he now had.
For the present he was content to have Jean's eyes light as he worked
out some intricate detail of his hero's life, or spoke with firm
purpose of the thing he meant to do next, as soon as this one "that had
haunted him for years" was out of the way. The breathless way she would
say: "That's great. Now go and get it down before you forget it," made
him want to take her in his arms and crush her until he hurt even her
strong body. But deeper than the delight of doing it, was the sensuous
delight in his own restraint. He asked none of the passionate response
of other women. This almost frightened surrender was enough. The other
would come, and of its own accord. The light in Jean's eyes and the
quick catch that came into her voice when they talked of the full years
ahead, was a promise. No fire could burn on the surface like that.
Secure in his untried strength, Herrick was very gentle and tender. He
was going to write many fine books and he was going to tend that spark
in the calm gray eyes of his wife until it blazed at his will.
Watching him, Jean was happy too. She had justified her own faith.
Looking back after almost two months of marriage, Jean saw what a
blind faith it had been. She had known nothing whatever of him. She
had found him among people she despised. Her mother had mistrusted.
She remembered the Sunday she had sat under the scrub oak and recalled
her mother shrinking from her father's touch, and farther back than
that the hot shame that had held her at the hungry groping of Herrick's
first kiss. There was nothing of that in his touch now. He liked to
draw her to the arm of his chair as she passed and rub his cheek softly
against her shoulder, and when he kissed her Jean always felt that it
was somehow a little rite that something very pure and deep in him was
offering to her.
Jean had not given up her work on the paper, because she did not
wish to be a dead weight on Herrick and had definite ideas about the
economic independence of women, and because she knew that housekeeping,
as she and Herrick were content to live, would take up very little of
her time. They had made few changes in the studio except to transform a
rubbish closet into a kitchenette and to make an extra bedroom of the
storeroom at the end. Otherwise it was as bare and "monk-like" as in
the days when Herrick had lived alone. Shortly after they were married,
Jean had told him how like a monk's cell she had thought it, the night
they wrote her first interview. Herrick had laughed, but suddenly his
eyes had misted and he had drawn Jean close and held her so for a
moment.
Martha Norris disliked the studio almost as much as she did the
haphazard order of their lives, and for this she blamed Jean. Deep in
her heart she liked Herrick no better than she ever had, nor could she
yet see the Divine purpose in making him Jean's husband. But, since
he was her husband, it was Jean's duty to weave about him those iron
bands that Martha called "making a home." Instead, more than half the
time they ate in restaurants. Jean called at the office for Herrick, or
they met somewhere and ate strange food in not overclean places. Once
in a while they brought chops or steaks in with them and fried these
over the gas. Martha made many indirect inquiries, but she never heard
of a meal that took more than fifteen minutes to cook. To buy cheap
underclothes and throw them away when they wore out, as Jean now did,
as well as Herrick, savored to Martha of license. It reached beyond
economics and touched morality. It was not far removed from their
decision not to have children. On this subject Martha and Jean had
talked only once, but Martha had prayed half the night about it.
The whole manner of this life was hectic and a little illicit, but she
made no comment. In the hours of lonely agony that she had spent on
Jean's wedding day, she had laid out her plan, and even finding that
it was the worst possible would not have swerved her a hair's breadth
from it. Nothing should ever come between her and Jean. She would
accept Herrick and try to like him, and this she did to the best of
her ability. She listened with interest when Jean told her of the work
Herrick was planning to do, and cooked all day Saturday getting the
dinners she served with so little apparent effort every fourth Sunday.
Jean understood and was filled with a softer love and truer sympathy
for her mother than the other guessed.
Martha only knew that, as weeks slipped by, this marriage of Jean's
was not weaning her big daughter away as she had expected and feared
so terribly. On the contrary, it seemed to draw them more closely
together in many ways. Jean often stole an hour from work and dropped
in unexpectedly. Then they had tea, and if there were any of the little
tea cakes that Jean loved, she always took some home for Herrick.
As for The Bunch, they seemed to have passed quite out of Jean's life.
Sometimes she met one of them by accident, and twice she and Herrick
had gone, at Flop's insistence, to an extra "blow-out." But Herrick had
been as bored as she, and they had not gone again.
When they had been married a little over three months, Herrick began
the novel. It was to be the life story of a man who had beaten his way
up from just such beginnings as Herrick's, and who finally achieved
fame and fortune as a great engineer. The man's name was Robert, and
Jean and Herrick spoke of him as of some one who lived with them.
Every night they hurried back from dinner to "keep the appointment with
Robert." From eight until ten Herrick wrote. He insisted that he could
not write a line unless Jean was curled up in her favorite place on
the couch. From time to time he would stop, and as soon as she became
conscious that the machine was no longer clicking, Jean would look up
and smile. Herrick liked to make Jean look up and smile.
Watching Herrick at work evening after evening, Jean felt that life was
a very simple matter if one used one's common sense and went straight
ahead doing the thing that was best and right. If people spoiled their
lives and got less than they might have had, it was because they were
either like The Bunch, grabbing feverishly at every passing illusion,
afraid that they might miss something; or else they were like Martha,
refusing and denying, which, after all, was only another kind of
fear. In these days of greater nearness to her mother, Jean sometimes
wondered whether Martha had not really wanted happiness so much that
she had been afraid to take it.
Jean spent many happy hours listening to the click of Herrick's machine
and laying down the laws of life. Fear was the thing to be afraid of.
She was very clear and definite in her own mind about this. Fear was
the great paralysis. But there was no need for any one to be paralyzed
unless he wanted to be. Of these speculations and certainties she wrote
to Pat, and Pat wrote back asking the color of Herrick's eyes and
saying she was too busy to philosophize about fear or anything else and
would "save all that" until she saw Jean, if that happy day ever came,
now that Jean was so busy leading her double life. Pat always insisted
on referring to Jean's newspaper work as one life and her "man job" as
another life.
Herrick liked this and used to stop work sometimes to come and sit
close to Jean on the couch and demand:
"Am I your 'man job,' Jean?"
When Jean said he was, Herrick insisted that she put the stamp of her
workmanship on it, which meant that Jean was to kiss him. When she had
kissed him he would go back to the machine and work steadily. He was
always making up little games like that, and after Jean had gotten over
the first sense of foolishness, she had come to like them.
Jean was quite honest with herself and with Herrick when she said that
he was her real work. She had no delusions about the newspaper. It was
much better than the library and infinitely better than teaching, but
she was not a born newspaper woman. She had not again found a Dr. Mary
or any one who approached her. It was only because her personal life
was full in those first months that some of the interest overflowed
into her routine, and Jean was able to interview dull people and whip
their mediocre purpose into some kind of life. The atmosphere of the
office she loathed, with its terrific rush and confusion, and was never
able to work up a proper respect for the wonderful concentration of Mr.
Thompson.
She often thought of Dr. Mary and her promise to go to the Hill House.
Twice she asked Herrick to go with her on a Sunday afternoon, but
Herrick had begged off.
"We work hard all the week, Jeany, and taking tea and settling the
affairs of nations strikes me as too strenuous for our one day of rest.
And, besides, I want you all to myself."
Jean was disappointed but said nothing. She decided to go and see the
little doctor the first chance she had. But, somehow, the chance did
not come, and finally, when six months had gone by, she was ashamed to
go.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In the middle of November, Herrick struck a snag in his work. The first
five chapters had gone well. He had brought Robert up from the farm,
taken him through college and plunged him into a big mining scheme in
South America. He had drawn well the narrowness of Robert's home and
the longing for opportunity.
But now Robert balked. He sat down in the Brazilian jungle to which
Herrick had led him and refused to move. Hour after hour Herrick
struggled and honestly tried to wake him from the permanent sleep
into which he had fallen without warning. But Robert would not wake.
Herrick's nerves tightened. He wanted and did not want to consult Jean.
He had never asked her advice about the psychology of his people, only
about the arrangement of incidents, or the vividness with which he had
succeeded in portraying them. To ask help in this was a confession of
his inability and Herrick's vanity refused.
And deep in Herrick's consciousness, beyond the point of
self-acknowledgment, was the fear that Robert was not asleep. Robert
was dead, dead beyond the power of revivifying. Until now Robert's
reactions had been Herrick's own. But from now on Robert must be
himself, and Herrick could not flesh the skeleton of this strenuous
young engineer, toiling away alone in his jungle, with no nearer
stimulus than a board of directors fifteen thousand miles away.
Evening after evening Herrick sat at the machine and covered pages with
useless words. His fingers moved mechanically, although he tried to
focus his attention on Robert. But the thoughts running at the back
of his brain pushed Robert further and further beyond the border of
his interest, and, finally, one evening in the middle of November,
Robert dropped over the horizon altogether and Herrick knew that he
had finished with him forever. His fingers lay idle on the keys and he
stared into space.
In the dressing-room Jean was changing into a house-dress. Herrick did
not like her to curl up on the couch in her working clothes and she
always changed to please him. In a few moments she would come through
the door quietly, take a book and make herself comfortable among the
pillows. She had done this for four months now. Every evening they had
sat so, Jean beyond touch across the room, but where he could look up
and see her. Every evening for four months he had sat almost the whole
distance of the room away from this big, calm, gray-eyed woman. Herrick
smiled. Soon the real winter would set in. The rain would beat on the
attic roof and the wood-fire crackle in the grate. There would be long
Sundays impossible out of doors. Would Jean expect him to sit through
these too, driving that mummy forward in his senseless progress?
Herrick's smile deepened.
Coming through the door, Jean caught the smile, and answered it. Then,
passing the work-table without speaking, she took a book and dropped
among the pillows. It was Hunter's "Poverty." She did not open it
immediately, but lay back against the cushions and closed her eyes,
stretching her arms above her head in a way she had when she was tired.
Completely relaxed she lay there, her throat and bare arms white on the
dark blue background of the cushions. The smile withered on Herrick's
face, and his fingers closed tightly, but he did not move. At last
Jean drew a long breath that swelled the deep breast, stretched, and
reached for her book. Herrick rose, ripped the paper from the machine,
tore it into fragments and threw them in the waste-basket. Then he
covered the typewriter and came towards the couch. Jean sat up.
"Why, Begee, what's the matter?"
It was the name that they had evolved from one of Herrick's little
games. It stood for a contraction of baby and genius. Jean had hit on
it accidentally and Herrick had insisted on keeping it.
He came over to the couch and sat down. He did not sit very near Jean,
because in a little while Jean was going to move of her own accord. Now
that he had so suddenly murdered his pretense he knew exactly what he
wanted.
"Jean, we're all wrong about Robert. He isn't a man at all. He's a
machine."
Jean laughed. "He is not. He's nothing of the kind. He's not the least
bit mechanical. You've fleshed and blooded him beautifully."
"Maybe I have since I've given him my own. But he's an ass, just the
same."
"He isn't and I won't have you abuse him. He's a real man and a
particular friend of mine."
"Well, I can't say much for your taste, then. I'd like to punch his
head. He'd bore me to death in ten minutes. Maybe, if you're so keen
about him, you'll accompany him on that neat little stunt he's about to
pull off. _I_ have no desire to go to Peru with the creature."
"I'd love to, but you know perfectly well that I can't put a thing
together except the ambitions of ladies who rescue cats. Getting Robert
through the next six months of his life wouldn't bore me. It would
overwhelm me."
"It'll swamp me--if I try."
"Begee!"
"Absolutely. He's behaved pretty well up to now because I understand
him. But I don't understand how it feels to tramp through a jungle with
nobody but natives you can't talk to, and sit all alone in a tent,
through wonderful moonlight nights, smoking pipes and being happy. I
never sat alone in a tent under tropic moonlight and I don't want to,
with nothing but a pipe. I'd go raving mad."
"Nonsense. If you'd wanted to build bridges instead of write novels,
you'd have done just the same."
"But I didn't want to build bridges. What's the good of them anyhow,
messing up a perfectly good jungle? It's a fool point of view, that
everlasting conquering difficulties and improving things."
"You know you don't mean that." Jean was looking at him now, with the
smile gone from her eyes. No more than Martha did she like to hear the
things she cared for derided. Instantly Herrick saw that he had gone
too quickly to his goal.
"I tell you what, Jeany, if we get that bridge built we'll have to
give Robert some incentive. We'll let him meet Dora before he does it
instead of after. It'll make her better, too, eliminate any possibility
of her loving him for anything but himself. How does that strike you?
She can't fall in love with his achievements, if he hasn't any."
"But that isn't the way we've mapped it out. Robert was going to get it
all done and offer it to her. It's just what he would do. If you go and
change it round you make him another kind of man. Maybe that other kind
of man wouldn't get the bridge----" Jean broke off suddenly.
"The bridge built at all. Is that what you mean?" Herrick finished for
her.
"Yes, I suppose I do. You see----" Jean frowned in her effort to get
exactly the right words. It seemed somehow very important that she
should get them just right, "The way we have it fixed now, Robert is
one kind of man and Dora is one kind of girl, and they're going to be
awfully happy. But if you change him she wouldn't be happy with that
kind of man. He'd be just the kind that would want to trail her through
the jungle after him. You will have to change her, too."
"Rubbish, Jean. That's the psychology of a girl of sixteen. Do you
suppose love depends on whether a man builds a bridge or not?"
"That isn't the point, Begee, and it's not the same thing at all.
Whether he built the bridge or not, under those difficult conditions,
depends on the man he is."
"Oh, Jean, you're a baby. Carrying out that logic then, if _I_ never
finish the novel, I am another man. And you'll have to get made all
over yourself. Would I be a different man to you?"
Jean looked down at her hands clasped in her lap. Then she raised her
eyes to Herrick's:
"Yes. You would be different."
"Why? Why would not finishing the novel make me any different?"
"Because, if you had never wanted to do it and never started, or
couldn't do it, that would be different. But you have always wanted
to, for years and years it's been haunting you. You can do it and you
have started it. So, if you stopped now, because you've got into a hard
place, it would mean that you hadn't the grit to go on. It would be
just plain cowardly. You'll be afraid of the pain and trouble of the
effort."
"Well, what of that? What's so specially fine in not being afraid of
pain? What's so horrible in being a coward? A coward is often a man who
sees values more clearly than the mob. What's so noble in beating after
something that won't make you any happier when you've got it? That's
all courage is, striving after something difficult or impossible to
get."
Herrick came closer and laid both hands on Jean's shoulders.
"It's just a lot of words, Jean, handed down till we swallow them
whole, this babble about courage and strength and getting the best of
things. Words, words, that's all. The measure of all this courage is a
measure of effort, not of accomplishment. According to that theory, a
baby that beats its head against a stone wall is brave."
Jean sat silent, held by the same terrible necessity of getting the
right words.
"No, it is not just blind fighting. It isn't beating after something
that you think's going to make you happy. It's seeing clearly and not
being afraid of being unhappy."
"Not being afraid of being unhappy? What else is there to be afraid of?
What else matters?"
"Being the best self you have, the very, very best."
"Is it?" His hold on her shoulders tightened, and he said, more to
keep that look on her face than for any further interest he had in the
subject:
"And this best? There is never any doubt about it? It is always
perfectly clear what it is?"
"Of course it's always clear--if we're honest."
"And every one knows what this wonderful 'best' in himself is and goes
trotting on alone and grabs it?"