So Bertram Chester went on, the easy familiar of the Tiffany
establishment, the contriver of Mrs. Tiffany's household assistances,
and the devoted follower of Eleanor. He never referred in any way to
the scene on the restaurant balcony; he did nothing formally to press
his suit. Indeed, his occasional air of gentle diffidence puzzled and
amused her. She had a queer sense, when she beheld him so, that she
liked it in him less than some of his old uncouthness, and only a
trifle better than such roughness of the heart as that passage with
the Chinese waiter. This new attitude was loose in the back, tight
across the shoulders, short in the seams--it was not made to fit
Bertram Chester. When he launched out into rudimentary art criticism,
stringing together the stock slang which he had picked up in the
studios, when he tried to impress her with his refined acquaintance,
his progress toward "society" of the conventional kind, her amusement
took another turn in the circle of emotion, and became annoyance.
In general company, he reverted to type. At their home dinners, when
wine and good fare had lit the fires of his animal spirits, he still
told his rambling, half-boastful stories of the cow country and of
College times, or laid before these home-stayers the gossip of the
town. That manner of his, always more compelling than either his
substance or his words, carried the plainest story; and he had at
least the art of brevity. One laughed when he laughed, catching from
his spirit the humorous idea, even when its expression failed on the
tongue. Voice and gesture and an inner appreciation which he could
flash instantly to his tongue contributed to these dazzling effects.
His new-made friends of the artistic set used to tell him, "If you
could only write down your stories--what humor, what action!" Mark
Heath, with the information of a room mate, the judging eye of a
half-disillusionized friend and the cynicism of a young journalist,
was first to perceive that a stenographer concealed to transcribe his
talk would get only barren words.
In his fading and declining years, Judge Tiffany leaned more and more
upon Eleanor, his business partner. Now it had come spring. The trees
were in bud along the Santa Clara. They must begin preparing for the
season. The family did not move to the ranch until apricot picking was
afoot; but from now on either Judge Tiffany or Eleanor would run down
every week to watch the trees and to oversee the Olsen preparations
for harvest time. Purchase of supplies and the business of selling
last year's stock, held over for a rise in German prices, kept Eleanor
busy.
She dragged the Judge out of his library one March afternoon, that he
might inspect with her a new set of sprayers which she was
considering. The Judge went to his office all too seldom nowadays;
Eleanor and Mrs. Tiffany used continually all kinds of diplomacies to
keep him at his business, from which he stubbornly refused to retire.
When they had driven their bargain, Eleanor guided and wheedled him to
the office. The methodical Attwood, having his man there, thumped a
pile of papers down before the Judge, representing that this demurrer
must be in on Tuesday, that case tried or continued next week. The
Judge sighed as he pulled the papers toward him.
"They've nailed me, Nell," he said. "Here, I'll appoint a substitute.
Send for Mr. Chester, Attwood--dining anywhere, Chester? Then take pot
luck with us and pay me by escorting my business conscience home. I'll
overwork myself if someone doesn't carry her away!"
* * * * *
The afternoon fog, forerunner of another rain, floated in lances above
Montgomery Street. The interior valleys had felt their first touch of
baking summer, had issued their first call on their cooling plant--the
Golden Gate, funnel for mist and rain-winds. The moisture fell in
sleety drops; yet only the stranger and pilgrim took protection of
raincoat or umbrella. The native knew well enough that it would go no
further. On these afternoons, neither cold nor hot, wet nor wholly
dry, the blood is champagne and the heart a dancing-floor.
At the moment when Eleanor stepped out into the home-going crowd, she,
an instrument tuned to catch delicate vibrations from earth and sea
and air, felt all this exhilaration. Life was right; the future was
right; the display of a young female creature before the male--that
most of all was right. And Bertram Chester, talking for the moment
like his old, natural self, was a main eddy in the currents of
joy-in-youth.
"You are bonny to-day!" she said quite naturally as she looked him
over.
He blushed happily. And the blush helped restore him in her eyes as
the natural Bertram Chester.
"And you're the bonniest of the bonny. I never saw you look so full of
ginger except--" he hesitated there, and her words rushed in to meet
the emergency.
"Thank you! Though I wasn't fishing, I am grateful just the same."
"Then you do find something now and then that you can stand for in
me?"
"I find a great deal--when you are Bert Chester." He seemed to puzzle
over this, to ponder it; so that she added:
"Let's not talk conundrums in this air and this crowd! We're not
blue-nosed, self-searching New Englanders. Let's keep away from Market
Street and walk through the Quarter. They haven't yet taken the
Easter things from the shop windows, and there's a darling atrocious
group of statuary next door to The Fior d'Italia which you must see!"
And then, as they turned the corner--
"What's the crowd? I'm for disremembering that I'm refined. I want to
be curious!"
"Looks like a scrap--do you--"
"Nonsense! Come on. I divide women into those who would like to see a
prize fight and admit it, and those who would like to see a prize
fight and deny it!"
"Gee whiz!" said Bertram. They had reached the edge of the crowd,
which circled about some knot of violent struggle and gesture. "Excuse
me!" He had sprung from her side and was breaking his way through. By
instinct, she followed into the hole back of him, so that she found
herself in the second row of spectators to a curious struggle, the
details of which flashed in upon her all at once.
Two laborers, gross, tanned, dirty, were fighting. They had swung
side-on as the hole opened, and her glance focused itself upon the
smaller of the two. He was an old man, quite gray; and down his scalp
ran a stream of bright blood which trickled upon his ear. The thing
which puzzled her was the action of the older man. He seemed to be
hanging to the arms of his younger and sturdier opponent; also he was
talking rapidly, excitedly; and she caught only one phrase.
"Hit me with a nail, will you?"
And just then the younger man got his arm free, and dove for the
pavement--dove at precisely the same instant with Bertram Chester.
Apparently, the younger fighter arrived first; he backed off from the
scuffle brandishing a piece of packing box. Then she saw what the old
man meant. Pointing the weapon was a nail, stained red.
As this rough fury poised himself for the stroke, she took in the
whole picture--a young, tall, brute man, one eye puffing from a new
blow, the other blood-shot, the mouth open and dripping, the right arm
raised for the murderer's blow.
Bertram Chester came between as though he had risen out of the earth.
His left hand, with a trained aptitude which made the motion seem the
easiest thing in the world, caught the upraised wrist. The laborer
ripped out an unconsidered oath and struck with his free fist at
Bertram's face. Bertram evaded the blow, slipped in close. And
then--in a lightning flash of speed, Bertram's right hand, which had
been resting loosely by his side, shot upward. His whole body seemed
to spring up behind it. The blow struck under the point of the chin.
The head of the young bruiser dropped, then his shoulders, then his
arms; his body sagged down upon Bertram. The champion of age shook him
off; he dropped to the sidewalk. All this in a flash, in a wink.
The crowd, curiously inert, as all city crowds are until the leader
appears, now followed this leader. A clamor of many tongues
arose--"Get a cop!" "He's killed him!" "Do him up!" A short rush of
half a dozen boys toward the fallen bully met the resistance of
Bertram, who had turned as though anticipating such a movement. He
shoved them back and raised his hand. His eyes were bright, his face
flushed, and that smile which won and commanded men had broken out on
his lips.
"Say," he said, "you all saw me do this man fair and square. He isn't
dead. He's only put out. He'll be all right in five minutes. You know
it was coming to him. Now, I've got a lady with me, and I don't want
her dragged into the police station. The cops will be here in a
minute. I'd like to show this thing up in court, but we don't want to
trouble the lady, do we? If I beat it, how many of you will witness to
the cops just what happened?"
"I!" and "I!" and "I!" from the crowd and "Me! God bless ye!" from the
elder warrior, who stood wiping the blood from his ear. Bertram gave
them no chance for reconsideration. "All right!" he said, "here I go!"
He pushed his way out as he pushed it in, swept Eleanor along with
him. The spectators lifted a cheer; but only a mob of small boys
followed.
"Beat it, kids, or the bulls will pipe me!" called Bertram over his
shoulder. At this magic formula, the boys fell out. A half a block
away, Eleanor dared look back. A policeman had just arrived; he was
clubbing his way stupidly through the crowd. Bertram looked back
too.
"All right," he announced, "now don't appear to hurry." At Kearney
Street, he swung her aboard an electric car.
"Victory!" she cried as the conductor rang his two bells and the car
gathered headway. "It was perfect!"
He stared down at her.
"Well, I just had to put it through once I got started, but say--I
thought you'd sure be sore on me." His voice took on an apologetic
tone. "It seems to me when I see a scrap, I constitutionally can't
keep out of it."
"No more should you--such fights as that."
"Then you make distinctions?" he asked.
"If you mean that I distinguish between fighting just for the lust of
it and fighting to protect the helpless, I may say that I do. You did
well."
"Thank you!" he said, half-earnestly. "I'd have thought you wouldn't
like to see me muss things up, that way." He was letting his voice
slip away from him, both in volume and in manner, and the car was
crowded. A panic necessity for concealment took possession of her.
"Surely we've evaded the police--let's get out and have our walk
through the Quarter."
"I'm with you." Kearney Street, that thoroughfare which gathered into
its two miles every element in American life, here struck its hill
rise. Sheer above them hung Telegraph Hill, attained by latticed
sidewalks, half stairs. The Latin quarter thronged and played all
about them in the dusk and the fresh lamplight. And again, mood and
spirits rose in her. The event whose swift, kaleidoscopic action still
danced on her retina, the very stimulus of brutal youth in action, had
conspired with the perfect night to raise her above herself.
"Oh, talk to me about it!" she said. "How did you do it--what do you
call it--I want to hear _you_ tell about it."
"I guess you saw it all--just a plain uppercut. Those blame city
crowds would see a man killed before they'd think of anything but the
show. I've always said that, and now I know it. I caught sight of the
old man side-on and I saw he was hurt by something more than a punch.
Far be it from me to spoil a good scrap, but that wasn't a fair shake.
So I dropped you and started in. And then I saw that nail. I made a
slip there," he let his voice fall in self-depreciation--"I should
have kicked that chunk of board away, instead of diving for it. He
beat me to it. The rest was so easy it was a shame to take the money.
Up comes his head and up comes my guard"--he stopped in the street to
illustrate--"and he couldn't use his club any more than a kitten. I'd
have let him go, if he hadn't hit at me--and clipped me. For a second,
I could have bit nails in two. When I pulled myself in close, there
was his chin just above me--a be-auty target. And an uppercut was his
medicine." Bertram jerked his right hand up from his hip to illustrate
the uppercut. Then he screwed up his face and felt of his right
shoulder. "He marked me some," he said in explanation.
"Did he hurt you?" she asked with real concern. It ran into her mind
that the conventional hero of romance makes his wound a scratch before
his lady. If she expected that from Bertram Chester, he
disillusionized her.
"Well, you don't take a punch like that, even glancing on your
shoulder, without something getting loose," he replied. "I shouldn't
be surprised if I'd slipped a cog or a tendon or something."
"Why--let's go home and see about it."
"Oh, it isn't bad enough for that!" Then he fell into reminiscences.
In their toilsome passage up the hen-coop sidewalks of Broadway, he
gesticulated--with constrained motions of his right arm--loosed the
sparkle of his energetic, magnetic talk upon her. She drew close to
him. Gradually, as the steps became steep, her hand slipped under his
arm. She was only half-conscious of this motion; her consciousness was
full of a softening toward him, a leaning upon that strength which she
had seen in action. On his side, he did not fail to notice it--this
first movement in her which had seemed like an advance. He stopped his
buzz of talk at one moment and all the lines of his face relaxed as
though he were about to say something softer and deeper. But he only
caught his breath and changed to another story. He had remembered--and
just in time, he thought--the advice of Kate Waddington.
But in spite of that remembrance, he permitted himself the luxury of
being natural; and he talked continually until they were within the
Tiffany doors.
Mrs. Tiffany must hear all about it from both of them. When they came
to the hero's injury, she dismissed Eleanor, made him strip his massy
shoulder, and got out her pet liniment. The Judge, coming home in the
midst of these surgical cares, heard the story retold with heroic
additions by his wife. Dinner that night was a merry, a happy, an
intimate party.
When Bertram left, Mrs. Tiffany did not follow him to the door, as was
her old-fashioned custom. He waited a moment, as though expecting
something. His eyes were on Eleanor. She did not move. She only bade
him a simple and easy good night over her shoulder.
The old couple sat for a long time before the fire. Eleanor was
gone--not to bed, could they but have known it, but to sit by her
window and breathe bay-fragrance and drink the foggy night air off the
Gate.
The Judge smiled down on that faded daintiness at his feet.
"Are we now to consider him in the light of a nephew-in-law?" he
asked.
"It has bothered me a good deal," said Mattie Tiffany. "What do you
think I ought to do?"
"If that frightful social responsibility of yours drives you to
anything," responded the Judge, "I should say you'd best leave it
alone."
"But Edward, dear, I'm just like a mother to her--and goodness knows I
haven't always been the best of mothers. There was her father--you
know how long I shirked that--"
"The sin of omission that you will carry to your grave--"
"And somehow this is so like Billy Gray! It was just this way in her
mother's case. When Billy came around--you remember how bonny a boy he
was then, Edward--I, her own sister, could never tell how she felt
toward him. I've always told you that Eleanor has slipped a
generation. She's her grandmother, not her mother, in mind. But she's
just like her mother in one thing. You can't ever tell what she's
thinking about, and the deeper her thoughts go the harder it is to
tell! That's why I'm considering all this so carefully--she doesn't
commit herself in one way or the other. It's a sign."
"Knowing you, Mattie, I presume that you've conducted researches into
his desirability as a nephew-in-law?"
"Well, shouldn't I? Goodness knows, we don't lead a conventional life
in this family, and I don't chaperone her. I reproach myself a little
with that. When Mrs. Goodyear wanted to take her up and put her into
the Fortnightly, it wasn't so much Eleanor's disinclination as my own
laziness about getting up gowns and paddling about paying calls which
kept me back--and that's God's truth."
"And these penitential exercises in detective work--what have they
brought forth?"
"He's a little careless morally, I think. He's had too much
conviviality about the Club. I'm afraid he's blossoming over young.
They can say all they want about wild oats, but in this city it's a
mistake to sow them all at once. That's one reason why I've been so
good to him. I flatter myself that a house like this is a moral
influence on him."
"It's all a concern for his soul with you, then?"
"No. Frankly, I like him. Everyone likes him. He's a dear. But as to
Eleanor--"
The Judge had risen and taken off his skull cap.
"Well, she has run a ranch and she's travelled alone to Europe and
back, and she's saved the soul if not the body of a father. And I
wonder whether a girl who's all that to her credit can't be trusted to
deal with the problem of an undesirable though attractive young
man--"
"If I were only sure he was undesirable!"
"It is according," responded the Judge, "to your definition of
undesirability. If you mean worldly circumstances, you needn't fear
for Bertram Chester. He resigns from my firm this month."
"What for?"
"Attwood brought me news of it. I don't know where he's going. I'm not
supposed to know anything. But for to get rich, for one thing." He
closed his book and restored it to its place on the shelves. "He took
the left-hand road, you see. It was manifest destiny; and you and I
and Eleanor cannot move one whit the career of that young man."