When Kate called him up over the telephone, inviting him, second-hand,
to join a Masters party at Sanguinetti's restaurant, Bertram
interrupted his banter to ask if Eleanor were going.
"I'm sure I don't know what her plans are," said Kate. "Why don't you
ask her?" The tone was a little cold.
Remembering his duty, Bertram did ask Eleanor over the telephone.
"I'm sorry," answered Eleanor, "but I had to decline."
"Oh, duck your engagement if you have any!" he said, pleading like a
boy. "It'll do you good to jolly up!" But she was firm. He matched the
cool tone of Kate with the equally cool tone of Eleanor, and wondered,
as he hung up the telephone, whether anything had gone wrong between
those girls. He remembered now that he had not seen Kate at the
Tiffany's since the expedition into Chinatown. Had he but known it,
he was perceiving late a thing of which others were making gossip
already.
While Bertram freshened up his toilet in his room and thought hard on
this, Kate Waddington, at home in the Mission, was making certain
special preparations of her own. Mrs. Waddington could measure the
importance of her daughter's engagements by the care she took with her
toilet. Fresh lace indicated the first degree of importance, her
latest pair of shoes the second degree, and perfectly fresh white
gloves raised the engagement to the highest degree of all. To-night,
all these omens served.
Further, Mrs. Waddington saw that Kate was rummaging through the
unanswered letters in her writing desk, saw that she was comparing two
of them. Kate picked up the larger one. She was wearing furs, since
the April night was chilly. This letter she tucked carefully into her
muff.
"Why in the name of common sense are you taking that letter along to a
dinner party?"
"Oh, something I want to show someone," answered Kate after a
momentary pause. Mrs. Waddington knew from old times the hidden
meaning of that pause. Just so, when at the age of seven they had
caught her in the sugar-bowl, Kate had paused before starting her
ready explanation. She had never overcome it; and her mother was the
last person likely to acquaint her with that flaw of method.
"It's from Alice Johnstone, I judge by the handwriting," continued
Mrs. Waddington.
"Oh, I guess so," responded Kate. She made rapidly for the door. "Good
night, mother. I'll be home to-night, but rather late."
"Thank you for small favors--" but Kate was gone.
Sanguinetti's held a place in the old city no less definite than that
of Zinkand's or the Poodle Dog. In the beginning a plain Italian
restaurant, frequented by the Italian fishermen whose sashes made so
bright the water front and whose lateen sails, shaped by the swelling
wind like a horse's ear, gave delight to the bay, it had existed since
the Neapolitans came to drag the Pacific with their nets. Painters and
art students from the attics of the Quarter "discovered" it. When they
made a kind of Bohemia about it, "the gang" of tawdry imitators and
posing professional Bohemians followed as a matter of course. That
invasion put it on the fair way toward failure. But Sanguinetti's
saved itself by dropping one degree lower. "South of Market"
discovered it. That district is somewhat to San Francisco as the East
Side to New York, though with an indescribable difference. Then came
the milliner's apprentice who slaved all the week that she might
brighten the "line" on Saturday afternoon, with the small clerk, her
companion or the butcher-boy her beau. There came also the little
people of the race track, as jockies out of a job, touts, bookmakers'
apprentices--tawdry people mainly, but ever good-humored and ready to
loosen restraint of custom after the second quart of Steve
Sanguinetti's red wine. So this place came to have an air of loose,
easy, half-drunken camaraderie, which seldom fell into roughness. It
was the home of noise and song and easy flirtations which died at the
door. When this transformation was fully accomplished, the painters
and art students and seekers after "life" came back again. This time,
they did not spoil its flavor. The fishermen had been shy folk who
fled from the alien invasion; no shyness about South-of-Market people
on a holiday!
This Sanguinetti dinner party of Sydney Masters's differed but
slightly, after all, from other slumming parties in the hostelry of
touch-and-go familiarities. Amused outsiders, they watched the growth
of swift flirtations, passed comments on the overdressed women, joined
in the latest Orpheum songs which started when the cheap wine made
music in the throat, chucked quarters into the banjoes of the two
negro minstrels who came in at eight o'clock to stimulate merriment.
Bertram, in his position as jester to King Masters, went a little
further than the others. It was he who bought out the stock of a small
Italian flower-vendor, that he might present a bouquet "to every lady
in the place." His attention brought from the ladies varying degrees
of gratitude, and from their escorts degrees of resentment which
varied still more. Running out of flowers before he had gone clear
around the room, he built up on toothpicks bouquets of celery and
radishes, which he fastened to the corks of empty claret bottles and
gave, with elaborate presentation speeches, to the merrier and
prettier of the neglected ladies.
From this expedition, he returned leading a little, sad man, who had
the look of a boy grown old by troubles. A bleached-blonde woman
followed them half-way across, but centre room she turned back with a
stamp of her foot and a flourish of her shoulders.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Bertram announced, "I desire the privilege of
introducing Teddy Murphy, California's premier jockey, lately set down
on an outrageously false charge of pulling a horse. He is here, ladies
and gentlemen, to tell you his troubles!"
A moment of silent embarrassment on both sides.
"Here--take my chair, Mr. Murphy!" spoke Kate from the foot of the
table. The next table, set _a deux_, had just become vacant. Kate
slipped into its nearest chair. Bertram's seat was back by the wall;
to reach it, he must step over feet and so interrupt Mr. Murphy's tale
of wrong. Nothing was more natural than that he should take the seat
opposite Kate. And instantly--he having heard the story
already--Bertram lost interest.
"Would you mind getting my muff?" asked Kate. "I think my handkerchief
is in it."
As Bertram handed over the muff, she was smiling up at him. She did
not look down until she had taken out her handkerchief, flirted out
its folds. Then a little, disconcerted "oh!" escaped her.
"What is it?"
Kate was shaking out her skirt, was glancing rapidly to right and
left. "Goodness!" she cried.
"What's the matter?"
"A letter. Have you seen it?"
Bertram looked under the table. There it lay, by his chair. He picked
it up and passed it over.
"Oh!" she cried again, this time in a tone balanced between relief and
embarrassment. She tucked it back into her muff, and her eyes avoided
his. He noted all this pantomime, and he was about to speak, when Mrs.
Masters touched Kate on the shoulder. "My dear, you're missing this!"
she whispered.
Kate put all her attention upon Mr. Murphy and his burning story about
the pulling of Candlestick. Mr. Murphy grew a little too broad; Mrs.
Masters, as the easiest way rid of him, rose and asked for her wraps.
As Bertram assisted Kate, he saw her reach an anxious hand into her
muff.
Outside, she contrived a loose shoe lace, so that she and Bertram fell
behind. She did not approach the subject of the letter; that came up
later and, of course, quite incidentally.
"Anything to confide in me to-night?" she began.
"Oh, nothing much. Gee, you can't tell about her, can you? Say, are
you sure about your system? She was with me last Tuesday when I
punched the jaw off a man, and she hasn't treated me so well since I
knew her as she did after that. I was blame near opening on her again.
Blame near. What's the answer?"
"A passing mood, perhaps."
"Well, I'd like to get her in that mood often."
"And you'll find that she's furthest from you in those moods--it's in
them that she's least herself."
"This general girl proposition is a tough one," commented Bertram.
"All right. You know the dope."
"You poor, perplexed boy!"
"Say, isn't it time you began confiding?"
"Oh, you caught it--the letter I mean--There are few things those eyes
of yours don't see!"
"Man?" he continued, ignoring the compliment.
"Yes. It's a dreadful perplexity."
"Tell your old uncle!"
"Perhaps."
"You're in love?"
"I--I was. You see--ah, it's gone past the place where it should have
ended!"
"Then why don't you break it off?"
"That's all very well to say, but he's a good man, and he says he's
crazy about me. Do I seem happy to you?"
"Middling."
"I am--sometimes. Then something like to-day comes, and it puts me
clear down in the heart. I have to keep up laughing and being gay when
I'm all torn to pieces. I feel that I oughtn't to keep him in suspense
this way. He's young, he's fairly rich--if that counted. When he's
here, I often think I do--love him. When he writes, I know I don't."
"Poor little girl!" said Bert, catching sympathetically at the
half-sob in her voice.
"Thank you," answered Kate on an indrawn breath. And then, "What would
you do? I'm only a girl after all, am I not? Here I'm leaning on you,
asking for advice."
Bertram did not answer for a time. Then:
"Sure you don't love him?"
"Not--not entirely. I might if he made me."
Bertram was looking straight down on her. His mouth was pursed up.
"Suppose he made you--and after you'd married him you got to feeling
again as you do now. That wouldn't be square to him, would it?"
"I--perhaps not. But oh, it would hurt him so!"
"I guess he could live through it. They usually do, and don't lose
many meals at that. I think he's running a bluff, myself."
Kate drew slightly away from him.
"That's a poor compliment."
Bertram studied her meaning.
"What?"
"To say that a man _couldn't_ get crazy over me."
"Oh! Not on your life. Sure thing no. I don't know a girl anywhere
that a man has more license to get crazy over. You're a beauty and
you're just about the best fellow I know."
"I suppose you _had_ to say that!"
"I figure that I wanted to. If I haven't said it before, it's
because--" he stopped; Kate, as though it were an actual presence,
could see the figure of Eleanor rising between them.
"Yes, I know--" she said quickly. "You do think I'm attractive
then--cross your heart."
"Cross my heart, you're a beaut."
"But that doesn't get me any further with my troubles."
"What are his bad points that make you hold off?"
"Nothing more than a feeling, I suppose. No, it's more than
that--something definite. It's--I find this thing hard to say. Not
exactly weakness in him--more a lack of proved strength. He inherited
his money; he's had the regular Eastern education. He's at work,
managing his properties. But I'd feel so much more secure of his
strength if he had made it for himself. That is the thing I could
admire most in a man; more even than kindness. To have him succeed
from nothing because his strength was in it. I don't care how
unfinished he might be--that would show he was a man!"
Bertram was still pausing on this, when Kate touched his arm.
"I'm afraid," she said, "that we must join the others. They'll be
talking about us if we don't, and we mustn't have that--for Eleanor's
sake if for no other!" They hurried ahead, therefore, and walked
beside Mr. and Mrs. Masters all the way in.
At the studio door, Kate declined a half-accepted invitation to remain
for the night.
"Mother isn't wholly well," she said, "and I can be fearfully domestic
in emergency! It's only a step to the Valencia Street cars, and Mr.
Bertram will get me home."
It was still too early for the theatre crowd; they found themselves
alone on the outer seat of a "dummy" car, one of those rapid transit
conveyances by which San Francisco of old let the passenger decide
whether that amorphic climate was summer or winter.
He had, it seemed, to shake her back into the story of her
love-affair. Three times he approached the subject, and each time she
fended it off. They had passed clear into the Mission, were more than
three-quarters of the way home, before he launched one of his frontal
assaults.
"You might give me some more work at my job of confidant," he said.
She began again, then; a story without detail; more a sentimental
exposure of her feelings. The thing was growing like a canker; she
fought it, but the decision, the feeling of his unhappiness should she
give him final rejection, roosted on her pillow. It had never come to
an engagement; it had been only an understanding; but she thought of
dreadful things, even of his possible suicide, whenever she
contemplated giving him the final blow.
The old-fashioned Waddington house stood on a big Spanish lot far out
in the Mission. There was ground to spare; enough so that its original
owners had room to plant trees without shading light from the windows.
As they walked into the deep shadows, her voice took on an intonation
like a suppressed sob.
"It is a comfort now to have said it, and it's a new life to have you
for support. Oh, Bertram, what a big, strong friend you are! Be good
to me, won't you?"
She had stopped; in the shadows the clouded moon of her face looked up
into his.
"Oh, won't you be good to me?"
He slipped his arm about her; and suddenly he kissed her.
She suffered his kiss for only a moment; then she moved away. He let
her go, and she rushed ahead to the door. When he reached the step,
she had faced about.
"Consider my _feelings_, Bert Chester," she said; and the screen door
slammed.