Cooped in a narrow space at the end of a long corridor, Helen sat
gazing at the life of a great San Francisco hotel. Every moment
the color and glitter shifted under the brilliant light of mammoth
chandeliers. Tall, gilded elevator-doors opened and closed; women
passed, wrapped in satins and velvets, airy feathers in their shining
hair; men in evening dress escorted them; bell-boys went by, carrying
silver trays and calling unintelligibly, their voices rising above the
continuous muffled stir and the faint sounds of music from the Blue
Room.
Helen had choked the telegraph-sounder with a pencil, so that she might
hear the music. But the tones of the violins came to her blurred by
a low hum of voices, by the rustle of silks, by the soft movement of
many feet on velvet carpets. Nothing was clear, simple, or distinct in
the medley. Her ears were baffled, as her eyes were dazzled and her
thoughts confused, by a multiplicity of sensations. San Francisco was a
whirlpool, an endless roaring circle, stupendous and dizzying.
This had been her sick impression of it on that first morning, when she
struggled through the eddying crowds at the ferry building, lugging
her telescope-bag with one hand and with the other trying to hold her
hat in place against gusts of wind. Beneath the uproar of street-car
gongs, of huge wagons rumbling over the cobbles, of innumerable
hurrying feet, whistles, bells, shouts, she had felt a great impersonal
current, terrifying in its heedlessness of all but its own mighty
swirl, and she had had the sensation of standing at the brink of a
maelstrom.
After ten months the impression still remained. But now she seemed to
have been drawn into the motionless vertex. The city roared around her,
still incomprehensible, still driven by its own breathless speed, but
in the heart of it she was alien and untouched. She had found nothing
in it but loneliness.
Her first terrors had vanished, leaving her with a frustrated sense
of having been ridiculous in having them. She had gathered her whole
strength for a great effort, and she had found nothing to do. Far
from lying in wait with nameless dangers and pitfalls for the unwary
stranger, the city apparently did not know she was there.
At the main telegraph-office Mr. Bryant had received her indifferently.
He was a busy man; she was one detail of his routine work. He directed
her to the St. Francis, asked her to report there at five o'clock,
and, looking at her again, inquired whether she knew any one in San
Francisco or had arranged for a place to live. Three minutes later he
handed her over to a brisk young woman, who gave her an address and
told her what car to take to reach it.
She had found a shabby two-story house on Gough Street, with a
discouraged palm in a tub on the front porch. A colorless woman showed
her the room. It was a small, neat place under the eaves, furnished
with an iron bed, a wash-stand, a chair, and a strip of rag carpet. The
bathroom was on the lower floor, and the rent was two dollars and a
half a week. Helen set down her bag with a sigh of relief.
Thus simply she found herself established in San Francisco. Her
first venture into the St. Francis had been no more exciting. After
a panic-stricken plunge into its magnificence she was accepted
noncommittally by the day-operator, a pale girl with eye-glasses, who
was already putting on her hat. She turned over a few unsent messages,
gave Helen the cash-box and rate-book, and departed.
Thereafter Helen met her daily, punctually at five o'clock, and saw her
leave. Helen rather looked forward to the moment. It was pleasant to
say, "Good evening," once a day to some one.
In the afternoon she walked about, looking at the city, and learned to
know many of the streets by name. She discovered the public library
and read a great deal. The library was also a pleasant place to spend
Sundays, being less lonely than the crowded parks, and if the librarian
were not too busy one might sometimes talk to her about a book.
The dragging of the days, as much as her need for more money, had
driven her to asking for extra work at the main office. But here,
too, she had been dropped into the machine and put down before her
telegraph-key, with barely a hurried human touch. A beginner, rated
at forty-five dollars, she replaced a seventy-five-dollar operator
on a heavy wire, and the days became a nerve-straining tension of
concentration on the clicking sounder at her ear, while the huge
room with its hundreds of instruments and operators faded from her
consciousness.
Released at four o'clock, she ate forlornly in a dairy lunch-room and
hurried to the St. Francis. Here, at least, she could watch other
people's lives. Gazing out at the changing crowd in the hotel corridor
she let her imagination picture the romances, the adventures, at her
finger-tips. A man spoke cheerfully to the cigar-boy while he lighted
his cigarette at the swinging light over the news-stand counter. He was
the center of a scandal that had filled the afternoon papers, and under
her hand was the message he had sent to his wife, denying, appealing,
swearing loyalty and love. A little, soft-eyed woman in clinging laces,
stepping from the elevator to meet a plump man in evening dress, was
there to put through a big mining deal with him. The ends of the
intrigue stretched out into vagueness, but her telegrams revealed its
magnitude.
Helen's cramped muscles stirred restlessly. There was barely room to
move in the tiny office, crowded with table and chair and wastebasket.
Spaciousness was on the other side of the counter.
She snatched the pencil from the counter and began a letter to Paul.
Her imagination, at least, was released when she wrote letters.
_Dear Paul_:
I wonder what you are doing now! It's eight o'clock and of course
you've had your supper. Your mother's probably finishing up the
kitchen work and putting the bread to rise, and you haven't
anything to do but sit on the porch and look at the stars and the
lighted windows here and there in the darkness, and listen to the
breeze in the trees. And here I am, sitting in a place that looks
just like a hothouse with all the flowers come to life. There's
a ball up-stairs, and a million girls have gone through the
corridors, with flowers and feathers and jewels in their hair, and
dresses and evening cloaks as beautiful as petals. How I wish you
could see them all, and the men, too, in evening dress. They're the
funniest things when they're fat, but some of the slim ones look
like princes or counts or something.
What kind of new furniture was it your mother got? You've never
told me a word about the place you're living since you moved, and
I'm awfully interested. Do please tell me what color the wall-paper
is and the carpets, and the woodwork, and what the kitchen is like,
and if there are rose-bushes in the yard. Did your mother get new
curtains, too? There is a lovely new material for curtains just
out--sort of silky, and rough, in the loveliest colors. I see it in
the store windows, and if your mother wants me to I'd love to price
it, and get samples for her.
A little boy's just come in with a toy balloon, and it got away
from him and it's bumping up around on the gilded ceiling, and
I wish you could hear him howl. It must be fun for the balloon,
though, after being dragged around for hours, tugging all the time
to get away, to escape at last and go up and up and up--
I felt just like that this morning. Just think, Paul, I sent the
last of the hundred dollars home, and another fifty besides! Isn't
that gorgeous? I'm making over ninety dollars a month now, with my
extra work at SF office, and my salary here--
She paused, biting her pencil. That would give him a start, she
thought. He had been so self-satisfied when he got his raise to being
day-operator and station-agent. She had not quite got over the hurt of
his taking it without letting her know that the night-operator's place
would be vacant. He had explained that a girl couldn't handle the job,
but she knew that he did not want her to be working with him.
In the spring, she thought, she would be able to get some beautiful new
clothes and go home for a visit. Paul would come, too, when he knew she
would be there. He would see then how well she could manage on a very
little money. In a few months more she would be able to save enough for
a trousseau, tablecloths, and embroidered towels--
"Blank, please!" A customer leaned on the counter. She gave him the pad
and watched him while he wrote. His profile was handsome; a lock of
fair hair beneath the pushed-back hat, a straight forehead, an aquiline
nose, a thin, humorous mouth. He wrote nervously, dashing the pencil
across the paper, tearing off the sheet and crumpling it impatiently,
beginning again. When he finished, shoving the message toward her with
a quick movement, he looked at her and smiled, and she felt a charm in
the warm flash of his eyes. His nervous vitality was magnetic.
She read the message. "'G. H. Kennedy, Central Trust Company, Los
Angeles. Drawing on you for five hundred. Must have it. Absolutely sure
thing this time. Full explanations follow by letter. GILBERT.'
Sixty-seven cents, please," she said. She wished that she could think
of something more to say; she would have liked to talk to him. There
was about him an impression of something happening every instant. When,
turning away, he paused momentarily, she looked at him quickly. But he
was speaking to the rival operator.
"Hello, kid!"
"On your way," the girl replied imperturbably. Her eyes laughed and
challenged. But with an answering smile he went past, and only his hat
remained visible in glimpses through the crowd. Then it turned a corner
and was gone.
"Fresh!" the girl murmured. "But gee, he can dance!"
Helen looked at her with interest. She was a new girl, on relief duty.
The regular operator for her company was a sober, conscientious woman
of thirty, who studied German grammar in her leisure moments. This one
was not at all like her.
"Do you know him?" said Helen, smiling shyly. This was an opening for
conversation, and she met it eagerly. The other girl had a friendly and
engaging manner, which obviously included all the world.
"Sure I do," she answered, though there was uncertainty under the
round tones. She ran a slim forefinger through the blond curl that lay
against her neck, smiling at Helen with a display of even, white teeth.
Helen thought of pictures on magazine covers. It must be wonderful to
be as pretty as that, she thought wistfully. "Who's he wiring to?"
Helen passed the message across the low railing that separated the
offices. She noticed the shining of the girl's fingernail as she ran it
along the lines.
"Well, what do you know about that? He _was_ giving me a song and dance
about being Judge Kennedy's son. You never can tell about men," she
commented sagely, returning the telegram. "Sometimes they tell you the
absolute truth."
A childlike quality made her sophistication merely piquant. Her
comments on the passing guests fascinated Helen, and an occasional
phrase revealed glimpses of a world of gaiety in which she seemed to
flutter continually, like a butterfly in the sunshine. She worked, it
appeared, only at irregular intervals.
"Momma supports me, of course on her alimony. Papa certainly treated
her rotten, but his money's perfectly good," she said artlessly. Her
frankness also was childlike, and her calm acceptance of the situation
made it necessary to regard it as commonplace. Helen, in self-defense,
could not be shocked.
"She's lot of fun, momma is. Just loves a good time. She's out dancing
now. Gee! I wish I was! I'm just crazy about dancing, aren't you?
Listen to that music! All I want is just to dance all night long.
That's what I really love."
"Do you ever--often, I mean--do it? Dance all night long?" Helen asked,
wide-eyed.
"Only once a night." She laughed. "About five nights a week."
Helen thought her entertaining, and warmed to her beauty and charm.
In an hour she was asking Helen to call her Louise, and although she
made no attempt to conceal her astonishment at the barrenness of
Helen's life, her generous desire to share her own good times took
the sting from her pity. Why, Helen didn't know the city at all, she
cried, and Helen could only assent. They must go out to some of the
cafés together; they must have tea at Techau's; Helen must come to
dinner and meet momma. Louise jumbled a dozen plans together in a rush
of friendliness. It was plain that she was genuinely touched in her
butterfly heart by Helen's loneliness.
"And you're a brunette!" she cried. "We'll be stunning together. I'm so
blonde." The small circle of her thought returned always to herself.
Helen, dimly seeing this, felt an amused tolerance, which saved her
pride while she confessed to herself her inferiority in cleverness
to this sparkling small person. Louise would never have drifted into
dull stagnation; she would have found some way to fill her life with
realities instead of dreams.
Midnight came before Helen realized it. Tidying her desk for the night,
she found the unfinished letter to Paul and tucked it into her purse.
She had not been forced to feed upon her imagination that evening.
Louise walked to the car-line with her, and it was settled that the
next night Helen should come to dinner and meet momma. It meant cutting
short her extra work and paying the day-operator to stay late at the
St. Francis, but Helen did not regret the cost. This was the first
friend the city had offered her.
* * * * *
Three weeks later she was sharing the apartment on Leavenworth Street
with Louise and her momma.
The change had come with startling suddenness. There had been the
dinner first. Helen approached it diffidently, doubtful of her
self-possession in a strange place, with strange people. She fortified
herself with a new hat and a veil with large velvet spots, yet at
the very door she had a moment of panic and thought of flight and
a telephone message of regrets. Only the thought of her desperate
loneliness gave her courage to ring the bell.
The strain disappeared as soon as she met momma. Momma, slim in a silk
petticoat and a frilly dressing-sack, had taken her in affectionately.
Momma was much like Louise. Helen thought again of pictures on magazine
covers, though Louise suggested a new magazine, and her mother did
not. Even Helen could see that Momma's pearly complexion was liberally
helped by powder, and her hair was almost unnaturally golden. But the
eyes were the same, large and blue, fringed with black lashes, and both
profiles had the same clear, delicate outlines.
"Yes, dear, most people do think we're sisters," Mrs. Latimer said
complacently, when Helen spoke of the resemblance.
"We have awful good times together, don't we, Momma?" Louise added, her
arm around her mother's waist, and Helen felt a pang at the fondness of
the reply. "We certainly do, kiddie."
It was a careless, happy-go-lucky household. Dinner was scrambled
together somehow, with much opening of cans, in a neglected, dingy
kitchen. Helen and Louise washed the dishes while momma stirred the
creamed chicken. It was fun to wash dishes again and to set the table,
and Helen could imagine herself one of the family while she listened
to their intimate chatter. They had had tea down town; there was
mention of some one's new car, somebody's diamonds; Louise had seen a
lavallière in a jeweler's shop; she teased her mother to buy it for
her, and her mother said fondly, "Well, honey-baby, we'll see."
They had hardly begun to eat when the telephone-bell rang, and momma,
answering it, was gone for some time. They caught scraps of bantering
talk and Louise wondered, "Who's that she's jollying now?" She sprang
up with a cry of delight when momma came back to announce that the
crowd was going to the beach.
There was a scramble to dress. Helen, hooking their gowns in the
cluttered bedroom, saw dresser drawers overflowing with sheer
underwear, silk stockings, bits of ribbon, crushed hat-trimmings, and
plumes. Louise brushed her eyebrows with a tiny brush, rubbed her nails
with a buffer, dabbed carefully at her lips with a lip-stick Helen
hoped that she did not show her surprise at these novel details of the
toilet. They had taken it for granted she was going to the beach with
them. Their surprise and regret were genuine when she said she must go
to work.
"Oh, what do you want to do that for?" Louise pouted. "You look all
right." She said it doubtfully, then brightened. "I'll lend you some
of my things. You'd be perfectly stunning dressed up. Wouldn't she be
stunning, Momma? You've got lovely hair and that baby stare of yours.
All you need's a dress and a little--Isn't it, Momma?"
Her mother agreed warmly. Helen glowed under their praise and was
deeply grateful for their interest in her. She wanted very much to go
with them, and when she stood on the sidewalk watching them depart in a
big red automobile, amidst a chorus of gay voices, she felt chilled and
lonely.
They were lovely to be so friendly to her, she thought, while she
went soberly to work. She felt that she must in some way return their
kindness, and after discarding a number of plans she decided to take
them both to a matinée.
It was Louise, at their third meeting, who suggested that she come to
live with them. "What do you know, Momma, Helen's living in some awful
hole all alone. Why couldn't she come in with us? There's loads of
room. She could sleep with me. Momma, why not?"
Her mother, smiling lazily, said:
"Well, if you kids want to, I don't care." Helen was delighted by
the prospect. It was arranged that she should pay one third of the
expenses, and Louise cried joyfully: "Now, Momma, you've got to get my
lavallière!"
The next afternoon Helen packed her bag and left the room on Gough
Street. Her feet wanted to dance when she went down the narrow stairs
for the last time and let herself out into the windy sunshine.
* * * * *
It was maddening to find herself so tied down by her work. In the early
mornings, dragging herself from bed, she left Louise drowsy among the
pillows and saw while she dressed the tantalizing signs of last night's
gaiety in the dress flung over a chair, the scattered slippers and
silk stockings. She came home at midnight to a dark, silent apartment,
letting herself in with a latch-key to find the dinner dishes still
unwashed and spatterings of powder on the bedroom carpet, where street
shoes and a discarded petticoat were tangled together. She enjoyed
putting things in order, pretending the place was her own while she
did it, but she was lonely. Later she awoke to blink at Louise,
sitting half undressed on the edge of the bed, rubbing her face with
cold-cream, and to listen sleepily to her chatter.
"You'll be a long time dead, kiddie," momma said affectionately.
"What's the use of being a dead one till you have to?" Helen's youth
cried that momma was right. But she knew too well the miseries of
being penniless; she dared not give up a job. A chance remark, flung
out on the endless flow of Louise's gossip, offered the solution. "What
do you know about that boob girl at MX office? She's picked a chauffeur
in a garden of millionaires, and she's going to quit work and _marry_
him!"
Helen's heart leaped. It was her chance. When she confronted Mr. Bryant
across the main-office counter the next morning her hands trembled, but
her whole nature had hardened into a cold determination. She would get
that job. It paid sixty dollars a month; the hours were from eight to
four. Whether she could handle market reports or not did not matter;
she would handle them.
She scored her first business triumph when she got this job, although
she did not realize until many years later what a triumph it had been.
She settled into her work at the Merchants' Exchange wires with only
one thought. Now she was free to live normally, to have a good time,
like other girls.
The first day's work strained her nerves to the breaking point The
shouts of buyers and sellers on the floor, the impatient pounding on
the counter of customers with rush messages, the whole breathless haste
and excitement of the exchange, blurred into an indistinct clamor
through which she heard only the slow, heavy working of the Chicago
wire, tapping out a meaningless jumble of letters and fractions. She
concentrated upon it, with an effort which made her a blind machine.
The scrawled quotations she flung on the counter were wrought from an
agony of nerves and brain.
But it was over at last, and she hurried home. The dim stillness of the
apartment was an invitation to rest, but she disregarded it, slipping
out of her shirt-waist and splashing her face and bare arms with cold
water. A new chiffon blouse was waiting in its box, and a thrill
of anticipation ran through her when she lifted it from its tissue
wrappings.
She fastened the soft folds, pleased by the lines of her round arms
seen through the transparency, and her slender neck rising from white
frills. In the hand-glass she gazed at the oval of her face reflected
in the dressing-table mirror, and suddenly lifting her lids caught the
surprising effect of the sea-gray eyes beneath black lashes, an effect
she had never known until Louise spoke of it.
She was pretty. She was almost--she caught her breath--beautiful. The
knowledge was more than beauty itself, for it brought self-assurance.
She felt equal to any situation the evening might offer, and she was
smiling at herself in the mirror when Louise burst in, a picture in
a dashing little serge suit and a hat whose black line was like the
stroke of an artist's pencil.
"The alimony's come!" she cried. "We're going to have a regular time!
Momma'll meet us down town. Look, isn't it stunning?" She displayed
the longed-for lavallière twinkling against her smooth young neck. "I
knew I'd get it somehow Momma--the stingy thing!--she went and got her
new furs. But we met Bob, and he bought it for me." She sat down before
the mirror, throwing off her hat and letting down her hair. "I don't
know--it's only a chip diamond." Her moods veered as swiftly as light
summer breezes. "I wish momma'd get me a real one. It's nonsense, her
treating me like a baby. I'm seventeen."
Helen felt her delight in the new waist evaporate. Louise's chatter
always made her feel at a disadvantage. There was a distance between
them that they seemed unable to bridge, and Helen realized that it was
her fault. Perhaps it was because she had been so long alone that she
often felt even more lonely when she was with Louise.
The sensation returned, overpowering, when they joined the crowd in the
restaurant. She could only follow Louise's insouciant progress through
a bewildering medley of voices, music, brilliant lights, and stumble
into a chair at a table ringed with strange faces. Momma was there,
her hat dripping with plumes, white furs flung negligently over her
shoulders, her fingers a blaze of rings. There was another resplendent
woman, named Nell Allan; a bald-headed fat man called Bob; a younger
man, with a lean face and restless blue eyes, hailed by Louise as
Duddy. They were having a very gay time, but Helen, shrinking unnoticed
in her chair, was unaccountably isolated and lonely. She could think of
nothing to say. There was no thread in the rapid chatter at which she
could clutch. They were all talking, and every phrase seemed a flash of
wit, since they all laughed so much.
"I love the cows and chickens, but this is the life!" Duddy cried at
intervals. "Oh, you chickens!" and "This is the life!" the others
responded in a chorus of merriment. Helen did not doubt that it all
meant something, but her wits were too slow to grasp it, and the talk
raced on unintelligibly. She could only sit silent eating delicate food
from plates that waiters whisked into place and whisked away again, and
laughing uncertainly when the others did.
Color and light and music beat upon her brain. About her was a
confusion of movement, laughter, clinking glasses, glimpses of white
shoulders and red lips, perfumes, hurrying waiters, steaming dishes,
and over and through it all the quick, accented rhythm of the music,
swaying, dominating, blending all sensations into one quickening
vibration.
Suddenly, from all sides, hidden in the artificial foliage that covered
the walls, silvery bells took up the melody. Helen, inarticulate and
motionless, felt her nerves tingle, alive, joyful, eager.
There was a pushing back of chairs, and she started. But they were only
going to dance. Duddy and momma, Bob and Mrs. Allan, swept out into a
whirl of white arms and dark coats, tilted faces and swaying bodies.
"Isn't it lovely!" Helen murmured.
But Louise was not listening. She sat mutinous, her fingers tapping
time to the music, her eyes beneath the long lashes searching the room.
"I can't help it. I just got to dance!" she muttered, and suddenly she
was gone. Some one met her among the tables, put his arms around her,
and whirled her away. Helen, watching for her black hat and happy face
to reappear, saw that she was dancing with the man whose telegram had
introduced them. Memory finally gave her his name. Gilbert Kennedy.
Louise brought him to the table when the music ceased. There were gay
introductions, and Helen wished that she could say something. But momma
monopolized him, squeezing in an extra chair for him beside her, and
saying how glad she was to meet a friend of her little girl's.
Helen could only be silent, listening to their incomprehensible
gaiety, and feeling an attraction for him as irresistible as an
electric current. She did not know what it was, but she thought him the
handsomest man she had ever seen, and she felt that he did whatever he
wanted to do with invariable success. He was not like the others. He
talked their jargon, but he did not seem of them, and she noticed that
his hazel eyes, set in a network of tiny wrinkles, were at once avid
and weary. Yet he could not be older than twenty-eight or so. He danced
with momma, when again the orchestra began a rag, but coming back to
the table with the others, he said restlessly:
"Let's go somewhere else. My car's outside. How about the beach?"
"Grand little idea!" Duddy declared amid an approving chorus. Helen,
following the others among the tables and through the swinging doors
to the curb where the big gray car stood waiting, told herself that
she must make an effort, must pay for this wonderful evening with some
contribution to the fun. But when they had all crowded into the machine
and she felt the rush of cool air against her face and saw the street
lights speeding past, she forgot everything but joy. She was having
a good time at last, and a picture of the Masonville girls flashed
briefly through her mind. How meager their picnics and hay rides
appeared beside this!
She half formed the phrases in which she would describe to Paul their
racing down the long boulevard beside the beach, the salty air, and the
darkness, and the long white lines of foam upon the breakers. This,
she realized with exultation, was a joy-ride. She had read the word in
newspapers, but its aptness had never before struck her.
It was astounding to find, after a rush through the darkness of the
park, that the car was stopping. Every one was getting out. Amazed and
trying to conceal her amazement, she went with them through a blaze of
light into another restaurant where another orchestra played the same
gay music and dancers whirled beyond a film of cigarette smoke. They
sat down at a round bare table, and Helen perceived that one must order
something to drink.
She listened to the rapid orders, hesitating. "Blue moons" were
intriguing, and "slow gin fizz" was fascinating, with its suggestion
of fireworks. But beside her Mr. Kennedy said, "Scotch high-ball,"
and the waiter took her hesitation for repetition. The glass appeared
before her, there was a cry of "Happy days!" and she swallowed a
queer-tasting, stinging mouthful. She set the glass down hastily.
"What's the matter with the high-ball?" Mr. Kennedy inquired. He had
paid the waiter, and she felt the obligation of a guest.
"It's very good really. But I don't care much for drinks that are
fizzy," she said. She saw a faint amusement in his eyes, but he did not
smile, and his order to the waiter was peremptory. "Plain high-ball
here, no seltzer." The waiter hastened to bring it.
Mr. Kennedy's attention was still upon her, and she saw no escape. She
smiled at him over the glass. "Happy days!" she said, and drank. She
set down the empty glass and the muscles of her throat choked back
a cough. "Thank you," she said, and was surprised to find that the
weariness was no longer in his eyes.
"You're all right!" he said. His tone was that of the vanquished
greeting the victor, and his next words were equally enigmatic. "I hate
a bluffer that doesn't make good when he's called!" The orchestra had
swung into a new tune, and he half rose. "Dance?"
It was hard to admit her deficiency and let him go.
"I can't. I don't know how."
He sat down.
"You don't know how to dance?" His inflection said that this was
carrying a pretense too far, that in overshooting a mark she had missed
it. His keen look at her suddenly made clear a fact for which she had
been unconsciously groping while she watched these men and women, the
clue to their relations. Beneath their gaiety a ceaseless game was
being played, man against woman, and every word and glance was a move
in that game, the basis of which was enmity. He thought that she, too,
was playing it, and against him.
"Why do you think I'm lying to you, Mr. Kennedy? I would like to dance
if I could--of course."
"I don't get you," he replied with equal directness. "What do you come
out here for if you don't drink and don't dance?"
It would be too humiliating to confess the extent of her inexperience,
her ignorance of the city in which she had lived for almost a year. "I
come because I like it," she said. "I've worked hard for a long time
and never had any fun. And I'm going to learn to dance. I don't know
about drinking. I don't like the taste of it much. Do people really
like to drink high-balls and things like that?"
It startled a laugh from him.
"Keep on drinking 'em, and you'll find out why people do it," he
answered. Over his shoulder he said to the waiter, "Couple of rye
high-balls, Ben."
The others were dancing. They were alone at the table, and when,
resting an elbow on the edge of it, he concentrated his attention upon
her, the crowded room became a swirl of color and light about their
isolation. Her breath came faster, the toe of her slipper kept time
to the music, exhilaration mounted in her veins, and her success in
holding his interest was like wine to her. But a cold, keen inner self
took charge of her brain.
The high-balls arrived. She felt that she must be rude, and did not
drink hers. When he urged she refused as politely as she could. He
insisted.
"Drink it!" She felt the clash of an imperious, reckless will against
her impassive resistance. There was a second in which neither moved,
and their whole relation subtly changed. Then she laughed.
"I'd really rather not," she said lightly.
"Come on--be game," he said.
"The season's closed," Louise's flippancies had not been without their
effect on her. It was easier to drop back into her own language. "No,
really--tell me, why do people drink things that taste like that?"
He met her on her own ground. "You've got to drink, to let go, to have
a good time. It breaks down inhibitions." She noted the word. The
use of such words was one of the things that marked his difference
from the others. "God knows why," he added wearily. "But what's the
use of living if you don't hit the high spots? And there's a streak
of--perversity--depravity in me that's got to have this kind of thing."
Their group swooped down about the table, and the general ordering of
more drinks ended their talk. There was a clamor when Helen said she
did not want anything. Duddy swept away her protests and ordered for
her, but momma came to the rescue.
"Let the kid alone; she's not used to it. You stick to lemon sours,
baby. Don't let them kid you," she said. The chatter swept on, leaving
her once more unnoticed, but when the music called again Mr. Kennedy
took her out among the dancers.
"You're all right," he said. "Just let yourself go and follow me. It's
only a walk to music." And unaccountably she found herself dancing,
felt the rhythm beat through blood and nerves, and stiffness and
awkwardness drop away from her. She felt like a butterfly bursting from
a chrysalis, like a bird singing in the dawn. She was so happy that Mr.
Kennedy laughed at the ecstacy in her face.
"You look like a kid in a candy-shop," he said, swinging her past a jam
with a long, breathless swooping glide and picking up the step again.
"I'm--per-fect-ly-happy!" she cried, in time to the tune. "It's
awfully good--of you-ou!"
He laughed again.
"Stick to me, and I'll teach you a lot of things," he said.
She found, when she went reluctantly back to the table with him,
that the others were talking of leaving. It hurt to hear him
enthusiastically greeting the suggestion. But after they were in
the machine it appeared that they were not going home. There was
an interval of rushing through the cool darkness, and then another
restaurant just like the others, and more dancing.
The hours blurred into a succession of those swift dashes through the
clean night air, and recurring plunges into light and heat and smoke
and music. Helen, faithfully sticking to lemon sours as momma had
advised, discovered that she could dance something called a rag, and
something else known as a Grizzly Bear; heard Duddy crying that she was
some chicken; felt herself a great success. Bob was growing strangely
sentimental and talked sorrowfully about his poor old mother; momma's
cheeks were flushed under the rouge, and she sang part of a song,
forgetting the rest of the words. The crowd shifted and separated;
somewhere they lost part of it, and a stranger appeared with Louise.
Helen, forced at last to think of her work next morning, was horrified
to find that it was two o'clock. Momma agreed that the best of friends
must part. They sang while they sped through the sleeping city, the
stars overhead and the street-lights flashing by. Drowsily happy, Helen
thought it no harm to rest her head on Mr. Kennedy's shoulder, since
his other arm was around momma, and she wondered what it would be like
if a man so fascinating were in love with her. It would be frightfully
thrilling and exciting, she thought, playing daringly with the idea.
"See you, again!" they all cried, when she alighted with momma and
Louise before the dark apartment-house. The others were going on
to more fun somewhere. She shook hands with Mr. Kennedy, feeling a
contraction of her heart. "Thank you for a very pleasant time." She
felt that he was amused by the stilted words.
"Don't forget it isn't the last one!" he said.
She did not forget. The words repeated themselves in her mind; she
heard his voice, and felt his arm around her waist and the music
throbbing in her blood for a long time. The sensations came back to
her in the pauses of her work next day, while she dragged through the
hours as if she were drugged, hearing the noise of the exchange and the
market quotations clicking off the Chicago wire, now very far and thin,
now close and sickeningly loud.
She was white and faint when she got home, and Momma suggested a
bromo-seltzer and offered to lend her some rouge. But Mr. Kennedy had
not telephoned, and she went to bed instead of going out with them that
evening. It was eleven days before he did telephone.