Sleep was impossible. Helen's exhausted nerves reacted in feverish
tenseness to the shock of this unexpected news of Bert. From long
experience she knew that in this half-delirious state she could not
trust her reasoning, must not accept seriously its conclusions, but she
could not stop her thoughts. They scurried uncontrolled through her
brain as if driven by a life of their own. She could only endure them
until her over-taxed body crushed them with its tired weight. To-morrow
she would be able to think.
In the square hotel room, under the garish light that emphasized the
ugliness of red carpet and varnished mahogany furniture, she moved
about as usual, opening the windows, hanging up her hat and coat,
unfastening her bag. She did not forget the customary pleasant word to
the bell-boy who brought ice-water, and he saw nothing unusual in her
white face and bright eyes. This hotel saw her only on her return trips
from the tract, and she was always exhausted after making or losing a
sale. She locked the door behind him, and began to undress.
Paul must not be involved. She must manage to shield him. A sensation
of nausea swept over her. The vulgarity, the cheap coarseness of it!
But she must not think. She was too tired. Why had she blundered into
such a situation? What change had the years made in Bert? Her thoughts,
touching him, recoiled. She would not think of Paul. To have the
two in her mind together was intolerable, it was the essence of her
humiliation. Married to one man, bound to him by a thousand memories
that rushed upon her, and loving another, engaged to him! No fine,
self-respecting woman could be in such a position. But she was. She
must face that fact. No, she must not face it. Not until she was rested,
in command of herself.
She bathed, scrubbing her skin until it glowed painfully. Cold-cream
was not enough for her face and hands. She rubbed them with soap, with
harsh towels. At midnight she was washing her hair. If only she could
slip out of her body, run away from herself into a new personality,
forget completely all that she was or had been!
This was hysteria, she told herself. "Only hold on, have patience,
wait. The days will go past you. Life clears itself, like running
water. It will be all right somehow. Don't try to think. You're too
tired."
At dawn her eyelids were weary at last, and she fell asleep. She
prolonged the sleep consciously, half waking at intervals as the day
grew brighter, pulling oblivion over her head again to shield herself
from living, as a child hides beneath a quilt to keep away darkness.
Outside the world had awakened, going busily about its affairs
while the day passed over it. The noise of the streets, voices,
automobile-horns, rumbling wheels, came through the open windows with
the hot sunshine, running like the sound of a river through her sleep.
She awoke in the late afternoon, heavy-lidded, with creased cheeks, but
once more quietly self-controlled.
Refreshed by a cold plunge, crisply dressed, composed, she ate dinner
in the big, softly lighted dining-room, nodding across white tables
to the business men she knew. Then, led by an impulse she did not
question, she went out into the crowded streets. With her walked
the ghost of the girl who had come down from Masonville, dazzled,
wide-eyed, so pitifully sure of herself, to learn to telegraph.
Sacramento had changed. It had been a big town; it was now a city,
radiating interurban lines, thrusting tall buildings toward the sky,
smudging that sky with the smoke of factories and canneries. Its
streets were sluggishly moving floods of automobiles; its wharves were
crowded with boats; across the wide, yellow river spans of new bridges
were reaching toward each other.
All the statistics of the city's growth, of the great reclamation
projects, of the rich farms spreading over the old grain lands, were
at Helen's finger-tips. A hundred times she had gone over them, drawn
conclusions from them, pounded home-selling arguments with them, since
she had added Sacramento valley lands to the San Joaquin properties she
handled. But more eloquently her reviving memories showed her the gulf
between the old days and the new.
Mrs. Brown's little restaurant and the room where Helen had lived,
were gone. In their place stood a six-story office building of raw new
brick. That imposing street down which she had stumbled awkwardly after
Mrs. Campbell was now a row of dingy boarding-houses. Mrs. Campbell's
house itself, once so awe-inspiring, had become a disconsolate building
with peeling paint, standing in a ragged lawn, and across the porch
where she and Paul had said good-by in the dawn there was now a black
and gold sign, "Ah Wong, Chinese Herb Doctor." She went quickly past it.
For the first time in the hurried years her thoughts turned inward,
self-questioning, and she tried to follow step by step the changes that
had taken place in her. But she could not see them clearly for the
memory of the girl that she had been, a girl she saw now as a piteous
young thing quite outside herself, a lovely, emotional, valiant young
struggler against unknown odds. She felt an aching compassion, a
longing to shield that girl from the life she had faced with such blind
courage, to save her youth and sweetness. But the girl, of course,
was gone, like the room from which she had looked so eagerly at the
automobile.
It was eleven o'clock when she walked briskly through the groups in the
hotel lobby, took her key from the room clerk and left a call for the
early San Francisco train. She would reach the city in time to get the
final contracts for the sale she had made yesterday, to take them to
San José and get them signed the same day. The thought of Bert lay like
a menace in the back of her mind, but she kept it there. She could not
foresee what would happen; she would meet it when it occurred. Meantime
she would go about her work as usual. Her attitude toward the future,
her attitude toward even herself, was one of waiting. She fell quietly
asleep.
On the train next morning she bought the San Francisco papers. The
headlines screamed the news at her. It was war. She missed one train
to San José in order to talk to Mr. Clark. The news had made no change
in the atmosphere of Clark & Hayward's wide, clean-looking office,
where salesmen lounged against the counters, their elbows resting on
plate glass that covered surveyor's maps and photographs of alfalfa
fields. The talk, as she stopped to speak to one and another, was the
usual news of sales made and lost, quarrels over commissions, personal
gossip. She waited her turn to enter Mr. Clark's office, and when it
came she looked at him with a keenness hidden under the friendliness of
her eyes.
She liked to talk to Mr. Clark. Three years of working with him had
brought her an understanding of this nervous, quick-witted, harassed
man. There was comradeship between them, a sympathy tempered by
wariness on both sides. Neither would have lost the slightest business
advantage for the other, but beyond that necessary antagonism they
were friends. She watched with pleasure the quick play of his mind,
managing hers as he would have handled the thoughts of a buyer; she was
conscious that he saw the motives behind her method of counter-attack;
a business interview between them was like a friendly bout between
fencers. But he spoke to her sometimes of the wife and children whose
pictures were on his desk; she knew how deeply he was devoted to them.
And once, during an idle evening in a Stockton hotel, he had held her
breathless with the whole story of his business career, talking to her
as he might have talked to himself.
To-day there seemed to her an added shade of effort in his briskly
cheerful manner. The lines around his shrewd eyes had deepened since
she first knew him, and it struck her, as she settled into the chair
facing his across the flat desk, that his hair was quite gray. With
the alert, keen expression taken from his face he would appear an old
man.
This expression was intensified when she spoke of the war, questioned
its effect on the business. It would have no effect, he assured her.
The future had never been brighter; Sacramento lands were booming;
fifty new settlers were going into Ripley Farmland Acres that fall.
Chaos on the stock market would make the solid investment values of
land even more apparent. If the war lasted a year or longer the prices
of American crops would rise.
"I was wondering about the psychological effect," she murmured. Mr.
Clark ran a nervous hand through his hair.
"Oh, that's all right. High prices will take care of the buyer's
psychology."
She laughed.
"While you take care of the salesman's." A twinkle in his eyes answered
the smile in hers, but she spoke again before he replied. "Mr. Clark,
I'd like to ask you something--rather personal. What do you really get
out of business?"
A quizzical smile deepened the lines around his mouth.
"Well, I got two million dollars out of it in the Portland boom! It's
a game," he said after a moment. "Just a game. That's all. I've made
two fortunes--you know that--and lost them. And now I'm climbing up
again. Oh, if I had it to do over again, I--" He changed the words on
his lips,--"I'd do the same thing. No doubt about it. We all think we
wouldn't, but we would. We don't make our lives. They make us."
"Fatalist?"
"Fatalist." They smiled at each other again as she rose and held out
her hand. He kept it a moment in a steadying grasp. "By the way, have
you heard that your husband's around?"
"Yes." She thanked him with her eyes. "Good-by."
She was oppressed by a sense of futility, of the hopeless muddle of
living, while the train carried her down the peninsula toward San José.
To escape from it she concentrated her attention on the afternoon
papers.
They were filled with wild rumors, with names of strange towns in
Belgium, a mass of clamoring bulletins, confusing, yet somehow making
clear a picture of gray hordes moving, irresistible as a monstrous
machine, toward France, toward Paris. She was surprised by her passion
of resistance. Intolerable, that the Germans should march into Paris!
Why should she care so fiercely, she who knew nothing of Paris, nothing
but chance scraps of facts about Europe?
"I must learn French," she said to herself, and was appalled by the
multitude of things she did not know, both without and within herself.
The unsigned contracts in their long manila envelope were like an
anchor in a tossing sea. She must get them signed that night. It was
something to do, a definite action. She telephoned from the station,
making an appointment with the buyer, and felt the familiar routine
closing around her again while the street-car carried her down First
Street to her office.
Bert was sitting in her chair, smoking and talking enthusiastically to
Hutchinson, when she opened the door. The shock petrified them all.
The two men stared at her, Hutchinson's expression of easy good humor
frozen on his face; Bert's hand, extended in the old, flashing gesture,
suspended in the air. The door closed behind her.
Later she remembered Hutchinson's blood-red face, his awkward, even
comical, efforts to stammer that he hadn't expected her, that he must
be going, his blind search for his hat, his confused departure. At the
moment she seemed to be advancing to meet Bert in an otherwise empty
room, and though she felt herself trembling from head to foot her hands
and her voice were quite steady.
"How do you do?" she said, beginning to unbutton her gloves:
Though she had not been able to remember his face, it was as familiar
as if she had seen it every day; the low white forehead with the lock
of fair hair across it, the bright eyes, the aquiline nose, the rather
shapeless mouth--No, she had not remembered that his mouth was like
that. Her experienced eye saw self-indulgence and dissipation in the
soft flesh of his cheeks, the faint puffiness of the eyelids. Her
trembling was increasing, but it did not affect her. She was quite cool
and controlled.
She heard unmoved his cajoling, confident expostulation. That was a
nice way to meet a man when he'd come--she brushed aside his embracing
arm with a movement of her shoulder. "We'd better sit down. Pardon
me." She took the chair he had left, her own chair, from which she had
handled so many land-buyers.
"God, but you're hard!" His accusation held an unwilling admiration.
She saw that the way to lose this man was to cling to him; he wanted
her now, because she had no need of him. Memories of all the wasted
love, the self-surrender and faith she had given him, for which he had
not cared at all, which he had never seen or known how to value, came
back to her in a flood of pain. Her lips tightened, and looking at him
across the desk, she said:
"Do you think so? I'm sorry. But--just what do you want?"
He met her eyes for a moment, and she saw his effort to adjust himself,
his falling back upon his old self-confidence in bending other minds
to his desires. He could not believe that any one would successfully
resist him, that any woman was impervious to his charm. And suddenly
she felt hard, hard through and through. She wanted to hurt him
cruelly; she wanted to tear and wound his self-centered egotism, to
reach somewhere a sensitive spot in him and stab it.
He wanted her, he said. He wanted his wife. She heard in his voice a
note she knew, the deep, caressing tone he kept for women, and she saw
that he used it skilfully, aware of its effect.
He had gone through hell. "Through _hell_," he repeated vibrantly.
He did not expect her to understand. She was a woman. She could not
realize the tortures of remorse, the agonies of soul, the miseries
of those years without her. He sketched them for her, with voice and
gestures appealing to her pity. He had been a brute to her; he had been
a yellow cur to leave her so. He admitted it, magnificently humble.
He had promised himself that he would not come back to her until he was
on his feet again. He had reformed. He was going to work. He was going
to cut out the booze. Already he had the most glittering prospects.
Fer de Leon, the king of patent-medicine men, was going to put on a
tremendous campaign in Australia. Fer de Leon had absolute confidence
in him; he could sign a contract at any time for fifteen thousand a
year.
He wanted her to come with him. He needed her. With her beside him he
could resist all temptations. She was an angel; she was the only woman
he had ever really loved and respected. With her he could do anything.
Without her he would be hopeless, heartsick. God only knew what would
happen. "You'll forgive me, won't you? You won't turn me down. You'll
give me another chance?"
She was looking down at her hands, unable any longer to read what her
eyes saw in him. Her hands lay folded on the edge of the desk, composed
and quiet, not moved at all by the sick trembling that was shaking her.
The desire to hurt him was gone. His appeal to her pity had dissolved
it in contempt.
"I'm sorry," she said with effort. "I hope you--you will go on
and--succeed in everything. I know you will, of course." She said it in
a tone of strong conviction, trying now to save his egotism. She did
not want to hurt him. "I know you have done the best you could. It's
all right. It isn't anything you've done. I don't blame you for that.
But it seems to me--"
"Good God! How can you be so cold?" he cried.
Even her hands were shaking now, and she quieted them by clasping
them together. "Perhaps I am cold," she said. "You see already that
we couldn't--make a success of it. It isn't your fault. We just
don't--suit each other. We never did really. It was all a mistake." Her
throat contracted.
"So it's another man!" he said. "I might have known it."
"No." She was quiet even under the sneer. "It isn't that. But there
was never anything to build on between you and me. You think you want
me now only because you can't have me. So it will not really hurt
you if I get a divorce. And I'd rather do that. Then we can both
start again--with clean slates. And I hope you will succeed. And have
everything you want." She rose, one hand heavily on the desk, and held
out the other. "Good-by."
Her attempt to end the scene with frankness and dignity failed. He
could not believe that he had lost this object he had attempted to
gain. His wounded vanity demanded that he conquer her resistance. He
recalled their memories of happiness, tried to sway her with pictures
of the future he would give her, appealed to generosity, to pity, to
admiration. He played upon every chord of the feminine heart that he
knew.
She stood immovable, sick with misery, and saw behind his words
the motives that prompted them, self-love, self-assurance, baffled
antagonism. She felt again, as something outside herself, the
magnetism, the force like an electric current, that had conquered her
once.
"I really wish you would go," she said. "All this gains nothing for
either of us." At last he went.
"You women are all alike. Don't think you've fooled me. It's another
man with more money. If I were not a gentleman you wouldn't get away so
easily with this divorce talk. But I am. Go get it!" The door crashed
behind him.
She did not move for a long moment. Then she went into the inner
office, locked the door behind her, and sat down. Her glance fell on
her clenched hands. She had not worn her wedding-ring for some time,
but the finger was still narrowed a little, and on the inner side a
smooth, white mark showed where it had been. Quietly she folded her
arms on the desk and hid her face against them. After a little while
she began to sob, rough, hard sobs that tore her throat and forced a
few burning tears from her eyes.
An hour went by, and another. She was roused, then, by the sound of
steps in the outer office. Doubtless a prospect had come in. She lifted
her head, and waited, without moving, until the steps went out again.
The noise of the streets came up to her as usual; street-cars clanged
past, a newsboy cried an extra. Across the corner the hands of the
clock in the Bank of San José building marked off the minutes with
little jerks.
It was six o'clock. An urgent summons knocked at a closed door in her
mind. Six o'clock. She looked at her wrist-watch, and memory awoke. She
had an appointment at six-thirty, to close the final contracts on the
forty-acre sale. Hutchinson was depending on her to handle it. Below
the window the newsboy cried "War!" again.
Wearily she bathed her face with cold water, combed her hair, adjusted
her hat. Contracts in hand, she locked the office door behind her,
and her face wore its necessary pleasant, untroubled expression. The
buyer's wife was charmed by her smile, and although the man was already
somewhat disturbed by the war news, Helen was able to persuade them to
sign the contracts.
* * * * *
A week later she announced to Hutchinson that she was going to stop
selling land. She could give him no reasons that satisfied his startled
curiosity. She was simply quitting; that was all. He could manage the
office himself or get another partner; her leaving would make little
difference.
He protested, trying half-heartedly to shake her determination. The
shattering of accustomed and pleasant routine shocked him; he was like
a man thrown suddenly from a boat into the unstable water.
"But what do you want to do it for? What's the idea? Aren't we getting
along all right?" He was longing to ask if she were going to Bert,
whose arrival and immediate departure had not been explained to him.
The whole organization, she knew, was discussing it, and Hutchinson, on
the very scene of their meeting, was in the unhappy position of being
unable to give the interesting details. But he did not quite venture
to break through her reserve with a direct question. He scouted her
suggestion that the war would affect business. "Why, things have never
looked better! Here we've just made a forty-acre sale. Sacramento's
booming, and so is the San Joaquin. Fifty new settlers are going into
Farmland Acres this fall. There's going to be a boom in land. Folk
are going to see what a solid investment it is, the way stocks are
tumbling. And the farmers are going to make money hand over fist if the
war lasts a couple of years."
"Oh, well, maybe you're right," she conceded, remembering the twinkle
in Mr. Clark's eye when she had accused him of taking care of the
salesman's psychology. She still believed that spring would see a slump
in real-estate business. She had learned too well that men did not
handle their affairs on a basis of cool logic; too often in her own
work she had taken advantage of the gusts of impulse and unreasoning
emotion that swayed them. There would be a period when they would be
afraid; no facts or arguments would persuade them to exchange solid
cash for heavily mortgaged land. But the point no longer interested her.
She felt a profound weariness, an unease of spirit that was like the
ache of a body too long held motionless. Business had rested on her
like a weight for nearly four years. She could bear it no longer. She
must relax the self-control that held her own impulses and emotions in
its tight grip. The need was too strong to be longer resisted, too deep
in herself to be clearly understood. "I'm tired," she said. "I'm going
to quit."
An agreement dividing their deferred commissions must be drawn up
and filed with the San Francisco office. Hutchinson took over her
half-interest in the automobile she had left to be repaired in
Sacramento. Already his mind was busy with new plans. Since she would
no longer write the advertising he would cut it out. "Want ads'll be
cheaper and good enough," he said.
Thus simply the bonds were cut between her and all that had filled her
days and thoughts. She went home to the little bungalow, put the files
of her land advertisements out of sight, hung her hat and coat in the
closet.
The house seemed strange, with early-afternoon sunlight streaming
through the living-room windows. It was delightfully silent and empty.
Long hours, weeks, months, stretched before her like blank pages on
which she might write anything she chose.
She went through the rooms, straightening a picture, moving a chair,
taking up a vase of withering flowers. The curtains stirred in a cool
breeze that poured through the open windows and ruffled her hair. It
seemed to blow through her thoughts, too; she felt clean and cool and
refreshed. With a deep, simple joy she began to think of little things.
She would discharge the woman who came to clean; she would polish the
windows and dust the furniture and wash the dishes herself. To-morrow
she would get some gingham and make aprons. Perhaps Mabel and the baby
would come down for a visit; she would write and ask them.
She was cutting roses to fill the emptied vase when she thought of
Paul. He came into her thoughts quite simply, as he had come before
Bert's return. She thought, with a warmth at her heart and a dimple in
her cheek, that she would telephone him to come next Sunday, and she
would make a peach shortcake for him.