Early on the morning of the nineteenth she climbed the steps to the
little brown house on Russian Hill. She had traveled all night from
Masonville, awake in her berth, and she was very tired. She was so
tired that it seemed impossible to feel any more emotion, and she
looked indifferently at the sunny, redwood-paneled room so full of
memories. A score of disconnected thoughts worried her mind; her
mother's tearful face, the telegram to Washington for her passports,
the steamer-trunk she must buy, Mabel looking at her enviously over the
baby's head.
Brushing a hand across her blurry eyes, she sat down at her desk. She
must write to Paul. She must tell him that she was going away; make him
understand that their smiling farewell at the Ripley station was her
good-by. She must try to show him that it was best, so that he would
not hold her memory too long.
When she had finished, she folded the sheet carefully, slipped it into
its envelope, and sealed the flap. It was done. She felt that she had
torn away a part of herself, leaving a bleeding emptiness. Her brain,
wise with experience of suffering, told her that the wound would heal,
would even in time be forgotten, but her wisdom did not dull the pain.
A thousand memories rushed upon her, torturing, unbearable. She rose,
trying to push them from her, reaching in agony for the anodyne of
work. Her trunks must be packed; there were shelves of books to give
away; she must telephone the tailor and the expressman. A horde of such
details stretched saving hands to her, and a self-control strengthened
by long use took her through them, with her chin up and a smile on her
lips.
The luncheon table had never seen her gayer, amid the excited
congratulations of the girls, and she rushed through an afternoon of
shopping to meet them all for tea, and to spend a last intimate, warm,
half-tearful evening with them around the fire.
"The old crowd's breaking up," they said. "Marian in France, and Dodo
in Washington, and now Helen's going. Nothing's going to be the same
any more."
"Nothing ever is," she answered soberly. "We can't keep anything in the
world, no matter how good it is. And hasn't it been good--all this! The
way we've cared for each other, and our happy times together, and all
you've meant to me--I can't tell you. I don't think there's anything in
the world more beautiful than the friendship of women. It's been the
happiest year of my whole life."
"It's been lovely, all of it," Sara murmured, curled in a heap of
cushions on the floor by Helen's low chair. She laid her long,
beautiful artist's hand on Helen's. "It's terrible to see things end."
The fire settled together with a soft, snuggling sound. In the dusk
Willetta's face was dimly white, and the little spark of red on Anne's
cigarette-tip glowed and faded. They sat about the dying fire in a
last communion of understanding that seemed threatened by the darkness
around them. Already the room had taken on something of the forlornness
of all abandoned places, a coldness and strangeness shared in Helen's
mind by the lands to which she was going, the unknown days before her.
The dull ache at her heart became pain at a sudden memory of Paul's
face. She straightened in her chair, closing her fingers more warmly
around Sara's.
"I'm sure of one thing," she said earnestly. "It hurts to--to let go
of anything beautiful. But something will come to take its place,
something different, of course, but better. The future's always better
than we can possibly think it will be. We ought to know that--really
_know_ it. We ought to be so sure of it that we'd let go of things more
easily, strike out toward the next thing. Like swimming, you know.
Confidently. We ought to live _confidently_. Because whatever's ahead,
it's going to be better than we've had. I tell you, girls, I know it
is."
* * * * *
She arrived breathlessly at the docks next day, rushing down at the
last minute in a taxi-cab jammed with bundles. Sara and Willetta were
part of the mad whirl of the morning, dashing with her to straighten
out a last unexpected difficulty with the passports, hounding a
delaying express company, telephoning finally for a taxi-cab to carry
the trunks to the docks. Willetta had gone with it to see that the
trunks got aboard; Sara had made coffee and toast and pressed them upon
Helen while she was dressing. The telephone had rung every moment.
It was ringing again when Helen, clutching her bag, her purse, her
gloves, slammed the door of the little house and ran down the stairs
of Jones Street to the waiting cab. Bumping over the cobbles, with
Sara beside her, and the bags, the hat-box, an armful of roses, the
shawl-strapped steamer-rug, jostled in confusion about her, she looked
through the plate-glass panes at San Francisco's hilly streets,
Chinatown's colorful vegetable markets and glittering shops, Grant
Avenue's suave buildings, and felt nothing but a sense of unreality.
Incredible that these would still be here when she was gone! Incredible
that she was going, actually going!
"You have the keys, Helen dear?" Sara's lips quivered.
"Yes--I think so." She dug them from her purse. "Give them to Willetta
for me, will you? I'm afraid I'll forget. I hope she'll be happy in the
little house." For the hundredth time she glanced at her wrist-watch.
"If you hear who it was that was telephoning, explain to them that I
simply had to run or I'd miss the boat, won't you dear? And you'll
write." How inadequate, these commonplace little remarks! Yet what else
could one say?
The taxi-cab stopped in the throng of automobiles about the wharves,
the man must be paid, bags and steamer-rug and flowers pulled out.
Willetta was there, laughing with tears in her eyes. The little Chinese
woman was there and Anne and Mr. Hayden. She was surrounded, laughing,
shaking hands, saying something, anything.
They were at the gang-plank, across it, on the deck of the steamer now,
in the packed crowd. All around them were tears and laughter, kisses,
farewells. She was shaking hands again. Miss Peterson, the stenographer
from the "Post," was pressing a white package into her hands; two
little girls from Telegraph Hill had come down to bring a hot, wilted
bunch of weed-flowers; Mary O'Brien, from the settlement house she had
written about, and others, acquaintances she had hardly remembered,
men with whom she had danced at the Press Club--"Oh, Mr. Clark! How
good of you to come--! Good-by!--Good-by!" "Hope you have a fine trip."
"Oh, thank you!--Thank you!--Good-by!"
The whistle blew; the crowd eddied about her. A last hug from Sara,
tremulous kisses, Willetta's damp cheek pressed against hers, a sob in
her throat. The last visitors were being hurried from the ship. Some
one threw a bright paper ribbon, curling downward to the wharf. Another
and another, scores of them, hundreds, sped through the sunshine,
interlacing, caught by the crowd below, while others rose in long
curves to the deck, till the steamer was bound to the shore by their
rainbow colors.
Another whistle. Slowly, with a faint quivering of its great hulk, the
ship awoke, became a living thing beneath her feet. The futile, bright
strands parted, one by one, curled, fell into the water. The crowd
below was a blur of white faces. Brushing her hand across her eyes,
she found her own little group, Willetta, Anne, Sara, close together,
waving handkerchiefs. Across the widening strip of water she waved her
roses, waved and waved them till the docks were blots of gray and she
could no longer see the answering flutter of white. The ship was slowly
turning in the stream, heading out through the Golden Gate.
When the last sight of the dear gray city was lost, when the Ferry
Tower, the high cliffs of Telegraph, the castle-like height of Russian
Hill, the Presidio, Cliff House, the beach, had sunk into grayness
on the horizon, she went down to her stateroom. It was piled with
gifts, long striped boxes that held flowers, baskets of fruit, square
silver-corded packages that spoke of bonbons, others large and small.
She had not known that so many people cared.
A blind impulse had brought her into this little place where she could
lock a door behind her and be alone. She had felt that she could give
way there to all the tears she had not shed. But she felt only a sense
of peace. She laughed a little, wiping away the few tears that did brim
over her lashes, thinking of the girls who still loved her and would
love her wherever she was.
Deliberately she thought of Paul, and already the deep hurt was gone.
He would be reading her letter now; she felt a pang of sharp pain
because she had made him suffer. But he would forget her now. In time
there would be another girl, such a girl as she had been,--the girl he
had loved and that no longer lived in her.
"That's why it hurt me so!" she thought, with sudden illumination. "Not
because I wanted him, but because I wanted to be all that I had been,
and to have all that I have missed and never will have. Marriage and
home and children. No, I can't ever fit into it now. But--there's all
the world, all the world, outside, waiting for me!"
Her thoughts turned forward to it.
THE END