Val stood just inside the door of the hotel parlor and glanced swiftly
around at the place of unpleasant memory.
“No, I must see Manley before I can tell you whether we shall want to stay
or not,” she replied to Arline's insistence that she “go right up to a
room” and lie down. “I feel quite well, and you must not bother about me at
all. If Mr. Burnett will be good enough to send Manley to me--I must see
him first of all.” It was Val in her most unapproachable mood, and Arline
subsided before it.
“Well, then, I'll go and send word to Man, and see about some supper for
us. I feel as if _I_ could eat ten-penny nails!” She went out into the
hall, hesitated a moment, and then boldly invaded the “office.”
“Say! have you got Man rounded up yit?” she demanded of her husband. “And
how is he, anyhow? That girl ain't got the first idea of what ails him--how
anybody with the brains and education she's got can be so thick-headed gits
me. Jim told me Man's been packing a bottle or two home with him every trip
he's made for the last month--and she don't know a thing about it. I'd like
to know what 'n time they learn folks back East, anyhow; to put their eyes
and their sense in their pockets, I guess, and go along blind as bats.
Where's Kent at? Did he go after him? She won't do nothing till she sees
Man--”
At that moment Kent came in, and his disgust needed no words. He answered
Mrs. Hawley's inquiring look with a shake of the head.
“I can't do anything with him,” he said morosely. “He's so full he don't
know he's got a wife, hardly. You better go and tell her, Mrs. Hawley.
Somebody's got to.”
“Oh, my heavens!” Arline clutched at the doorknob for moral support. “I
could no more face them yellow eyes of hern when they blaze up--you go tell
her yourself, if you want her told. I've got to see about some supper for
us. I ain't had a bite since dinner, and Min's off gadding somewheres--”
She hurried away, mentally washing her hands of the affair. “Women's got to
learn some time what men is,” she soliloquized, “and I guess she ain't
no better than any of the rest of us, that she can't learn to take her
medicine--but _I_ ain't goin' to be the one to tell her what kinda fellow
she's tied to. My stunt'll be helpin' her pick up the pieces and make the
best of it after she's told.”
She stopped, just inside the dining room, and listened until she heard Kent
cross the hall from the office and open the parlor door. “Gee! It's like a
hangin',” she sighed. “If she wasn't so plumb innocent--” She started
for the door which opened into the parlor from the dining room, strongly
tempted to eavesdrop. She did yield so far as to put her ear to the
keyhole, but the silence within impressed her strangely, and she retreated
to the kitchen and closed the door tightly behind her as the most practical
method of bidding Satan begone.
The silence in the parlor lasted while Kent, standing with his back against
the door, faced Val and meditated swiftly upon the manner of his telling.
“Well?” she demanded at last. “I am still waiting to see Manley. I am not
quite a child, Mr. Burnett. I know something is the matter, and you--if you
have any pity, or any feeling of friendship, you will tell me the truth.
Don't you suppose I know that Arline was--_lying_ to me all the time about
Manley? You helped her to lie. So did that other man. I waited until I
reached town, where I could do something, and now you must tell me the
truth. Manley is badly hurt, or he is dead. Tell me which it is, and take
me to him.” She spoke fast, as if she was afraid she might not be able to
finish, though her voice was even and low, it was also flat and toneless
with her effort to seem perfectly calm and self-controlled.
Kent looked at her, forgot all about leading up to the truth by easy
stages, as he had intended to do, and gave it to her straight. “He ain't
either one,” he said. “He's drunk!”
Val stared at him. “Drunk!” He could see how even her lips shrank from the
word. She threw up her head. “That,” she declared icily, “I know to be
impossible!”
“Oh, do you? Let me tell you that's _never_ impossible with a man, not when
there's whisky handy.”
“Manley is not that sort of a man. When he left me, three years ago, he
promised me never to frequent places where liquor is sold. He never had
touched liquor; he never was tempted to touch it. But, just to be doubly
sure, he promised me, on his honor. He has never broken that promise; I
know, because he told me so.” She made the explanation scornfully, as
if her pride and her belief in Manley almost forbade the indignity of
explaining. “I don't know why you should come here and insult me,” she
added, with a lofty charity for his sin.
“I don't see how it can insult you,” he contended. “You're got a different
way of looking at things, but that won't help you to dodge facts. Man's
drunk. I said it, and I mean it. It ain't the first time, nor the second.
He was drunk the day you came, and couldn't meet the train. That's why I
met you. I ought to've told you, I guess, but I hated to make you feel bad.
So I went to work and sobered him up, and sent him over to get married.
I've always been kinda sorry for that. It was a low-down trick to play on
you, and that's a fact. You ought to've had a chance to draw outa the game,
but I didn't think about it at the time. Man and I have always been pretty
good friends, and I was thinking of _his_ side of the case. I thought he'd
straighten up after he got married; he wasn't such a hard drinker--only
he'd go on a toot when he got into town, like lots of men. I didn't think
it had such a strong hold on him. And I knew he thought a lot of you, and
if you went back on him it'd hit him pretty hard. Man ain't a bad fellow,
only for that. And he's liable to do better when he finds out you know
about it. A man will do 'most anything for a woman he thinks a lot of.”
“Indeed!” Val was sitting now upon the red plush chair. Her face was
perfectly colorless, her manner frozen. The word seemed to speak itself,
without having any relation whatever to her thoughts and her emotions.
Kent waited. It seemed to him that she took it harder than she would have
taken the news that Manley was dead. He had no means of gauging the horror
of a young woman who has all her life been familiar with such terms as “the
demon rum,” and who has been taught that “intemperance is the doorway to
perdition”; a young woman whose life has been sheltered jealously from all
contact with the ugly things of the world, and who believes that she might
better die than marry a drunkard. He watched her unobtrusively.
“Anyway, it was worrying over you that made him get off wrong to-day,” he
ventured at last, as a sort of palliative. “They say he was going to start
home right in the face of the fire, and when they wouldn't let him, he
headed straight for a saloon and commenced to pour whisky down him. He
thought sure you--he thought the fire would--”
“I see,” Val interrupted stonily. “For the very doubtful honor of shaking
the hand of a politician, he left me alone to face as best I might
the possibility of burning alive; and when it seemed likely that the
possibility had become a certainty, he must celebrate his bereavement by
becoming a beast. Is that what you would have me believe of my husband?”
“That's about the size of it,” Kent admitted reluctantly. “Only I wouldn't
have put it just that way, maybe.”
“Indeed! And how would you pit it, then?”
Kent leaned harder against the door, and looked at her curiously. Women, it
seemed to him, were always going to extremes; they were either too soft and
meek, or else they were too hard and unmerciful.
“How would you put it? I am rather curious to know your point of view.”
“Well, I know men better than you do, Mrs. Fleetwood. I know they can do
some things that look pretty rotten on the surface, and yet be fairly
decent underneath. You don't know how a habit like that gets a fellow just
where he's weakest. Man ain't a beast. He's selfish and careless, and he
gives way too easy, but he thinks the world of you. Jim says he cried like
a baby when he came into the saloon, and acted like a crazy man. You don't
want to be too hard on him. I've an idea this will learn him a lesson. If
you take him the right way, Mrs. Fleetwood, the chances are he'll quit
drinking.”
Val smiled. Kent thought he had never before seen a smile like that, and
hoped he never would see another. There was in it neither mercy nor mirth,
but only the hard judgment of a woman who does not understand.
“Will you bring him to me here, Mr. Burnett? I do not feel quite equal
to invading a saloon and begging him, on my knees, to come--after the
conventional manner of drunkards' wives. But I should like to see him.”
Kent stared. “He ain't in any shape to argue with,” he remonstrated. “You
better wait a while.”
She rested her chin upon her hands, folded upon the high chair back, and
gazed at him with her tawny eyes, that somehow reminded Kent of a lioness
in a cage. He thought swiftly that a lioness would have as much mercy as
she had in that mood.
“Mr. Burnett,” she began quietly, when Kent's nerves were beginning to feel
the strain of her silent stare, “I want to see Manley _as he is now_. I
will tell you why. You aren't a woman, and you never will understand, but I
shall tell you; I want to tell _somebody_.
“I was raised well--that sounds queer, but modesty forbids more. At any
rate, my mother was very careful about me. She believed in a girl marrying
and becoming a good wife to a good man, and to that end she taught me and
trained me. A woman must give her all--her life, her past, present, and
future--to the man she marries. For three years I thought how unworthy I
was to be Manley's wife. _Unworthy_, do you hear? I slept with his letters
under my pillow.” The self-contempt in her tone! “I studied the things I
thought would make me a better companion out here in the wilderness. I
practiced hours and hours every day upon my violin, because Manley had
admired my playing, and I thought it would please him to have me play in
the firelight on winter evenings, when the blizzards were howling about the
house! I learned to cook, to wash clothes, to iron, to sweep, and to scrub,
and to make my own clothes, because Manley's wife would live where
she could not hire servants to do these things. I lived a beautiful,
picturesque dream of domestic happiness.
“I left my friends, my home, all the things I had been accustomed to all my
life, and I came out here to live that dream!” She laughed bitterly.
“You can easily guess how much of it has come true, Mr. Burnett. But you
don't know what it costs a girl to come down from the clouds and find that
reality is hard and ugly--from dreaming of a cozy little nest of a home,
and the love and care of--of Manley, to the reality--to carrying water and
chopping wood and being left alone, day after day, and to find that his
love only meant--Oh, you don't know how a woman clings to her ideals! You
don't know how I have dung to mine. They have become rather tattered, and I
have had to mend them often, but I have clung to them, even though they do
not resemble much the dreams I brought with me to this horrible country.
“But if it's true, what you tell me--if Manley himself is another
disillusionment--if beyond his selfishness and his carelessness he is a
drunken brute whom I can't even respect, then I'm done with my ideals. I
want to see him just as he is. I want to see him once without the halo I
have kept shining all these months. I've got my life to live--but I want to
face facts and live facts. I can't go on dreaming and making believe, after
this.” She stopped and looked at him speculatively, absolutely without
emotion.
“Just before I left home,” she went on in the same calm quiet, “a girl
showed me some verses written by a very wicked man. At least, they say he
is very wicked--at any rate, he is in jail. I thought the verses horrible
and brutal; but now I think the man must be very wise. I remember a few
lines, and they seem to me to mean Manley.
“For each man kills the thing he loves--
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word;
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword.
“I don't remember all of it, but there was another line or two:
“The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.
“I wish I had that poem now--I think I could understand it. I think--”
“I think you've got talking hysterics, if there is such a thing,” Kent
interrupted harshly. “You don't know half what you're saying. You've had
a hard day, and you're all tired out, and everything looks outa focus. I
know--I've seen men like that sometimes when some trouble hit 'em hard and
unexpected. What you want is sleep; not poetry about killing people. A
man, in the shape you are in, takes to whisky. You're taking to graveyard
poetry--and, if you ask _me_, that's worse than whisky. You ain't normal.
What you want to do is go straight to bed. When you wake up in the morning
you won't feel so bad. You won't have half as many troubles as you've got
now.”
“I knew you wouldn't understand it,” Val remarked coldly, still staring at
him with her chin on her hands.
“You won't yourself, to-morrow morning,” Kent declared unsympathetically,
and called Mrs. Hawley from the kitchen. “You better put Mrs. Fleetwood
to bed,” he advised gruffly. “And if you've got anything that'll make her
sleep, give her a dose of it. She's so tired she can't see straight.” He
was nearly to the outside door when Val recovered her speech.
“You men are all alike,” she said contemptuously. “You give orders and you
consider yourselves above all the laws of morality or decency; in reality
you are beneath them. We shouldn't expect anything of the lower animals!
How I _despise_ men!”
“Now you're _talking_,” grinned Kent, quite unmoved. “Whack us in a bunch
all you like--but don't make one poor devil take it all. Men as a class are
used to it and can stand it.” He was laughing as he left the room, but his
amusement lasted only until the door was closed behind him. “Lord!” he
exclaimed, and drew a deep breath. “I'd sure hate to have that little
woman say all them things about _me!_” and glanced involuntarily over his
shoulder to where a crack of light showed under the faded green shade of
one of the parlor windows.
He crossed the street and entered the saloon where Manley was still
drinking heavily, his face crimson and blear-eyed and brutalized, his
speech thickened disgustingly. He was sprawled in an armchair, waving an
empty glass in an erratic attempt to mark the time of a college ditty six
or seven years out of date, which he was trying to sing. He leered up at
Kent.
“Wife 'sall righ',” he informed him solemnly. “Knew she would be--fine
guards's got out there. 'Sall righ'--somebody shaid sho. Have a drink.”
Kent glowered down at him, made a swift, mental decision, and pipped him
by the shoulder. “You come with me,” he commanded. “I've got something
important I want to tell you. Come on--if you can walk.”
“'Course I c'n walk all righ'. Shertainly I can walk. Wha's makes you think
I can't walk? Want to inshult me? 'Sall my friends here--no secrets from my
friends. Wha's want tell me? Shay it here.”
Kent was a big man; that is to say, he was tall, well-muscled and active.
But so was Manley. Kent tried the power of persuasion, leaving force as a
last, doubtful result. In fifteen minutes or thereabouts he had succeeded
in getting Manley outside the door, and there he balked.
“Wha's matter wish you?” he complained, pulling back. “C'm on back 'n' have
drink. Wha's wanna tell me?”
“You wait. I'll tell you all about it in a minute. I've got something to
show you, and I don't want the bunch to get next. Savvy?”
He had a sickening sense that the subterfuge would not have deceived a
five-year-old child, but it was accepted without question.
He led Manley stumbling up the street, evading a direct statement as to his
destination, pulled him off the board walk, and took him across a vacant
lot well sprinkled with old shoes and tin cans. Here Manley fell down, and
Kent's patience was well tested before he got him up and going again.
“Where y' goin'?” Manley inquired pettishly, as often as he could bring his
tongue to the labor of articulation.
“You wait and I'll show you,” was Kent's unvaried reply.
At last he pushed open a door and led his victim into the darkness of a
small, windowless building. “It's in here--back against the wall, there,”
he said, pulling Manley after him. By feeling, and by a good sense of
location, he arrived at a rough bunk built against the farther wall, with a
blanket or two upon it.
“There you are,” he announced grimly. “You'll have a sweet time getting
anything to drink here, old boy. When you're sober enough to face your wife
and have some show of squaring yourself with her, I'll come and let you
out.” He had pushed Manley down upon the bunk, and had reached the door
before the other could get up and come at him. He pulled the door shut
with a slam, slipped a padlock into the staple, and snapped it just before
Manley lurched heavily against it. He was cursing as well as he could--was
Manley, and he began kicking like an unruly child shut into a closet.
“Aw, let up,” Kent advised him, through a crack in the wall. “Want to know
where you are? Well, you're in Hawley's ice house; you know it's a fine
place for drunks to sober up in; it's awful popular for that purpose. Aw,
you can't do any business kicking--that's been tried lots of times. This
is sure well built, for an ice house. No, I can't let you out. Couldn't
possibly, you know. I haven't got the key--old lady Hawley has got it, and
she's gone to bed hours ago. You go to sleep and forget about it. I'll talk
to you in the morning. Good night, and pleasant dreams!”
The last thing Kent heard as he walked away was Manley's profane promise to
cut Kent's heart out very early the next day.
“The darned fool,” Kent commented, as he stopped in the first patch of
lamplight to roll a cigarette. “He ain't got another friend in town that'd
go to the trouble I've gone to for him. He'll realize it, too, when all
that whisky quits stewing inside him.”