With a sense of adventure upon them the men flocked down at once. They
bought at first because the wares were offered by a pretty girl. They
came back to buy because never had there been such sandwiches.
Jane had improved upon her first idea. There were not only ham
sandwiches; there were baked beans between brown bread, thin slices of
broiled bacon in hot baking-powder biscuit. Henry Bittinger said to
Atwood Jones afterward: "The food was so good that if she had been as
ugly as sin she'd have got away with it."
"She isn't ugly," said Atwood, and had a fleeting moment of speculation
as to whether Jane with her red hair would fit into his plutocratic
future.
Jane had made fifty sandwiches. She sold them all, and took ten dollars
home with her.
"I shall make a hundred next time," she said to Tommy, whom she picked
up on the way back. "And--it wasn't so dreadful, Tommy."
But that night as she lay in bed looking out toward the mountain,
silver-tipped in the moonlight, she had a shivering sense of the eyes of
some of the men--of Tillotson, who kept the hotel, and of others of his
kind.
O-liver had stayed at home that Saturday night to write a certain weekly
letter. He had stayed at home also because he didn't approve of Jane.
"But you haven't seen her," Tommy protested.
"I know the type."
On Sunday morning Tommy brought him a baked-bean sandwich. "It isn't as
fresh as it might be. But you can see what she's giving us."
There were months of O-liver's life which had been spent with a
grandmother in Boston. His grandmother had made brown bread and she had
baked beans. And now as he ate his sandwich there was the savor of all
the gastronomic memories of a healthy and happy childhood.
"It's delicious," he said, "but she'd better not mix with that crowd."
"She doesn't mix," said Tommy.
"She'll have to." O-liver had in mind a red-haired woman, raw-boned,
with come-hither eyes. Her kind was not uncommon. Tommy's infatuation
would of course elevate her to a pedestal.
"She's going to make a hundred sandwiches next week," Tommy vouchsafed.
O-liver's mind could scarcely compass one hundred sandwiches. "She'd
better stick to her leeks and lettuce."
He rode away the next Saturday night. It was his protest against the
interest roused in the community by this Jane who sold sandwiches. He
heard of her everywhere. Some of the men were respectful and some were
not. It depended largely on the nature of the particular male.
O-liver rode Mary Pick and wore his straw helmet. His way led down into
the valley and up again and down, until at last he came to the sea. Then
he followed the water's edge, letting Mary Pick dance now and then on
the hard beach, with the waves curling up like cream, and beyond the
waves a stretch of pale azure to the horizon.
He reached finally a fantastic settlement. Against the sky towered walls
which might have inclosed an ancient city--walls built of cloth and wood
instead of stone. Beyond these walls were thatched cottages which had no
occupants; a quaint church which had no congregation; a Greek temple
which had no vestals, no sacred fire, no altar; hedges which had no
roots. O-liver weighing the hollowness of it all had thought whimsically
of an old nursery rime:
The first sent a goose without a bone;
The second sent a cherry without a stone;
The third sent a blanket without a thread;
The fourth sent a book that no man could read.
At the end of the settlement was a vast studio lighted by a glass roof.
Entering, O-liver was transported at once to the dance hall on the
Barbary Coast--a great room with a bar at one end, the musicians on a
platform at the other, a stairway leading upward. Groups of people
waited for a signal to dance, to drink, to act whatever part had been
assigned them--people with unearthly pink complexions. The heat was
intense.
With her face upturned to the director, who was mounted on a chair,
stood a childish creature who was pinker, if possible, than the rest.
She had fluffy hair of pale gold. She ran up the stairway presently, and
the light was turned on her. It made of her fluffy hair a halo. In the
strong glare everything about her was overemphasized, but O-liver knew
that when she showed up on the screen she would be entrancing.
He had first seen her on the screen. He had met her afterward at her
hotel. She had seemed as ingenuous as the parts she played. Perhaps she
was. He could never be quite sure. Perhaps the money she had made
afterward had spoiled her. She had jumped from fifty dollars a week to a
thousand.
After that O-liver could give her nothing. He had an allowance from his
mother of three thousand a year. Fluffy Hair made as much as that in
three weeks. Where he had been king of his own domain he became a sort
of gentleman footman, carrying her sables and her satchels. But that was
not the worst of it. He found that they had not a taste in common. She
laughed at his books, at his love of sea and sky. She even laughed at
his Mary Pick, whose name suggested a hated rival.
And so he left her--laughing.
A certain sense of responsibility, however, took him to her once a
month, and a letter went to her every week. She was his wife. He
continued in a sense to watch over her. Yet she resented his watching.
From her stairway she had seen him, and when a rest was granted she came
down to him.
"I'll be through presently," she said. "We can go to my hotel."
Her rooms in the hotel overlooked the sea. There was a balcony, and they
sat on it in long lazy chairs and had iced things to drink.
O-liver drank lemonade. His wife had something stronger.
"I have not been well," she said; "it's a part of the doctor's
prescription."
She had removed the pink from her face, and he saw that she was pale.
"You are working too hard," he told her. "You'd better take a month in
the desert, out of doors."
She shivered. She hated the out-of-doors that he raved about. They had
spent their honeymoon in a tent. She had been wild to get back to
civilization. It had been their first moment of disillusion.
She showed him before he went some of the things she had acquired since
his last visit--an ermine coat, a string of pearls.
"I saw them in your last picture," he told her. "You really visit me by
proxy. I find your name on the boards, and walk in with a lot of other
men and look at you. And not one of them dreams that I've ever seen the
woman on the screen."
"Well, they wouldn't of course." She had never taken his name. Her own
was too valuable.