THE FINEST CITY IN THE WORLD
So Sheila Arundel left the garret where the stars pressed close, and
went with Sylvester Hudson out into the world. It was, that morning, a
world of sawing wind, of flying papers and dust-dervishes, a world, to
meet which people bent their shrinking faces and drew their bodies
together as against the lashing of a whip. Sheila thought she had never
seen New York so drab and soulless; it hurt her to leave it under so
desolate an aspect.
"Cheery little old town, isn't it?" said Sylvester. "Gee! Millings is
God's country all right."
On the journey he put Sheila into a compartment, supplied her with
magazines and left her for the most part to herself--for which isolation
she was grateful. With her compartment door ajar, she could see him in
his section, when he was not in the smoking-car, or rather she could see
his lean legs, his long, dark hands, and the top of his sleek head. The
rest was an outspread newspaper. Occasionally he would come into the
compartment to read aloud some bit of information which he thought might
interest her. Once it was the prowess of a record-breaking hen; again it
was a joke about a mother-in-law; another time it was the Hilliard murder
case, a scandal of New York high-life, the psychology of which intrigued
Sylvester.
"Isn't it queer, though, Miss Arundel, that such things happen in the
slums and they happen in the smart set, but they don't happen near so
often with just plain folks like you and me! Isn't this, now, a real
Tenderloin Tale--South American wife and American husband and all their
love affairs, and then one day her up and shooting him! Money," quoth
Sylvester, "sure makes love popular. Now for that little ro-mance, poor
folks would hardly stop a day's work, but just because the Hilliards here
have po-sition and spon-dulix, why, they'll run a couple of columns about
'em for a week. What's your opinion on the subject, Miss Arundel?"
He was continually asking this, and poor Sheila, strange, bewildered,
oppressed by his intrusion into her uprooted life, would grope wildly
through her odds and ends of thought and find that on most of the
subjects that interested him, she had no opinions at all.
"You must think I'm dreadfully stupid, Mr. Hudson," she faltered once
after a particularly deplorable failure.
"Oh, you're a kid, Miss Sheila, that's all your trouble. And I reckon
you're half asleep, eh? Kind of brought up on pictures and country walks,
in--what's the name of the foreign part?--Normandy? No friends of your
own age? No beaux?"
Sheila shook her head, smiling. Her flexible smile was as charming as a
child's. It dawned on the gravity of her face with an effect of spring
moonlight. In it there was some of the mischief of fairyland.
"What _you_ need is--Millings," prescribed Sylvester. "Girlie and Babe
will wake you up. Yes, and the boys. You'll make a hit in Millings." He
contemplated her for an instant with his head on one side. "We ain't got
anything like you in Millings."
Sheila, looking out at the wide Nebraskan prairies that slipped
endlessly past her window hour by hour that day, felt that she would not
make a hit at Millings. She was afraid of Millings. Her terror of Babe
and Girlie was profound. She had lived and grown up, as it were, under
her father's elbow. Her adoration of him had stood between her and
experience. She knew nothing of humanity except Marcus Arundel. And he
was hardly typical--a shy, proud, head-in-the-air sort of man, who would
have been greatly loved if he had not shrunk morbidly from human
contacts. Sheila's Irish mother had wooed and won him and had made a
merry midsummer madness in his life, as brief as a dream. Sheila was all
that remained of it. But, for all her quietness, the shadow of his
broken heart upon her spirit, she was a Puck. She could make laughter
and mischief for him and for herself--not for any one else yet; she was
too shy. But that might come. Only, Puck laughter is a little unearthly,
a little delicate. The ear of Millings might not be attuned.... Just
now, Sheila felt that she would never laugh again. Sylvester's humor
certainly did not move her. She almost choked trying to swallow
becomingly the mother-in-law anecdote.
But Sylvester's talk, his questions, even his jokes, were not what most
oppressed her. Sometimes, looking up, she would find him staring at her
over the top of his newspaper as though he were speculating about
something, weighing her, judging her by some inner measurement. It was
rather like the way her father had looked a model over to see if she
would fit his dream.
At such moments Sylvester's small brown eyes were the eyes of an
artist, of a visionary. They embarrassed her painfully. What was it,
after all, that he expected of her? For an expectation of some kind he
most certainly had, and it could hardly have to do with her skill in
washing dishes.
She asked him a few small questions as they drew near to Millings. The
strangeness of the country they were now running through excited her and
fired her courage--these orange-colored cliffs, these purple buttes,
these strange twisting cañons with their fierce green streams.
"Please tell me about Mrs. Hudson and your daughters?" she asked.
This was a few hours before they were to come to Millings. They had
changed trains at a big, bare, glaring city several hours before and
were now in a small, gritty car with imitation-leather seats. They were
running through a gorge, and below and ahead Sheila could see the brown
plain with its patches of snow and, like a large group of red toy
houses, the town of Millings, far away but astonishingly distinct in the
clear air.
Sylvester, considering her question, turned his emerald slowly.
"The girls are all _right_, Miss Sheila. They're lookers. I guess I've
spoiled 'em some. They'll be crazy over you--sort of a noo pet in the
house, eh? I've wired to 'em. They must be hoppin' up and down like a
popper full of corn."
"And Mrs. Hudson?"
Sylvester grinned--the wrinkle cutting long and deep across his lip.
"Well, ma'am, she ain't the hoppin' kind."
A few minutes later Sheila discovered that emphatically she was not the
hopping kind. A great, bony woman with a wide, flat, handsome face, she
came along the station platform, kissed Sylvester with hard lips and
stared at Sheila ... the stony stare of her kind.
"Babe ran the Ford down, Sylly," she said in the harshest voice Sheila
had ever heard. "Where's the girl's trunk?"
Sylvester's sallow face reddened. He turned quickly to Sheila.
"Run over to the car yonder, Miss Sheila, and get used to Babe, while I
kind of take the edge off Momma."
Sheila did not run. She walked in a peculiar light-footed manner which
gave her the look of a proud deer.
"Momma" was taken firmly to the baggage-room, where, it would seem, the
edge was removed with difficulty, for Sheila waited in the motor with
Babe for half an hour.
Babe hopped. She hopped out of her seat at the wheel and shook Sheila's
hand and told her to "jump right in."
"Sit by me on the way home, Sheila." Babe had a tremendous voice. "And
leave the old folks to gossip on the back seat. Gee! you're different
from what I thought you'd be. Ain't you small, though? You've got no
form. Say, Millings will do lots for you. Isn't Pap a character, though?
Weren't you tickled the way he took you up? Your Poppa was a painter,
wasn't he? Can you make a picture of me? I've got a steady that would be
just wild if you could."
Sheila sat with hands clenched in her shabby muff and smiled her
moonlight smile. She was giddy with the intoxicating, heady air, with the
brilliant sunset light, with Babe's loud cordiality. She wanted
desperately to like Babe; she wanted even more desperately to be liked.
She was in an unimaginable panic, now.
Babe was a splendid young animal, handsome and round and rosy, her body
crowded into a bright-blue braided, fur-trimmed coat, her face crowded
into a tight, much-ornamented veil, her head with heavy chestnut hair,
crowded into a cherry-colored, velvet turban round which seemed to be
wrapped the tail of some large wild beast. Her hands were ready to burst
from yellow buckskin gloves; her feet, with high, thick insteps, from
their tight, thin, buttoned boots, even her legs shone pink and plump
below her short skirt, through silk stockings that were threatened at the
seams. And the blue of her eyes, the red of her cheeks, the white of her
teeth, had the look of being uncontainable, too brilliant and full to
stay where they belonged. The whole creature flashed and glowed and
distended herself. Her voice was a riot of uncontrolled vitality, and, as
though to use up a little of all this superfluous energy, she was
violently chewing gum. Except for an occasional slight smacking sound, it
did not materially interfere with speech.
"There's Poppa now," she said at last. "Say, Poppa, you two sit in the
back, will you? Sheila and I are having a fine time. But, Poppa, you old
tin-horn, what did you mean by saying in your wire that she was a husky
girl? Why, she's got the build of a sagebrush mosquito! Look-a-here,
Sheila." Babe by a miracle got her plump hand in and out of a pocket and
handed a telegram to her new friend. "Read that and learn to know Poppa!"
Sylvester laughed rather sheepishly as Sheila read:
Am bringing home artist's A1 picture for The Aura and artist's A1
daughter. Husky girl. Will help Momma.
"Well," said Sylvester apologetically, "she's one of the wiry kind,
aren't you, Miss Sheila?"
Sheila was struggling with an attack of hysterical mirth. She nodded
and put her muff before her mouth to hide an uncontrollable quivering
of her lips.
"Momma" had not spoken. Her face was all one even tone of red, her
nostrils opened and shut, her lips were tight. Sylvester, however, was in
a genial humor. He leaned forward with his arms folded along the back of
the front seat and pointed out the beauties of Millings. He showed Sheila
the Garage, the Post-Office, and the Trading Company, and suddenly
pressing her shoulder with his hand, he cracked out sharply:
"There's The Aura, girl!"
His eyes were again those of the artist and the visionary. They glowed.
Sheila turned her head. They were passing the double door of the saloon
and went slowly along the front of the hotel.
It stood on that corner where the main business street intersects with
the Best Residence Street. Its main entrance opened into the flattened
corner of the building where the roof rose to a fantastic façade. For the
rest, the hotel was of yellowish-brick, half-surrounded by a wooden porch
where at milder seasons of the year in deep wicker chairs men and women
were always rocking with the air of people engaged in serious and not
unimportant work. At such friendlier seasons, too, by the curb was always
a weary-looking Ford car from which grotesquely arrayed "travelers" from
near-by towns and cities were descending covered with alkali dust--faces,
chiffon veils, spotted silk dresses, high white kid boots, dangling
purses and all, their men dust-powdered to a wrinkled sameness of aspect.
At this time of the year the porch was deserted, and the only car in
sight was Hudson's own, which wriggled and slipped its way courageously
along the rutted, dirty snow.
Around the corner next to the hotel stood Hudson's home. It was a large
house of tortured architecture, cupolas and twisted supports and strange,
overlapping scallops of wood, painted wavy green, pinkish red and yellow.
Its windows were of every size and shape and appeared in unreasonable,
impossible places--opening enormous mouths on tiny balconies with twisted
posts and scalloped railings, like embroidery patterns, one on top of the
other up to a final absurdity of a bird cage which found room for itself
between two cupolas under the roof.
Up the steps of the porch Mrs. Hudson mounted grimly, followed by Babe.
Sylvester stayed to tinker with the car, and Sheila, after a doubtful,
tremulous moment, went slowly up the icy path after the two women.
She stumbled a little on the lowest step and, in recovering herself, she
happened to turn her head. And so, between two slender aspen trees that
grew side by side like white, captive nymphs in Hudson's yard, she saw a
mountain-top. The sun had set. There was a crystal, turquoise
translucency behind the exquisite snowy peak, which seemed to stand there
facing God, forgetful of the world behind it, remote and reverent and
most serene in the light of His glory. And just above where the turquoise
faded to pure pale green, a big white star trembled. Sheila's heart
stopped in her breast. She stood on the step and drew breath, throwing
back her veil. A flush crept up into her face. She felt that she had been
traveling all her life toward her meeting with this mountain and this
star. She felt radiant and comforted.
"How beautiful!" she whispered.
Sylvester had joined her.
"Finest city in the world!" he said.