HUDSON'S QUEEN
The lobby, empty of its crowd when Sheila passed through it on her way up
to her rooms, was filled by a wheezy, bullying voice. In front of the
desk a little barrel of a man with piggish eyes was disputing his bill
with Dickie. At the sound of Sheila's entrance he turned, stopped his
complaint, watched her pass, and spat into a near-by receptacle. Sheila
remembered that he had visited the bar early in the evening before, and
had guzzled his whiskey and made some wheezy attempts at gallantry.
Dickie, flushed, his hair at wild odds with composure, was going over the
bill. In the midst of his calculations the man would interrupt him with a
plump dirty forefinger pounced upon the paper. "Wassa meanin' of this
item, f'rinstance? Highway robbery, thassa meanin' of it. My wife take
breakfast in her room? I'd like to see her try it!"
Sheila went upstairs. She took off her things, washed off the dust, and
changed into the black-and-white barmaid's costume, fastening the frilly
apron, the cuffs, the delicate fichu with mechanical care. She put on the
silk stockings and the buckled shoes and the tiny cap. Then she went into
her sitting-room, chose the most dignified chair, folded her hands in
her lap, and waited for Dickie. Waiting, she looked out through the
window and saw the glow fade from the snowy crest of The Hill. The
evening star let itself delicately down through the sweeping shadows of
the earth from some mysterious fastness of invisibility. The room was dim
when Dickie's knock made her turn her head.
"Come in."
He appeared, shut the door without looking at her, then came unwillingly
across the carpet and stopped at about three steps from her chair,
standing with one hand in his pocket. He had slicked down his hair with
a wet brush and changed his suit. It was the dark-blue serge he had worn
at the dance five months before. What those five months had been to
Dickie, through what abasements and exaltations, furies and despairs he
had traveled since he had looked up from Sheila's slippered feet with
his heart turned backward like a pilot's wheel, was only faintly
indicated in his face. And yet the face gave Sheila a pang. And,
unsupported by anger, he was far from formidable, a mere youth. Sheila
wondered at her long and sustained persecution of him. She smiled, her
lips, her eyes, and her heart.
"Aren't you going to sit down, Dickie? This isn't a school examination."
"If it was," said Dickie, with an uncertain attempt at ease, "I wouldn't
pass." He felt for a chair and got into it. He caught a knee in his hand
and looked about him. "You've made the room awful pretty, Sheila."
She had spent some of the rather large pay she drew upon coverings of
French blue for the plush furniture, upon a dainty yellow porcelain
tea-set, upon little oddments of decoration. The wall-paper and carpet
were inoffensive, the quietest probably in Millings, so that her efforts
had met with some success. There was a lounge with cushions, there were
some little volumes, a picture of her father, a bowl of pink wild roses,
a vase of vivid cactus flowers. Some sketches in water-color--Marcus's
most happy medium--had been tacked up. A piece of tapestry decorated the
back of the chair Sheila had chosen. In the dim light it all had an air
of quiet richness. It seemed a room transplanted to Millings from some
finer soil.
Dickie looked at the tapestry because it was the nearest he dared come to
looking at Sheila. His hands and knees shook with the terrible beating of
his heart. It was not right, thought Dickie resentfully, that any feeling
should take hold of a fellow and shake and terrify him so. He threw
himself back suddenly and folded his arms tight across his chest.
"You wanted to see me about something?" he asked.
"Yes. I'll give you some tea first."
Dickie's lips fell apart. He said neither yea nor nay, but watched
dazedly her preparations, her concoctions, her advance upon him with a
yellow teacup and a wafer. He did not stand up to take it and he knew too
late that this was a blunder. He tingled with shame.
Sheila went back to her chair and sipped from her own cup.
"I've been angry with you for three months now, Dickie."
"Yes'm," he said meekly.
"That's the longest I've ever been angry with any one in my life. Once I
hated a teacher for two weeks, and it almost killed me. But what I felt
about her was--was weakness to the way I've felt about you."
"Yes'm," again said Dickie. His tea was terribly hot and burnt his
tongue, so that tears stood in his eyes.
"And I suppose you've been angry with me."
"No, ma'am."
Sheila was not particularly pleased with this gentle reply. "Why, Dickie,
you _know_ you have!"
"No, ma'am."
"Then why haven't you spoken to me? Why have you looked that way at me?"
"I don't speak to folks that don't speak to me," said Dickie, lifting the
wafer as though its extreme lightness was faintly repulsive to him.
"Well," said Sheila bitterly, "you haven't been alone in your attitude.
Very few people have been speaking to me. My only loyal friends are Mr.
Hudson and Amelia Plecks and Carthy and Jim. Jim made no promises about
being my guardian, but--"
"But he _is_ your guardian?" Dickie drawled the question slightly. His
gift of faint irony and impersonal detachment flicked Sheila's temper as
it had always flicked his father's.
"Jim is my friend," Sheila maintained in defiance of a still, small
voice. "He has given me a pony and has taken me riding--"
"Yes'm, I've saw you--" Dickie's English was peculiarly fallible in
moments of emotion. Now he seemed determined to cut Sheila's description
short. "Say, Sheila, did you send for me to tell me about this lovely
friendship of yours with Jim?"
Sheila set her cup down on the window-sill. She did not want to lose her
temper with Dickie. She brushed a wafer crumb from her knee.
"No, Dickie, I didn't. I sent for you because, after all, though I've
been so angry with you, I've known in my heart that--that--you are a
loyal friend and that you tell the truth."
This admission was an effort. Sheila's pride suffered to the point of
bringing a dim sound of tears into her voice....
Dickie did not speak. He too put down his tea-cup and his wafer side by
side on the floor near his chair. He put his elbows on his knees and bent
his head down as though he were examining his thin, locked hands.
Sheila waited for a long minute; then she said angrily, "Aren't you glad
I think that of you?"
"Yes'm." Dickie's voice was indistinct.
"You don't seem glad."
Dickie made some sort of struggle. Sheila could not quite make out its
nature. "I'm glad. I'm so glad that it kind of--hurts," he said.
"Oh!" That at least was pleasant intelligence to a wounded pride.
Fortified, Sheila began the real business of the interview. "You are not
an artist, Dickie," she said, "and you don't understand why your father
asked me to work at The Aura nor why I wanted to work there. It was your
entire inability to understand--"
"Entire inability--" whispered Dickie as though he were taking down the
phrase with an intention of looking it up later.
This confused Sheila. "Your--your entire inability," she repeated
rapidly, "your--your entire inability--"
"Yes'm. I've got that."
"--To understand that made me so angry that day." Sheila was glad to be
rid of that obstruction. She had planned this speech rather carefully in
the watches of the wakeful, feverish morning which had been her night.
"You seemed to be trying to pull your father and me down to some lower
spiritual level of your own."
"Lower spiritual level," repeated Dickie.
"Dickie, stop that, please!"
He looked up, startled by her sharpness. "Stop what, ma'am?"
"Saying things after me. It's insufferable."
"Insufferable--oh, I suppose it is. You're usin' so many words, Sheila. I
kind of forgot there was so many words as you're makin' use of this
afternoon."
"Oh, Dickie, Dickie! Can't you see how miserable I am! I am so unhappy
and--and scared, and you--you are making fun of me."
At that, spoken in a changed and quavering key of helplessness, Dickie
hurried to her, knelt down beside her chair, and took her hands.
"Sheila! I'll do anything!"
His presence, his boyish, quivering touch, so withheld from anything but
boyishness, even the impulsive humility of his thin, kneeling body, were
inexpressibly soothing, inexpressibly comforting. She did not draw away
her hands. She let them cling to his.
"Dickie, will you answer me, quite truthfully and simply, without any
explaining or softening, please, if I ask you a--a dreadful question?"
"Yes, dear."
"I'm not sure if it is a dreadful question, but--but I'm afraid it is."
"Don't worry. Ask me. Surely, I'll answer you the truth without
any fixin's."
Her hands clung a little closer. She was silent, gathering courage. He
felt her slim knees quiver.
"What do they mean, Dickie," she whispered with a wan look, "when they
call me--'Hudson's Queen'?"
Dickie bent from her look as though he felt a pain. He took her hands up
close to his breast. "Who told you that they called you that?" he asked
breathlessly.
"That's what every one calls me--the men over in the Big Horn
country--they tell men that are coming to Millings to be sure to look up
'Hudson's Queen.' Do they mean the Hotel, Dickie? They _do_ mean the
Hotel, don't they, Dickie?--that I am _The_ Hudson's Queen?"
The truth sometimes presents itself like a withering flame. Dickie got
up, put away her hands, walked up and down, then came back to her. He had
heard the epithet and he knew its meaning. He wrestled now with his
longing to keep her from such understanding, or, at least, to soften it.
She had asked for the clear truth and he had promised it to her. He stood
away because he could not trust himself to endure the wincing of her
hands and body when she heard the truth. He hoped dimly that she might
not understand it.
"They don't mean the Hotel, Sheila," he said harshly. "They mean--Father.
You know now what they mean--?" In her stricken and bewildered eyes he
saw that she did know. "I would like to kill them," sobbed Dickie
suddenly. "I would like to kill--_him_. No, no, Sheila, don't you cry.
Don't you. It's not worth cryin' for. It's jest ignorant folks's ignorant
and stupid talk. It's not worth cryin' for." He sat down on the arm of
her chair and fairly gathered her into his arms. He rocked and patted her
shoulder and kissed her gently on her hair--all with that boyishness,
that brotherliness, that vast restraint so that she could not even guess
the strange and unimaginable pangs he suffered from his self-control.
Before Dickie's resolution was burnt away by the young inner fire, Sheila
withdrew herself gently from his arms and got up from the chair. She
walked over to one of the two large windows--the sunset windows she
called them, in contradistinction to the one sunrise window--and stood
composing herself, her hands twisted together and lifted to the top of
the lower sash, her forehead rested on them.
A rattle of china, a creaking step outside the door, interrupted their
tremulous silence in which who knows what mysterious currents were
passing between their young minds.
"It's my dinner," said Sheila, and Dickie walked over mechanically and
opened the door.
Amelia Plecks came panting into the room, set the tray down on a small
table, and looked contempt at Dickie.
"There now, Miss Arundel," she said with breathless tenderness, "I've
pro-cured a dandy chop for you. You said you was kind of famished for a
lamb chop, and, of course, in a sheep country good mutton's real hard to
come by, and this ain't properly speaking--lamb, _but_--! Well, say, it's
just dandy meat."
She ignored Dickie as one might ignore the presence of some obnoxious
insect in the reception-room of a queen. Her eyes were disgustedly
fascinated by his presence, but in her conversation she would not admit
this preoccupation of disgust.
"I'll be going," said Dickie.
Amelia nodded as one who applauds the becoming move of an inferior.
"Here's a note for you, Miss Arundel," she said, coming over to Sheila's
post at the window, where she was trying to hide the traces of her tears.
"Well, say, who's been botherin' you?" Amelia's voice went down a long,
threatening octave to a sinister bass note, at the voicing of which she
turned to look at Dickie.
"Good-night, Sheila," he said diffidently; and Sheila coming quickly
toward him, put out her hand. The note Amelia had handed her fell. Dickie
and Amelia both bent to pick it up.
"No, you don't," said Amelia, snatching it and accusing him, by her tone,
of inexpressibly base intentions. "Say, Miss Arundel," in a whisper of
thrilled confidence, "_Mister Jim_! Uh?"
"Thank you, Dickie," murmured Sheila, half-embarrassed, half-amused by
her adoring follower's innuendoes. "Thank you for everything. I shall
have to think what I can do ... Good-night."
Dickie, his eyes forcibly held away from Jim's note, murmured,
"Good-night, ma'am," and went out, closing the door with exaggerated
gentleness. The quietness of his departure seemed to spare Sheila's
sensitiveness.
"Ain't he a worm, though!" exclaimed Amelia, sparing nobody's
sensitiveness.
"He's nothing of the sort," Sheila protested indignantly. "He is a dear!"
Amelia opened her prominent eyes and pursed her lips. A reassuring light
dawned on her bewilderment. "Oh, say, dearie, I wasn't speakin' of your
Mister Jim. I was makin' reference to Dickie."
Sheila thrust the note into her pocket and went over to the table to
light her lamp. "I know quite well that you meant Dickie," she said.
"Nobody in Millings would ever dream of comparing Mr. James Greely to a
worm, even if he came out from the ground just in time for the early bird
to peck him. I know that."
"You're ornery to-night, dearie," announced Amelia, and with exemplary
tact she creaked and breathed herself to the door. There she had a
relapse from tactfulness, however, and planted herself to stare. "Ain't
you goin' to read your note?"
Sheila, to be rid of her, unfolded the paper and read. It was quite
beautifully penned in green ink on violet paper. Jim had written both
wisely and too well.
"My darling--Why not permit me to call you that when it is the simple and
sincere truth?" An astonished little voice in Sheila's brain here seemed
to counter-question mechanically "Why not, indeed?"--"I cannot think of
anything but you and how I love you. These little notes I am going to
keep a-sending you are messengers of love. You will never meet with a
more tremendous lover than me.... Be _my_ Queen," Jim had written with a
great climatic splash of ink, and he had signed himself, "Your James."
Sheila's face was crimson when she put down the note. She stared straight
in front of her for an instant with very large eyes in this scarlet rose
of countenance and then she crumpled into mirth. She put her face into
her hands and rocked. It seemed as though a giant of laughter had caught
her about the ribs.
Amelia stared and felt a wound. She swallowed a lump of balked sentiment
as she went out. Her idol was faintly tarnished, her heroine's stature
preceptibly diminished. The sort of Madame du Barry atmosphere with which
Sheila's image was surrounded in Amelia's fancy lost a little of its rosy
glow. The favorite of Kings, the _amorita_ of Dukes, does not rock with
laughter over scented notes from a High Desirable.
"She ain't just quite up to it," was Amelia's comment, which she
probably could not have explained even to herself.
Sheila presently was done with laughter. She ate a nibble of dinner as
soberly as Amelia could have wished, then sat back, her eyes closed with
a resolve to think clearly, closely, to some determination of her life.
But Jim's note, which had so roused her amusement, began to force itself
in another fashion upon her. She discovered that it was an insufferable
note. It insinuated everything, it suggested--everything. It was a
boastful messenger. It swaggered male-ishly. It threw out its chest and
smacked its lips. "See what a sad dog my master is," it said; "a regular
devil of a fellow." Sheila found her thoughts confused by anger. She
found that she was too disturbed for any clear decision. She was terribly
weary and full of dread for the long night before her. And a startled
look at her clock told her it was time now to go over to the saloon.
She got up, went to her mirror, smoothed her rippled hair with two
strokes of a brush, readjusted her cap, and decided that, for once, a
little powder on the nose was a necessity. Carthy must not see that she
had been crying. As it was, her brilliant color was suspicious, and her
eyes, with their deep distended look of tears. She shut them, drew a
breath, put out her light, and went down the back stairs to a narrow
alley. It led from the hotel to the street that ran back of The Aura ...
the street to which she had taken young Hilliard the night before.
The alley seemed to Sheila, as she stepped into it from the glare of the
electric-lighted hotel, a stream of cool and silvery light. Above lay a
strip of tender sky in which already the stars shook. In this high
atmosphere they were always tremulous, dancing, beating, almost leaping,
with a fullness of quick light. They seemed very near to the edges of the
alley walls, to be especially visiting it with their detached regard,
peering down for some small divine occasion for influence. Sheila prayed
to them a desperate prayer of human helplessness.