The Readjustment Part 5

"Lord yes!" he replied. "Every pay day nowadays. Used to be the brightest man in the business, too."

Then as she stood there, blown by all the strong cross-winds of the world, Marshall the editor, who knew Eleanor, came hurrying down the stairs. He saw that wreckage, grown familiar now to them all, saw the girl standing white of face beside the bal.u.s.trade; the situation came over him at once. He opened the door, drew in both the intoxicated Billy Gray and his daughter. Half an hour later, when Billy could walk a little--it was a dead, nerveless intoxication with him nowadays--Eleanor and the foreman took him home in a cab.

In that long day and night, Eleanor strung together a thousand half-forgotten incidents, neglects and irregularities of life, and perceived the truth which her whole world had been in conspiracy to keep from her. Out of the cross-blowing impulses of an immaturity which was still half childhood--self pity, shame, heroic pride in her own tragedy, pa.s.sionate hatreds of a world which harbors such things--she came to a resolve in whose very completeness she was happy for a time. When, before breakfast, she burst into Mattie Tiffany's boudoir, she had a saintly radiance in her face. The elder woman, advised by the first words that Eleanor knew, took the little, cold body into bed with her, petted her back to something like calm. Storm followed the calm; Eleanor went all to pieces in a burst of pa.s.sionate crying.

After she had recovered a little, her purpose came out of her.

Considering her years, she said it all quite simply and undramatically. It was her business to be with her father. Her mother would have wished it so. She was going to leave school. That was her work.

Mattie Tiffany, with her pa.s.sion for picturesque philanthropies, knew right well that she had neglected somewhat the plain, unpicturesque philanthropy which lay close to her hand. She had neither the heart nor the conscience to deny Eleanor this sacrifice. In that hour, there grew up between the childless aunt and the motherless niece an understanding which those three years of first infancy, when Eleanor had lain on her breast like a daughter, had never brought at all.

In three months more, during which time Billy Gray reformed, lapsed, reformed, lapsed again, the wiser head of Judge Tiffany found the way.

The Sturtevant estate, nearly fifty thousand dollars in all, lay in his hands as trustee. Upon Eleanor's majority, it was to be divided, one third accruing to her, the surviving grandchild, and two-thirds to Mattie Tiffany.

Of late, Judge Tiffany had been turning his mind toward the Santa Clara Valley fruit farms, and especially toward the Santa Lucia tract.

He had made the struggle with his own world and lost; that is another story. At sixty-eight, life held little for him except an easy descent into the grave after a career in which he had played only too little.

That leisurely style of farming, which would permit him to keep an eye on his dwindling law practice, attracted him. And nothing, it seemed to him, would better further the intention, now awakened in all of them, to do something for Billy Gray. He bought, therefore, two tracts, already planted and bearing in diversified fruits; one of forty acres, with a little cottage home, for Eleanor; the other of eighty acres, with a large bungalow, for himself.

So far as his intentions toward Billy Gray went, Judge Tiffany made this venture with little hope. Billy Gray had tried the Keeley Cure twice. After each course of treatment, he had "beaten it," although he must gargle whisky, through a deadly sickness, in order to get back into the habit again. His was that variety of drunkenness which is not only an unnatural thirst, but also a mania to forget. There on the Santa Lucia tract, Billy Gray, sure of a living, might tilt at happiness and success with that independent writing which is the chimera of all newspaper men until the end of their days; and Eleanor might help him make the fight.

The next four years--they were a monotony of variety. For her broken, incompetent father, Eleanor learned the art and practice of growing apricots and prunes. Lady of her small manor, she made a business of it; got it to pay after the second year. Billy Gray never reformed; no one but Eleanor ever expected that he would. He smuggled whisky in; he stole away to get it; once he led the Judge and Eleanor a chase through his old haunts in San Francisco until they found him, broken all to pieces, in the county hospital.

That incident--it appeared that he had been beaten by a squad of drunken soldiers from the Presidio--was the breaking strain. His const.i.tution gone, his mind and body weakened. For twenty years, no one had ever heard him speak the name of that Saxon Alice whose death was the death of his soul. Now, he began suddenly to babble to his daughter of her mother. In his last delirium, he called her "Alice."

When he was dead and buried, Eleanor went on for a year through her accustomed routine of the ranch, letting life flow in again. Tired at twenty-two, she overstated the feeling to herself after the manner of youth, and thought that heart and sense and feeling were dead in her.

In all the years of pa.s.sage from girlhood to womanhood, she had lived alone with that dipsomaniac, seeing only such society as frequented her aunt's lawn, and little of that. Books, and such training in life as they give, she had known; but she had never known a flirtation, a follower or a lover. On the day when Bertram Chester went with her to tame the bull, she was as one who steps from the door of a convent.

CHAPTER IV

As she left the Tiffany gate and emerged into the main road between Santa Clara and Los Gatos, Eleanor raised her serviceable khaki-brown parasol. She was walking directly toward the setting sun, which poured into her eyes; yet she dropped the sunshade behind her head as though to s.h.i.+eld herself against an approach from the rear. No one followed; she had walked to the next fence corner before she a.s.sured herself of that, dared to s.h.i.+ft that feminine buckler against the eye of the sun, to slacken her pace, and to muse on an afternoon whose events, so quiet, so undramatic, and yet so profoundly significant, buzzed still in her head. As she thought on them, other things came into her mind as momentous and worthy of attention before the jump of the great event--that moment alone with Bertram Chester, that panic of unaccountable fear. Slow to anger as much by a native and hidden sweetness as by that surface control which puzzled her demonstrative Aunt Matilda, she surprised her cheeks burning and her blood beating in her throat.

With this physical agitation came an army of disagreeable and disturbing thoughts. At first they were only recollections of irritations past; the tiny maladjustments of her life; things by which she owed vengeance of slight wrongs. They came together at length, into one great, sore grievance--the forwardness, the utter, mortifying impudence, of Mr. Chester. It was long before she admitted this as a cause of irritation; once admitted, it overshadowed all her other complaints against life.

Timidly, she approached stage by stage that scene on the lawn, that unaccountable moment in the kitchen. Again she saw his great shoulders heave with unnecessary strength at the ridiculous cracker box; again she caught the sense of confinement with a machine of crus.h.i.+ng strength and power. It seemed to her that her retina still danced with the impression of him as he turned to face her, as he flashed upon her like a drawn weapon. She found herself looking down at the dusty road; suddenly she grew so sick and faint that the breath deserted her body and she had to lean against the gate post for support. The touch of it against her body revived her with a start, and brought to her mind the extent and folly of her own imaginings. She pulled herself together and dropped her parasol to s.h.i.+eld her face from Maria, who was hurrying over from the kitchen garden.

Life flowed in immediately. A hundred details of a household, of a fruit farm in the picking season, awaited her attention. Her orchard and the Tiffany orchard were conducted together on a kind of a loose co-operative system devised by the Judge to give her the greatest amount of freedom with just as much responsibility as would be good for her. Foreseeing that Alice Sturtevant's daughter would never live on a farm indefinitely, that marriage or her own kind would claim her in the end, he arranged everything so that her oversight might pa.s.s on short notice to Olsen or to himself. In this harvest season, for example, he secured for both farms the cutters and pickers--the hardest problem for the Californian farmer. Also, the fruit went to his own sheds and yards for cutting and drying. He was among the st.u.r.dy minority who stood out against the co-operative driers which had absorbed most of the fruit crop in the Santa Clara Valley. The detail work about her place--such as setting out the fruit boxes, selecting the moment when apricots or pears were ripe for the picking, seeing that the trees, her permanent investment, were not injured by wagon or picker, keeping her own accounts in balance with those of Judge Tiffany--these and a hundred other little things she did herself and did them well. Especially was the up-keep of the orchard her special care; and this she managed with such native mother-sense that one learned in trees might have told just when he crossed the unfenced line from the Gray orchard to the Tiffany orchard.

To-night, Olsen was waiting to know whether she thought that the ten rows of Moor Parks were ready for picking; he had just finished the first crop of the Judge's Royals and a small gang would be without pressing work on Monday morning. So they walked over the orchard together, pressing a golden ball here and there, and decided that the fruit was ripe and ready. Eleanor summoned Antonio for directions about boxes and ladders. The hen-house had to be inspected, for Eleanor was fumigating against the pip, brought into the Santa Lucia by an importation of fancy Eastern chickens. To-morrow's menu of the housekeeper was to be looked after. The things kept her busy until her solitary Sunday evening supper.

Eleanor had dined alone so much that she had quite recovered from any self-pity on that score. Like the daughter of convent manners that she was, she kept up her self-respect by a little ceremony at this meal.

She dressed for it usually; at least she put on fresh ribbons and flowers, gave a touch here and there to the table, held Maria to the refinements of service.

However, as she opened her napkin that evening the rush and emotional strain of the day brought a certain flash of introspection. It came first when she lifted her eyes and caught sight of herself in the mirror--dewy eyed, fresh, a pink rose in her hair, a pink ribbon at her throat. What was she, so young, so feminine, doing there, supping alone in state? She remembered the invitation of Lars Wark in Munich; he and his wife, living the life artistic away over there, had sent to ask her that she visit them and share their winter in the studio or their summer on the coast of Brittany. Why, in the face of that alluring invitation, did she suffer her soul to keep her in such prisons as this? She could afford it; there was no question of money.

According to the books she had read, that solitary state belonged to old, disappointed bachelors, old maids, faded people generally. Here she sat, a picture unseen, playing at age--and she less than twenty-two. There was a kind of delicate incongruity about it all. And watching her own grey eyes, as they faced her in the mirror, she half comprehended why she continued to live so, even after her father died and took away the reason for her old solitude. She had been under the hypnotic suggestion of an event, an impression. That moment on Montgomery street, when she found her father lying drunk, when tragedy and responsibility came together--that moment had stretched itself out to six years. She had lived by it; was living by it now.

In some unaccountable fas.h.i.+on, that picture would intertwine itself with the impression, so new and vivid, which she had received that afternoon. Momentarily, both united to produce one emotion--profound disgust and dislike for the coa.r.s.eness, the brutality, of male humanity, which had laid her father out on the pavement for the sport of a mob, which had made this perturbing young man trample on all considerations and delicacies.

"You need not mind about dessert, Maria," she called out suddenly. She rose, hurried out of doors, tore into the inspection of fruit crates for to-morrow's picking.

Night, falling with little twilight, as always in those climes, found her still ranging the house and barnyard, the rose incongruously in her hair, the ribbon at her throat. When it was too dark to find employment out of doors, she hurried back to the house, tried to read.

But a sense of confinement drove her forth. She started out toward the road, stopped by the hedge gate, sat down finally on a bench under her grape arbor. The leaves and the bunches of swelling fruit hid her from sight of the highway, overshadowed at that point by a great bay tree.

A confusion of voices, masculine and feminine, sounded in the distance. She caught a shrill, rowdy laugh. "The cutting-women and their men," she thought dimly. That social phenomenon of the picking season, grown accustomed by six years of pa.s.sing summers and winters, drew no special attention from her. But the noise continued; it became plain that these reveling laborers were making in her direction.

Doubtless, they came from the women's camp at Judge Tiffany's. The night was bringing her peace and sleep of the soul after a disturbing day; alone, that raucous noise marred the calm.

She peered idly through the leaves. A half a dozen women, their white dresses making them visible in the dusk, a few men whose forms loomed indistinctly against the edge of the sky, noised past her and were gone down the road. One couple, she perceived, lingered behind. They had reached the shade of the bay tree, were so close that she might have reached out and touched them, before she realized the situation.

She was about to call out, to cough, when the man spoke.

"No, I won't hurt you," he said, "I'm as gentle a little kisser as you ever saw." The voice was that of Bert Chester.

"Aw, you're too fresh," came the voice of the girl. But as they drew into deeper shadow, she was not pulling away from him.

"Fresh as a daisy!" said the voice of Bertram Chester. Followed a struggle, a faint "stop, stop!" in the voice of the girl, the sound of gross and heavy kissing. In a moment, the white form of the girl broke down the road, the greater, darker form of the man lumbering after. He caught her, held her for a longer time and a lesser struggle. She came out of this one laughing, and down the road they went, his arm a black shadow about her waist.

Eleanor's deeper and higher self--the self that lay like a filmy, impalpable wrapper about her conscious mind, so that at times she appeared to herself as two persons--that consciousness stood aloof in expectation of disgust, revulsion, horror. It came as a confused surprise that she felt nothing of the kind. A cloying sweetness, a sensation purely physical, as though a syrup had been poured into all the channels of her nerves, began in her throat, rushed through body and limbs. The sweet tide surged backward, beat in a wave of faintness upon her heart. Shame, like air into a vacuum, followed with a rush.

She sank to the ground, clinging to the bench.

When she had so far mastered herself that she could feel her own senses, she was praying aloud--praying in the rite which held her emotions while it failed with her reason.

"Ave Maria Sanctissima!" she was saying over and over again.

CHAPTER V

"Match you to see whether it's good, old fifteen cent feed at the Ma.r.s.eillaise or a four bit bust at the Nevada," said Bertram Chester.

"I'll take you," responded Mark Heath, flipping a silver dollar as he spoke. "Heads the Nevada; tails the croutons and Dago red."

"Tails it is--aw, let's make it the Nevada to show there's nothing in luck."

"You quitter!"

"All right; but I hate to look cabbage soup in the face," grumbled Bertram. He resumed, then, his languid occupation which this parley had interrupted, and continued to review, from an angle of Moe's cigar stand, the pa.s.sing matinee parade.

The time was late afternoon of a fog-scented October day. Through the wet air, street lamps and electric signs had begun to twinkle. Under the cross-light of retreating day and incandescent globes, the parade of women, all in bright-colored silks and gauds, moved solid, unbroken. Opera bags marked off those who had really attended the matinees; but only one in five wore this badge of sincerity. The rest had dressed and painted and gone abroad to display themselves just because it was the fas.h.i.+on in their circles so to dress and paint and display. Women of Greek perfection in body and feature, free-stepping Western women who met the gaze of men directly and fearlessly, their costumes ran through all the exaggerations of Parisian mode and tint.

Toilettes whose brilliancy would cause heads to turn and necks to crane on the streets of an Eastern city, drew here no tribute of comment. It had gone on all the afternoon. From the Columbia Theatre corner, which formed one boundary of "the line," to the Sutler Street corner of Kearney, five blocks away, certain of these peac.o.c.ks had been strutting back and forth since two o'clock. The men who corresponded in the social organization to these paraders of vanity lined the sidewalks or lolled in the open-air cigar stands, as did these two young adventurers in life--Bertram Chester, now a year and a half out of college, and Mark Heath, cub reporter on the _Herald_.

When the homefarers from office and factory had begun to tarnish the brilliance of this show, when the women had begun to scatter--this one to dinner with her man, that one back to the hall-room supper by whose economies she saved for her Sat.u.r.day afternoon vanities--Bertram and Mark drifted with the current up Kearney street toward the Hotel Ma.r.s.eillaise. In their blood, a little whipped already by the two c.o.c.ktails which they had felt able to afford even while they debated over the price of dinner, ran all the sparkling currents of youth.

They drew on past Sutler Street to Adventurer's Lane, the dingy section of that street wherein walked the treasure-farers of all the seven seas; and as they walked, Bertram began to speak of the things which lay close to his heart.