The Gay Cockade Part 35

III

A week later Jane in a white s.h.i.+rt-waist and white ap.r.o.n came down with her white-covered basket into the glare of the town's white lights. The night was warm and she wore no hat. Her red hair was swept back from her forehead with a droop over the ears. She had white skin and strong white teeth. Her eyes were as gray as the sea on stormy days. Tommy came after her with a wooden box, which he set on end, and she placed her basket on it. The princ.i.p.al stores of the small town, the one hotel and the post-office were connected by a covered walk which formed a sort of arcade, so that the men lounging against doorways or tip-tilted in chairs seemed in a sort of gallery from which they surveyed the Sat.u.r.day-night crowd which paraded the street.

Jane folded up the cloth which covered her basket and displayed her wares. "Don't stick round, Tommy," she said. "I shall do better alone."

But as she raised her head and saw the eyes of the men upon her a rich color surged into her cheeks.

She put out her little sign bravely:

HOME-MADE SANDWICHES--TWENTY CENTS

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 s.h.i.+vering 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 compa.s.s one hundred sandwiches. "She'd better stick to her leeks and lettuce."

He rode away the next Sat.u.r.day 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 gla.s.s 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 a.s.signed 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 s.h.i.+vered. 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.

When he told her good-bye he asked a question: "Are you happy?"

For a moment her face clouded. "I'm not quite sure. Is anybody? But I like the way I am living, Ollie."

He had a sense of relief. "So do I," he said. "I earn fifteen dollars a week. The papers say that you earn fifteen hundred--and you're not quite twenty."

"There isn't a man in this hotel that makes so much," she told him complacently. "The women try to snub me, but they can't. Money talks."

It seemed to him that in her case it shouted. As he rode back on Mary Pick he thought seriously of his fifteen dollars a week and her fifteen hundred; and of how little either weighed in the balance of happiness.