Lost Ecstasy/Chapter 26
THEN began a strange period for Kay. The days were endless and the heat extreme. The wheat men were watching the sky and praying for rain. Tom, inured to weather of all kinds, came and went on mysterious errands of his own. He was, she gathered, looking for work. But he had cleaned and loaded his revolver, and whatever that meant it frightened her.
Of the incident of the party in thirty-four, she found that to Tom it was simply that and nothing more. He had wakened in the morning, puzzled to find himself fully clothed but otherwise unrepentant.
"They didn't mean anything, you know, girl. They were just feeling good, and when a lot of fellows feel like that they just naturally want to sing."
He never knew that she had not gone to bed.
Shut up in the hotel room Kay suffered intensely from the heat and loneliness. She had no friends, even no books. True, some of the important ranchers' wives called on her. They came, kindly enough, smiling, intensely curious, and because she had no sitting room she saw them in the lobby, with its worn leather chairs, its brass cuspidors, the drinking fountain where one leaned over and by turning a lever, was enabled to drink without a cup. But she was too constrained, too bewildered to make friends of them, and one or two of them showed a certain pity which she fiercely resented.
She had, however, two callers who came to her room without announcement.
One was Bob Allison. She opened the door and he stepped inside, a big man with a heavy jaw and a broad brown Stetson hat on the back of his head.
"You'll have to excuse me, Mrs. McNair. Where's that young scapegrace of a husband of yours?"
"He's out just now. If there's any message"
"Well, there is and there isn't." He pushed the hat further back, scratched his head, looked at her again.
"How is he? Feeling all right?"
"He doesn't say very much, you know. I think he has a good bit of pain sometimes. But I can't keep him quiet."
"No," he said. "No, Tom's always been restless, Tom ever say who he was holding responsible?"
"No. It was an accident."
He considered that. Every one in town but this girl apparently knew that Tom claimed to have been shot by Little Dog, and that he was only waiting for the Indian to come back to clear up his score against him. But after another look at Kay he put on his hat and turned to the door.
"There's no message, then?"
He hesitated. "Well, you might say this to Tom. Tell him I was here—my name's Allison—and that I'm planning to handle certain little problems without any help from him."
She was no less mystified by the message than by Tom's reception of it.
"He's got nerve!" he said angrily. "Coming here and handing you a thing like that! For two bits I'd knock his teeth down his throat."
But he did not explain, and she asked no questions.
Her other visitor was Mrs. Mallory. She made an uneasy call soon after their arrival, sitting on the edge of a chair in the bedroom and eying Kay with frank interest.
"You certainly have lost flesh, haven't you?" she said, her surprise breaking down her earlier formality. "Well, don't you let Tom McNair wear on you. I know Tom, and he's right uncertain at times. But he's every inch a man, and I've a right to know if any one has."
She grew more expansive after that. Nellie was in school and taking piano lessons. They were making out all right; she had a couple of roomers now. The stock was in good condition too, although her nephew was not a real cattleman, like Jake or Tom. She sighed over Jake's name, and smoothed her black dress with her work-hardened hands.
Before she left she had relaxed sufficiently to straighten her respectable hat before the mirror. She stood there for a moment, staring at her reflection in the glass.
"Ranching sure ages a woman," she said. "It's all right for the men; it keeps them young. But for a woman"
The bureau stood between the two windows, and she glanced out casually. Then her eyes narrowed, and going to one of them she jerked down the green shade with what amounted to violence.
"Somebody over there on Dicer's second floor, rubber-necking," she said tartly. "You'd better watch your windows. There's a lot of curious people in the world."
Kay, at the window after she had gone, watched her sail across the street below and into the Emporium, later to emerge still angrily flushed, and stalk down the street.
Like Bob Allison's visit, that puzzled her.
The few callers were almost the only breaks in the monotony of those early days. Tom's absences continued. Alone she read the local paper over and over:
"For sale, one Poland China male hog. Nellie Smith."
"Notice: we will trade flour for wheat. Fort Lumber Company."
And when Tom came back at night, after what she guessed was a fruitless day, it would be to eat little in the hot dining room below and then go early to bed, lying she knew wide-eyed in the darkness beside her long after she had found refuge in sleep, withdrawn into some unhappy retreat of his own where he apparently neither needed nor wanted her.
Yet he loved her. She was sure of that. Not after her own fashion, which still made her breathless when she heard his halting step outside the door, but in a queer, alternately violent and humble, way of his own. He would quarrel with her, generally over some matter of his sensitive pride, and then make his peace with a passion that startled her. One such difference was typical. The suit she had worn away with her was threadbare and none too cool. One day she suggested writing to Nora for some clothes. He had drawn her down onto his knee, but now he pushed her away and stood up.
"What clothes?"
"My own. I have so many at home, and I need them, Tom."
"Part of your wedding clothes, you mean?"
"I can't see what difference that would make. After all, I'm married to you."
"That's just where you and I differ," he said, white to the lips. "You are married to me, and I dress my wife or she goes naked. I'm owing the Dowling family nothing."
He had never seen her cry, but she cried then, first quietly, then in long-drawn gasping sobs that he could do nothing to quiet. All her loneliness and terror, her actual fear of this undisciplined and relentless side of him, rose to add to her wretchedness. She flung herself on the bed in complete abandonment to it. When he came over and sat down beside her she drew away from him, and miserable as he was he had to wait until her sobs began to die away.
"Do you hate me like that, girl?"
"It's not hate. I think I'm afraid of you."
If she had struck him he could not have been more astounded.
"Afraid of me! My God!"
Had she been a little older, a little wiser, she would have met him half-way then, but although he humbled himself before her, confessed his weakness and his unhappiness, made his young and passionate love to her in his own inarticulate fashion, she remained aloof after that for a day or two. She never sent to Nora for the clothes.
Their small supply of money was dwindling, too. True, Kay still had Bessie's check, but after that quarrel she dared not mention it to Tom. And to the heat was added the discomfort of a continuing drought. Dust blew into her windows and covered the shabby furniture in the room; the pastures were baked hard in the sun, and sandy clouds rose from under the cattle's feet and hovered over them as they moved restlessly; the wheat burned in the fields, and the mountains day after day lifted their heads into a blue and cloudless sky. Anxiety began to be widespread. There was talk among the cattlemen of early shipping, to get out from under, for a summer drought followed by a long hard winter meant ruin.
Tom, limping about or making his long fruitless excursions to outlying ranches, heard one hard luck story after another. The thought of Little Dog began to take second place in his mind, and the problem of actual subsistence for Kay and himself began to obsess him. Never once had he confessed that he was lamed for life.
"How about the leg, Tom? Riding at the Fair, this fall?"
"You tell 'em!"
Old Doctor Dunham overheard that one day, and went on his way dryly chuckling.
But he would not take Kay away from the Martin House, although Mrs. Mallory offered them a room. There was, in the back of his stubborn head, some determination to keep her like a lady as long as he could.
The situation was bound to reach Kay in time, however, and did. He had begun to bring his friends to see her, cowboys in from the range or the ranch, spurred, sombreroed, inclined to long abashed silences; rangers in khaki, with their matter-of-fact talk of forest fires and fire stations, those small neat boxes scattered over the mountains, each with its spade, its pick and saw, its oil jug and its lantern; small cattlemen, in town to buy groceries, or to make their anxious visits to where in his brick bank Mr. Tulloss sat, like a God whose manna of extended credit could save them from bankruptcy.
The hidden far-reaching activities of the back country slowly spread out before her. Gray wolves attacked cows, one checking the flight from in front, the other hamstringing the wretched creatures from the rear; coyotes, crawling under the wire, devastated whole herds of sheep. Glanders, lumpy jaw, mavericks, yardage, shrinkage, feeding, freight—a new vocabulary sounded in her ears.
And there was humor, too.
"Well, we knew the old silvertip was up there somewhere, so when Bill was leanin' over the creek cleanin' the fish I just went behind him and grunted and then give him a good strong hug. Say! He just said 'Jesus!' and went right into the water."
Or again:
"It looked to me like he was going to buy the horse, so he'd stopped at the spring for a drink and I says: 'Well, how about it? Do you want to buy it?' And he says, with the cup in his hand: 'Well, Joe, I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll pay you forty dollars, delivered at my ranch.' 'That suits me,' I says, 'I'll ride him out tomorrow.' 'Ride him!' says he. 'You blamed fool, I'm talking about this spring.'"
She liked these men. She would hear Tom's halting step in the hall, and he would usher in some sun-burned and abashed individual who would more or less tiptoe into the room.
"Come on in, Hank, and meet the wife," he would say.
Then for a little while he would be his handsome debonair old self. He would throw away his stick and roll a cigarette, and then standing there, tall and smiling, he would seem to fill the little room. Sometimes George brought ice water and Kay made lemonade. The visitor would drink it solemnly.
He was inordinately proud of her, she saw, and she on her part liked these men he brought in. They reeked of the outdoors, their eyes were clear; when they took off their great hats their foreheads were white above the tan and somehow pathetic to her. When they had ridden into town they always stopped outside and took off their spurs. But she was not stupid. She began to see that this new world of hers had no place in it for the weak or the maimed.
But something else had happened to her. Those casual soft-spoken sagas of the range to which Tom listened as one who hears news from home had rebuilt his background for her. Through such a life of grinding hard work, adventure and escape, had he come to her; against this backdrop he once more loomed young and strong and god-like.
She must get him back to it somehow. These weeks in the town were only marking time, as she had suspected Herbert of marking time so long ago. And after a small incident which brought Clare Hamel into the picture, she was more than ever determined.
For the first time in her life she was jealous, not with the light and selfish jealousy of the girl, but with the furious possessive jealousy of a wife.
Considering her day and generation, she was curiously unsophisticated. It was fundamental with her, the romantic tradition which assumed, not only that a beloved woman was the center of the universe to the man who cared for her, but that she was his sole universe. All about her she had seen proofs to the contrary; men who loved their wives and yet were unfaithful to them or neglected them for their business, but the tradition had persisted. Even Bessie's warning: "You think everything's over, I daresay. You've got him and he's got you! But it isn't,"—even that had not shaken her sublime confidence.
Then one day Nellie Mallory came to see her.
It was a strange visit. Nellie seemed to have little or nothing to say, but her small curious eyes took in every detail of Kay herself, of the room, of the expensive gold brushes, jars and scent bottles on the painted pine bureau. It was only when she got up to go that she wandered to the window and looked out.
"Mother says she saw Clare Hamel rubber-necking in here the other day."
And when Kay said nothing:
"She just about had a fit when she heard you'd got him. She thought she had Tom roped and tied for herself."
Then Kay found her voice.
"Does she—is she employed over there?"
"Yes, at the Emporium."
Kay could think of nothing to say. She saw Nellie out, and then went back to the room and to the window. So that was what Mrs. Mallory had meant the other day! A girl who had "had a fit" when she learned he was married. A girl then who cared for him, as—well, as Herbert had cared for her. She thought about it more than was good for her, during those days when Tom was away, and the heat rose from the pavements below and beat in at her windows in waves. She even began to question Tom's absences, but she never questioned Tom himself. It would have been better if she had; but it was not an issue that she dared to raise. She knew his quick anger.
"Sure I had a girl. So did you have Percy! When I think of that lily-handed" And so on and on.
Then came the incident which decided her. She was starting down the stairs one day, those stairs which led directly into the lobby, when she saw a girl come in. She came in almost furtively, and that she did not see Kay at once was due to the semi-darkness inside and the blinding glare without. Kay knew her at once, and stopped, and so she saw her leave a letter with Ed and start out again. When at the door she turned again she saw Kay coming down, and she hesitated. Then she threw her head up and went on.
Kay did not go out, after all. She went upstairs and stationed herself at a window, and there followed one of those small secret duels between women which are at once tragic and ludicrous. At the noon hour Clare, convinced that she had been discovered, crossed the street to the hotel, to find Kay talking to Ed, and precipitately fled. Kay's hands were like ice, and her eyes were burning, but she was determined to know where she stood; if life had played its final trick on her. But she was quiet enough when Tom came in and found her in their room.
"Well, did you get your letter?"
He had sat down and was rubbing his swollen ankle, but now he stopped.
"What letter?"
"I thought Ed said there was a letter for you."
For an instant their glances clashed. Then he went back to his rubbing.
"No letter for me. If you don't believe it you can look in my pockets."
They had both lied! A sense of shame overcame her, as well as wild jealousy. He had had his letter, and he had not dared to bring it into the room. He had deliberately deceived her. He had stood downstairs in the lobby and destroyed it before he came to her.
Lying sleepless in the hot bed that night while Tom slept, she faced the knowledge that she had given all she had and had not even bought security with it; that while women had certainly occupied only intervals in Tom's life, these intervals had been recurrent and probably violent, and, even granting his love for her, that they might occur again.