Lost Ecstasy/Chapter 6
URSULA prided itself on its progressiveness. It was a pretty town, the best in the valley, perhaps in the state. It had paved streets, a park, a great stone school house, even a Zoo, (Tom McNair had roped and brought in the two, bear cubs in their cage.) It had a flour mill, a beet sugar factory, and a hospital.
Its streets bustled with activity. Twenty-one, going North, disgorged traveling salesmen with sample cases, and twenty-two South picked them up again. The outlying ranches fed it and in their turn were fed by it. It even had a social life of no mean order, and in the winter twenty-one South or twenty-two North picked up the wealthier of its inhabitants and stowed them in lowers or drawing rooms and carried them away from the bitter cold.
The conductors on the railroad knew them all.
"I see it's Pasadena this year this time!"
"Yep. Tried New York last year but didn't like it much. Too crowded."
But Ursula was like the smaller towns along the track. It had no environs. Where it ended the back country began. One could leave its paved streets, its comfortable houses with their gardens, climb a hill, descend again and, as Bessie would certainly not have put it, be alone with God.
On the second day following the Fair Clare Hamel stood behind a counter in Dicer's Emporium. She was near the door. Across the street the setting sun shone brilliantly into the one broad window of the Martin House, with its five worn leather chairs behind it and the old brass bar-rail now fastened beneath it, to keep—hopefully—the sitters' feet from the window sill. Beside it was the National Drug Store, once her father's professional stand and known then as the Last Chance saloon; and beyond that again the Zenith barber shop.
She was bored and anxious, and the outlook gave her no comfort. She knew it all; it was all she did know. Marcus the barber bending over some one in his chair; Carrie Young's baby carriage with the twins in it, parked outside of the drug store; an Indian in an old sack suit and straw hat, with red flannel twisted in his braids, driving past in a buckboard, a hungry-looking dog running along beside it; men in Stetsons rubbing shoulders with men in straw hats; the Prairie Rose café; the new bank building; a stream of cars. And over it all, for the weather had turned warm again, a haze of dust and heat.
Heat, dust and dreariness. Not even a customer to wander in, finger the dress-goods and exchange a bit of talk across the counter. Across from her—handkerchiefs, gloves, stockings and toilet goods—was Sarah Cain, likewise bored and idle. She did not like Sarah, and Sarah did not like her, but out of the heat and a certain dreariness that was in her she finally spoke across the aisle.
"Looks like a good picture tonight."
"Yeah. But it's so awful hot in there. My God, ain't this weather awful again?"
"It sure is. You could fry an egg out there."
"You bet."
Silence fell again. Then Sarah, with a glance toward the rear of the store where Mr. Dicer sat at a desk, edged out into the aisle and crossed to Clare.
"Say, I seen a friend of yours yesterday."
A hand, which had seemed to be wavering over Clare's heart for a day or two, suddenly closed down on it.
"What friend? I got more than one, you know."
"Tom McNair."
"Oh, Tom!" She moistened her dry lips. "Is he still in town? Pity he wouldn't come in and say how-d'ye-do."
"He wasn't saying anything to anybody when I saw him."
There was a sort of malicious pleasure in Sarah's voice, and Clare looked at her coldly.
"If you mean he'd been drinking why don't you say it?" she asked. "It's no news to me, and it's certainly nothing in my life."
"Well, I'm glad to hear you say it," said Sarah, with assumed heartiness. "The way folks talk around here you'd think He'd been drinking all right. And some."
She sauntered back, leaving Clare to stare out of the open door again. Her face was impassive, for Sarah was watching her, but she was torn within by a thousand distracting thoughts. Something had set Tom off again; he only went on these periodic drinking spells when something set him off.
Was it her own visit to him? Had she had some effect after all, even this? She had seemed to make so little impression on him that night at the ranch.
"We've had some good times together, haven't we, Tom?"
"You've been mighty nice to me, Clare. I'm not forgetting that."
"Well then, what's the matter? I don't hardly sleep any more. Look here, look how loose this belt is! I just get to worrying, thinking maybe I've done something, and I can't sleep."
"We're mighty busy just now, you know."
"I've heard that before."
"Then," he went on, unusually patient for him, "we've got the Dowlings now, and they take a lot of looking after."
"You mean she does. The girl. Oh, I'm not so far away I don't hear things. If you're fool enough to fall for that sort of thing"
"What sort of thing?" He was ominously calm.
"Her making a joke out of you," she went on, recklessly. "What do you think you mean in her life? I'll bet she's laughing at you half the time."
"That'll do," he said roughly. "I've had all I'm taking. You haven't any claim on me and you know it. Now you get in that Lizzie of yours and go back home." Then more gently: "You'd better start anyhow. You've got a long ways to go."
But at this unexpected gentleness the shrew died in her, and suddenly she began to cry.
"I'm crazy about you, Tom. I never fooled you about that. And I thought you liked me too."
"So I do; fine, Clare."
"And I'm straight, Tom. You can't say that about all of them."
"Sure you are. Don't I know that? That's why I don't want anybody to see you hanging around here."
But when she was at last in the old Ford and on her way back home, she knew she had not touched him. Knew indeed that she had never touched him, that his light-hearted philandering had been just that and nothing more.
She had cried steadily all the way back.
That was almost a week ago. She had gone back home, to the one-story bungalow on the outskirts of the town. Her mother was sitting on the porch resting after her dishwashing.
"That you, Clare? I was getting worried about you."
"I was just moving around, hunting a breeze."
"Your supper's in the oven. It's pretty much dried out now."
"I had a chocolate ice-cream soda, mom," she lied. "I'm not hungry." And went into the house.
Alone in her room she had turned on the light and surveyed herself in the mirror. No wonder he had turned her down. She looked ugly, badly dressed, crude. And that girl out there, with a lady's maid—Nora was the first personal maid outside of the movies she had ever heard of—a lady's maid to work over her. No wonder Tom's head was turned. She had a vision of this girl she had never seen, lounging about on sofas in exotic négligées, bathing or being bathed—poor Nora!—in a perfumed bath, casting her siren's net over all and sundry, and especially over Tom McNair.
She had gone on as best she could.
"You're sure it's all wool?"
"You can ask Mr. Dicer. It's the very best grade. Mrs. Hutchinson just bought a skirt off that piece."
"Well, I don't know that that recommends it."
Measuring, cutting, wrapping up, and then long periods of idleness when the heat came in waves through the open door, and her mind wrestled with loneliness and despair. The Fair, with the Emporium closed in the afternoons and her heart stopping when—the announcer bellowed through his megaphone:
"Tom McNair coming out on Stampede. McNair on Stampede."
The throwing open of the gates of the saddling chute, the hazers scattering, the judges watchful, the horse leaping, sun-fishing, rearing and bucking; and then the ride made, the pistol shot, the hazers closing in. She could breathe again.
She had only one comfort. Inspect the grand-stand as she might, she did not see the Dowling girl.
In the evenings she had waited alone on the porch of the bungalow, but Tom had not appeared. And now he had been drinking, and maybe old Dowling would fire him. Then he would go away and she would never see him again.
She leaned over the counter.
"Where'd you see him, Sarah?"
"Going into the Martin House."
At five-thirty Mr. Dicer in the rear of the store glanced up from an order blank at the clock, and then rising took his straw hat from its hook. And at this signal the girls, already poised for flight, with a simultaneous movement dipped under their counters, brought forth their absurd small hats, jerked them on their heads and moved to the door. Mr. Dicer, following them, locked it behind them.
"Good night, Mr. Dicer."
"Good night."
Under pretense of an errand Clare crossed to the drug store and entered. But when they had gone out of sight she emerged again and made her way into the Martin House. Ed Clark, the clerk and general factotum, was cleaning his nails with a pen-knife behind the glass cigar counter which served as a desk.
"Hello, Ed. Is Tom McNair here?"
"He's got a room here. I can't say if he's in it."
"She was certain however that Tom was upstairs, and after a moment's thought she wrote him a note.
"I'll be at the corner by the Court House, Tom. And I'll wait there until you come if it takes all night. Clare."
"Wake him up and give him that, Ed," she said. "See that he reads it, won't you? There's going to be trouble if he doesn't go home tonight."
"Right-o," said Ed. "I get you."
But after she left it she wondered. If she sent him back to the ranch she would be sending him to Kay again! She shrugged her shoulders and went on.
To Kay herself those two days of Tom's unexplained absence were sheer torture. Always she was on the watch for him, from early in the morning when the wranglers came in at six for breakfast to late afternoon, with Charlie the dairy-maid driving in the milk herd, great slow-moving beasts with full udders which swung as they walked. Once she went to the corral; but Tom's big gray was not there, nor was Tom's saddle on its peg in the saddle house. She could not ask for him, and now she felt that they would be gone before he came back. Her father was up and moving about, and they were to leave on Wednesday. Already Nora was packing the trunks.
"I'd better keep out your heavy coat, Miss Kay."
"Yes, please, Nora."
If they went before Tom came back what could she do? Could she leave a note for him? But what would she say if she did? "Dear Tom: I am so sorry we have to go without seeing you. I do hope" Never! Better no word at all than that.
In spite of what Jake had told her she had no real suspicion of the truth. Monday passed like Sunday. Herbert was cheerful, almost blithe.
"Well, the old Mariposa won't look so bad to me."
"No?"
"Nor to you either, once you're headed East. You'll—forget all this."
But she ignored that.
To do Herbert justice he believed she would forget, and perhaps it was to make that forgetting easier that he followed her to the verandah that night. She could not stay inside the house. He sat down near her and began his usual preliminary tappings before he lighted his cigarette. When he spoke it was carefully, as if considering what he had to say.
"Kay dear."
"Yes."
"Aren't you taking this thing too hard?"
"What thing?"
"McNair's spree. Bat. Whatever you like to call it."
"You wouldn't dare to say that, if he were here to defend himself!"
"It's the truth. Everybody knows it. Ask Jake! Ask any of the boys! They may lie to you, but it's the truth. He got drunk and half killed an Indian in town the other night."
"I don't believe it."
"An Indian named Little Dog. He and the big Swede here, Gus, had a fight with him over a decision at the Fair, and Tom knocked him cold. They'd both been drinking."
She sat very still. She knew now that it was true. She even felt that she had known it all along.
"Now listen, Kay. I don't bring charges like that unless I can prove them. If they hurt you I'm sorry. I'm more than that, as you know very well. But they're true. McNair's half a savage. Even the other men here have to handle him with gloves. He's violent; he fights and drinks. He doesn't just drink; he gets down into the gutter. And he's a bad man with women. Oh, I know he can ride; I know he's the type to appeal to a girl. But—for God's sake don't get interested in him, Kay. Either he would shame you to death, or he'd crush you and throw you away."
Kay did not move. She felt nothing save a curious numbness, and much of Herbert's last speech she hardly heard at all. It was enough, at last. She was through. While she sat and waited for him he was in the gutter. It had killed her madness; she was cured.
"I see," she said, very quietly. "Only don't be unduly agitated." She smiled at him. "He is nothing in the world to me. Let him go and wallow if he likes."
"Good girl," said Herbert, relieved beyond measure. He was happier than he had been for days. He knew Kay, knew every tone and inflection of her voice, knew her honesty of speech and action.
Suddenly she got up.
"Let's take a walk. I've been sitting around all day."
They wandered down the road together, amiably and cheerfully. Now and then Kay hummed a snatch of song, and although her hands were icy cold she felt quite wonderful. Except once when she saw a white flower gleaming in the dusk and stooped to gather it; then she felt slightly dizzy.
"I've been rather hateful lately, Herbert. I'm sorry."
A truce and a new peace. How faint the stars were in the evening sky, and how still the mountains! Still and peaceful, as if they were asleep. Or dead. Perhaps they were dead. It was only in the storms of winter that they lived. Then they shot down their avalanches, froze, crushed, killed.
Curious, the very world seemed dead. No color, no movement. She and Herbert were two spirits walking in eternal shade. She felt nothing, because she was a spirit—or no; her body was walking there right enough. It was her spirit which was dead.
Herbert reached out and took her cold hand.
"Lord, it's a relief to be friends again," he said huskily.
She let him hold it, and hand in hand like two children wandering in the dark they moved on under the trees.
There was a light behind them, and Jake's car came along the road. They stepped aside to let it pass, and Jake's voice called "Good evening." It was moving on; it was going. Suddenly Kay fiercely released her hand and ran after it.
"Mr. Mallory!" she called. "Jake! Jake!"
He heard her and stopped the car, and she caught up with it, breathless.
"Are you going to town?"
"That's what I reckoned to do."
"I'm going with you."
She jerked at the door and Jake opened it, too astonished for speech. She crawled in and slammed it shut. "All right. Go on."
"What about Mr. Forrest?"
"He's not coming. Go on, please."
With a deliberation that drove her frantic Jake let in the clutch and the car moved on. None too soon. She could hear Herbert close behind it as it got under way.
She chattered feverishly at first as they went along, but Jake, uneasy and suspicious of he knew not what, had relapsed into taciturnity.
"I don't know what your folks'll say about this, Miss Kay," he said once.
"Herbert will tell them. It's all right."
And again: "You'd ought to have brought a coat or something. This night air gets mighty chilly."
"I'm not cold at all."
They went on in silence. Once they passed a round-up outfit camped beside the road. It was on its way to the Reservation, and in the moonlight she could see the horses of the remuda peacefully grazing behind wire. The cook tent was lighted, and from inside she could hear men's voices and laughter.
"Potter's," Jake said briefly. "They're shipping eight thousand head this fall."
If there was any bitterness in his tone she did not notice. Potter was going to buy the ranch. He was still holding out, but Jake knew it would come. He would buy the ranch and turn in black-faced sheep on the upper pastures and plant wheat lower down; and Hank Tulloss in town would finance the deal, or maybe take a part of it himself. He knew what the L. D. could be, did Tulloss. He never put a dollar into anything unless he saw two coming out.
He was very taciturn after that. Suddenly they rose to the top of a hill, and the town lay before them. A locomotive whistled down at the track, a disreputable white poodle dog dashed across the road in front of them.
"Old Dunham'd better keep that pup of his at home!"
Paved streets, neat houses under trees with bits of lawn in front, the high school, the Court House. And by the Court House, under a lamp post a tall familiar figure with a girl. The girl had her hand on the man's arm, was looking up, talking urgently. Jake brought the car to a grating stop.
"That you, Tom?"
"Yeah. Who is it?"
"Mallory. You coming out tonight?"
"I'm starting soon as I get my horse."
Tom was peering into the darkness. Kay shrank back.
"That Nellie you've got there?"
"Yes," said Jake, and got under way again.
Jake only spoke once on the way to the side-track and the car.
"You all right still?"
"I'm cold," she said. "I guess you were right after all. Everybody was right!" But that was silly; she was talking nonsense. "I'll get a wrap from the car," she said.
Her teeth were chattering again.
Once in the Mariposa she pulled herself together. William, cheerful and garrulous after his long vigil on the side-track, the lights, her grandfather's stateroom, now her own, all of them helped to restore her to a semblance of normality. That strange madness of hers, which had grown through the day to that crazy impulse to run after the car, was gone.
She moved about, fingering this and that, while the cook made her coffee and Jake saw the station agent with his orders.
By half past nine Jake was back again, and with awrap about her they started back. A half mile or so outside the town they overtook a horse and rider moving slowly, the man with bent head and drooping shoulders. Jake peered out, seemed satisfied and went on. Perhaps to the relief of both, when they swung into the lane from the state road the ranch buildings were dark. When Jake had stopped the engine and helped her out he held to her arm and detained her.
"You'll have to square me with your father for this, Miss Kay."
"Of course. But he mayn't know anything about it. Good night, Jake."
He watched her out of sight before he closed the doors of the old wagon shed which was now the garage. He was puzzled and uneasy; maybe it was a good thing after all; at least she knew now about Clare Hamel. But if she was as crazy about him as all that
He grunted and made his way past the dairy to his own cottage. The milk cows were resting in their yard outside, and a calf, escaped from the enclosure, ran toward him, hesitated and then loped away. Tired as he was he opened the gate and drove the awkward thing back to its mother. "Go on in there, little feller." The calf shot by him, tail high in the air. He opened the door of his cottage—no doors were ever locked on the ranch—and found his wife still awake, in the double white iron bed with its sagging springs.
"What about Tom, Jake? Did you see him?"
"Yeah. He's on his way out now."
"Are you taking him back?"
"I'll make a few conditions," he told her grimly, and began removing his clothes. "He was with that Hamel girl."
"She'd better let him alone." She lowered her voice. "I kinda wish you'd let him go, Jake." She made a cautious gesture toward the next room, where Nellie lay asleep. "I don't know why girls are so crazy about him. He'd make any girl he married miserable."
Jake glanced uneasily toward the room she had indicated.
"What's wrong now?" he said, cautiously.
"I don't know. She's been crying today. Says it's a toothache, but I don't believe it."
Sitting up in her bed, her muslin nightgown buttoned to the throat, she gazed at him anxiously.
"He's a good hand," Jake said, after a pause.
"And she's a good girl," she flashed back at him. Then she lay down again and turned on her side. Jake, blowing out the lamp and crawling in beside her, felt that she was crying and put his arm over her.