Читать книгу Second Hand Wife - Kathleen Thompson Norris - Страница 4

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Sandra Trumbull had recently had the astonishing experience of being voted the most popular girl in the offices of Cavendish & Bartlett. The honor had come upon her absolutely without warning; she had been but languidly, but indifferently, amused by the proceeding. Her own vote had been cast, without much reflection, for little Myra Byrnes, who was in fresh mourning and always appeared to have been weeping. The contest, to Sandra, was just one of those “office stunts.”

But whatever Sandra did, everyone else in the office took the popularity test in deadly earnest; nothing else was discussed for many a noontime. Girls reflected and giggled and struggled over filling in the long blanks when the actual balloting came.

“Is she kind?” “Is she tidy?” “Is she prompt?” ran some of the questions. “Does she use good English?” “Is she fond of outdoor sports, books, music, cards, games?” “What do men who have business associations with her think of her?”

“It’s vivisection!” Sandra had murmured to her nearest neighbor.

“I don’t think it’s supposed to have anything to do with sex at all,” Laura Files had answered primly.

When her own name had been called as the winner, Alexandra Trumbull had experienced an astonishment amounting almost to vertigo. It had been extremely difficult for her to come forward from the assembled group in the main office, where they had their weekly “Better Service” talks. She had all but forgotten the balloting, now some days past. She had been sitting in her usual dreamy silence, only now and then bringing her long, strange, hazel eyes to the earnest face of old Runyon, who was maundering on about efficiency and organization spirit. Sandra felt some little contempt for the salesmanship patter of the day; she had been but half attentive.

“Miss Alexandra Trumbull, of the main office ...” The name had jarred her confusedly to her feet; the clapping of hands, the laughter and pleasure all about her had made her feel humbled and ashamed.

“Oh, no—not I!” she had stammered in all honesty. All the speaker’s kindly words had come back.... “fellowship, willing work, eagerness to help anyone in trouble, kindness, sweetness ...”

“Oh, no, truly——” she had protested, being pushed forward by generous hands, somehow, to the front of the room, and facing the white smile in the brown face of Carter Cavendish.

“Congratulations!” he had said. Her own hand had felt the grip of his big fingers, and with his left hand he had tendered her the little box of flowers and the slip of an envelope. A check for a hundred dollars, and violets, and the girls clapping until she awkwardly pinned on the flowers.

“Here, don’t lose that check!” Carter had said, laughing, as it fell, and with a swift movement he had recovered it.

“I shouldn’t have it, Mr. Cavendish,” Sandra had continued to protest, bewilderedly. Not that he cared, one way or the other. It had been a mistake, she had thought a thousand times since, to draw him into it at all. It had been too heavy a note; it didn’t make any difference to him, anyway. He had only bowed and smiled, perfunctorily and kindly, and had murmured a few quite indifferent words: “Oh, I think you must let the other young ladies decide that.”

And then it had been over; Mr. Cavendish and Miss Curtis and Mr. Runyon suddenly had disappeared to their own sacred offices, and the girls, bubbling with laughter that they had taken Miss Trumbull so completely by surprise, had gathered about to examine flowers and check. Somehow their artless, affectionate pleasure had given Sandra more pain than pride; she did not like them really—she had only been decent to them, kind to them, because her own native good manners dictated it, and it was too bad to have them praising her, claiming her, storming her citadel for that.

The episode had left her only a prickling sensation of shame; she did not quite like to remember it. She wanted very much to send the entire hundred dollars to old Jim Huchinson, the janitor, who had been taken to the city hospital a few weeks before. But that would look like a further bid for popularity and enthusiasm.

The real sting for her lay not in the girls’ choice of her name and their absurd and embarrassing enthusiasm. It lay in that memory of a brisk, well-dressed, important young man, who had spared a scant five minutes to give the winning young lady the prize and a glimpse of the Cavendish smile. Carter Cavendish! What had he ever done to be so handsome, so sure of himself, so kindly approving and superior?

She, Alexandra Trumbull, who held herself quite as good as any Cavendish of the lot, had bungled over some deprecatory, modest remark, and he had brushed it aside—had hardly heard it. “Oh, I think you must let the other young ladies decide that,” he had said, with indifferent conscious superiority.

“I hope he had sense enough to know that I wasn’t talking to him!” she would think, many a time, writhing, in the days that followed. And under the spare paper in the side drawer of her desk she would uncover the newspaper picture of him, laughing, in a loose-collared white silk shirt that showed the modeling of his big arms and shoulders, the horse’s long, mild head close to his own. Sandra would study the photograph somberly.

She tried to stop thinking about him; it was no use. He was always in her mind. When she and her mother sat gossiping over their breakfast Sandra was wondering if he would come into the main office this morning, wondering what he was doing, down in the Cavendish home in Burlingame. When she was in the office every step was his step, every tingle of her house telephone his voice. And when he went away in the late afternoon all the interest and life of the place seemed to go with him.

She was not conscious of liking him or of disliking him. It was just that she could not get him out of her mind.

“How can Carter Cavendish afford polo ponies—aren’t they terribly expensive?” she asked Miss Curtis at a noon hour, when they were having their lunch together at the Maple Leaf Cafeteria.

The name brought a flash of pleasure to the eyes behind the strong glasses.

“Oh, he doesn’t,” the older woman answered eagerly. “He rides the Peabodys’ or the Brays’ horses, or maybe Fred Fargo’s horses.”

“Oh——” Sandra said vaguely, buttering a bran muffin.

“It isn’t that the Cavendishes couldn’t,” Miss Curtis recommenced presently. “It’s just that they don’t go in for that sort of display.”

“You’d think men would ride their own horses,” Sandra suggested, with an air of keeping an idle conversation moving. But, for some perverse cause she could not define, it was not idle.

“But he’s the best,” the other woman answered promptly. “They want him on the team.”

“Mr. Cavendish is the best?”

“Oh, my, yes!” Miss Curtis took off her glasses; there was a faint red ridge across her high, bony nose. “He’s one of the nicest men I have ever had anything to do with!” she confessed, looking into space, smiling reminiscently. “He’s so considerate. It’s a pleasure to work for him.”

“Is his wife nice?” Sandra asked, in a dry voice.

“Oh, she’s charming.” Miss Curtis’s enthusiasm was unabated. “They’re lovely together. Last Christmas, you know, when she was in the hospital, she telephoned down to the office to ask me to remind him of Patsy’s dollhouse. So he asked me if I would go up to the Emporium with him and pick it out. Well, we had more fun! He was like a boy that day. Well, then later she sent me such a darling note of thanks. I mean,” said Gertrude Curtis, her face shining—“I mean how do fashionable people like that get time for these things? I mean I thought it was so gracious—so sweet of her! And then in May I was down at her place, you know.”

“Visiting?”

“Gracious, no! It was at the tennis tournament for the Junior League, at the Brunwalds’ place. He gave me my tickets; he had a lot. So that afternoon, strolling around—they had booths and ice cream, all that—my sister and I met him with his wife and this adorable little Patsy. She’s a wonderful child, you know; plays the violin simply marvelously, they say. So then he told us their house was just next door and to come in and see where he lived. And we had tea; it was too delightful. When we left,” the speaker concluded, her happy eyes still shining on space, “Mrs. Cavendish said to me, ‘Now remember I expect you to keep him in order, Miss Curtis,’ and I said, ‘Oh, believe me, Mrs. Cavendish, nobody has to keep Mr. Cavendish in order; he keeps himself in order!’ ”

She looked straight at Sandra as she said the words, with a noble and dignified expression; the younger girl with some difficulty kept the inner smile of which she was conscious from betraying her.

“She’s simply mad about him,” Sandra thought, “and she doesn’t know it!”

And she reflected with a little bitterness upon the unfairness of the situation. After this daily association with one of the most fascinating of men, a man always perfectly groomed and dressed, a man familiar with all the plays, affairs of the nation, great cities of the world, a man who stood to her in the position of superior, how could poor Gertrude Curtis be expected to take interest in any other? The pleasant intimacy of their office relationship, her knowledge of the business, her concern for his success, his health, his happiness—these were so many barbs to fence Gertrude away from the normal love affair, the normal marriage and home that might have come to her otherwise. Sandra thought she could imagine exactly how good, plain Mr. Stevens, the cashier, or Ralph Miller, Gertrude’s hotel-keeping brother-in-law, would seem to her after Carter Cavendish.

The whole thing fretted her, irritated her in a way she could not define. She disliked innocent Gertrude; she disliked the subject and the thought of Carter Cavendish, but she could seem to avoid neither. A misery of unrest possessed her.

It was November now; the popularity contest was a month in the background, and the Sunday upon which Sandra had discovered the picture of Carter Cavendish in the paper three weeks gone by. But still the western skies smiled on, and the shortening days were mild and blue. Sandra—her mother noted that she had grown thinner, grown graver, somehow—could wear her favorite suit of brown tweeds to the office, her favorite plain blouses, the snug brown hat. She had grown suddenly tired of the summer silks and the loose blue coat. It was pleasant to be tailored again, to step out freely in the exhilarating air, her brown bag tucked firmly under her arm, her brown fox skin loose about her shoulders.

Every girl in the office wore a fox or squirrel or rabbit skin this autumn; Sandra sometimes wondered where they got them. Hers had come from the effects of poor Yvonne Montgomery, when Yvonne, under her own name of Eda Roots, had died from self-administered poison in the upper front room at Mrs. Bevilaqua’s. “Everything I have belongs to Flossy Trumbull!” Yvonne had gasped at the end, and of the poor estate the fox skin had reverted to Sandra. It was shabby even then; cleaning had not done much for it.

Her own brown-and-cream beauty set off by the tweeds, the fur, the brown hat, she was ready to go out to lunch one day, when a message came from the office of Mr. Carter Cavendish: Miss Curtis wanted to know if Miss Trumbull would step in?

Unsuspectingly, unthinkingly, Sandra went in, to find Gertrude Curtis important with authority, and Carter Cavendish at the main desk telephoning. A tall, square, lean young man, with sleek black hair rippled like wet feathers, he could have posed, with his straight nose, heavily molded chin and mouth, and deep eye sockets, for the head of some classic Greek boy in marble. But the skin of the living man was burned brown, was even peeling here and there, and there was no self-consciousness in the easy hint of a smile and nod that, without interrupting his conversation, he gave Sandra as she came in.

“Listen,” he was saying, “you’re all wet, Joe. Do you get me? You’re all wet. Listen, it’ll be a wash-out.”

Miss Curtis waited until he had stopped and had stretched back in his chair to smile at both women. Then she somewhat fussily asked Miss Trumbull if she could take a certain envelope—the familiar, red fiber-paper envelope that carried bonds—to an address just up the street; the party was waiting, and Ken, the delivery man, was out....

“Sure enough, it’s Miss Trumbull,” Carter said, now on his feet, fussing with the papers in the wire basket. He straightened up. “Been winning any more contests lately?” he asked.

“Once is enough,” Sandra responded, outwardly easy, inwardly drowning, drowning under strange new thrilling waters.

“I told you what she did with it!” Gertrude Curtis exclaimed.

Sandra and Carter Cavendish looked squarely at each other. The girl made no protest, but he heard the quick click of the big white teeth and saw the warm color flash up under her clear skin.

Surprisingly, he saw that she was annoyed at the other woman; it amused him to ask carelessly:

“No; what did she do?”

“She gave it to Huchinson’s wife—the janitor’s wife,” Gertrude Curtis answered, with a loyal apologetic glance at Sandra’s hot cheeks.

Carter turned to the younger woman, but Sandra would not expand. She shrugged, smiled faintly with a barely moving mouth and strange long brown eyes, and taking the envelope from Miss Curtis, turned away.

“No,” Carter said, almost sharply; “why should you do that?”

“I wanted to, I suppose,” Sandra explained it, still smiling.

“You shouldn’t have done that!” he protested.

Sandra merely widened her eyes again. In another moment, shaking and proud and thrilling, she was in the big elevator with the other office girls, she was going down to the street. But it was no earthly street that she walked that day, no ordinary sun that shone, no usual world that moved about her. She had met him, she had scored. Or if she had not scored, at least he had not entirely had his way.

The rest of the day was a blur. Electricity, champagne ran in Sandra’s veins. She was only vaguely conscious of her return to the office, of the afternoon hours. Moments of ecstasy alternated with moods of dull despair, but both were so enthralling, so strangely different from anything that she had ever known before that Sandra clung to the new pain almost as to the new joy. She fell into a very stupor of daydreams, lying on her bed, when she went home, and was still deep in them when her mother came into the room in the darkness, at six o’clock. Flossy exclaimed in alarm when she realized that Sandra was lying there.

“For heaven’s sake, Sandra! How you scared me!”

“I’m sorry. I must have fallen asleep.”

But there was no sleep in the shining brown eyes, no drowsiness in the thrilling voice. Flossy looked at her daughter curiously when the lights were lighted. Sandra’s rich chestnut hair was tumbled in a loose soft coil on her shoulders; her color was high. She gave an exultant mysterious laugh, sitting up, and bringing her feet to the floor.

“What about dinner, Flossy?” She glanced at the packages her mother carried. “Here?”

And suddenly a deep depression enveloped her, and she hated herself and her life, everybody and everything. The tawdry, disordered room, upon which the light streamed so mercilessly, the dirty area outside, the squalid street harshly lighted by cafés and tobacco stands, all seemed to overwhelm her like a sickening tide; the ukulele, the movie magazines, the grease seeping through one of the packages her mother had brought in were all a part of it. Their obscure, their undignified lives affronted her as she had never been affronted before. She sat tousled and blinking on the edge of the disreputable old white enamel and brass-trimmed bed, and felt her soul sick within her.

“Want to go to a picture to-night?” Floss asked.

“I want to die!” Alexandra wanted to exclaim. “I want to get out of this horrible place and live somewhere where there are clean sheets and servants and decency and flowers! I want to dress myself beautifully once, before I die, in lacy things and trailing things and pearls, and have some man take me to a wonderful place where the rooms are big and dim and scented and quiet. I want him to kiss me; I want something to stop this hunger that is gnawing me and making my heart beat so hard and my thoughts spin around and around this way!”

Her head in her hands, she sat silent, making no reply. Flossy dispossessed herself of her bundles, moved about the room, hung up her coat.

“I got cream cheese and ham,” she said.

Still the girl sat motionless, her face buried, her softly tumbled bright hair falling over her hands, unable to speak. Flossy turned on the radio and a firm buoyant voice rang through the room.

“Friends, let’s think happiness—let’s say happiness—let’s spread happiness to-night. Let this be happiness night. That’s the way to do it! This is Wally White of the Buoyancy Boys talking ...”

The heavy chenille cover of the table had been shoved back in thick dusty folds, pushing the lamp, the magazines, photographs, ash trays, boxes, and vases into a jumble. Flossy was drifting back and forth with butter and spoons, rolls, the sticky jar of marmalade with the spoon in it.

“We had that stuff called Bar-le-Duc to-day for lunch,” she began. “I don’t think so much of it. It’s terribly expensive. Are you all right, Sandra?” she asked, suddenly, uneasy eyes on her daughter’s face. “You certainly must of slept!”

“I’m fine,” Sandra answered gallantly, dragging the words out over burning plowshares. “I’m starving!” she added. But after all she but nibbled the cheese and the rolls, her mother noted, and drank one cup of weak hot tea after another.

“You don’t want to go to a picture!” Flossy predicted, in brave disappointment. But Alexandra, surprisingly, was all for the movie, and liked it so much that she sat through the first part of it again, listening to dreamy music, watching the lovers on the screen.

“That part of it where she was falling in love with her brother-in-law was good,” Flossy said, walking home.

“Wasn’t it?”

“But you’d think her sister would have thrown her out of the house, carrying on that way!”

“Perhaps she couldn’t help it, Flossy.”

“Anyone could.”

A silence, while they moved along the littered black sidewalks under the night lights.

“Want a sandwich, Sandra?”

“Not for me. But if you’d like one——”

“No; I’m not hungry.”

They were in their own room and undressing when Sandra said:

“A girl might not be friendly to a man, Flossy; she might not want even to see him. That would be in her own hands. But falling in love—falling in love——”

Her voice lingered on the words; she roused herself from thought.

“Wouldn’t that be something different again?” she asked.

“You mean love at first sight?” the older woman demanded, flatly.

“Well, not exactly. She might have seen the man, met him—all that. Just as this girl did her brother-in-law. But she might never have had that—that special feeling——”

“She knew mighty well what was happening to her!” Flossy said virtuously, in the pause. “It wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t let it happen.”

“It wasn’t—much fun—for her,” Alexandra said slowly.

“Well, it was at the end, when his wife got killed,” Flossy offered.

“Yes, it was at the end. But that was a picture. People don’t get killed in real life.”

Mrs. Trumbull had put out all the lights except the reading lamp above the bed. She had opened the window on the grimy court, and the dirty Nottingham curtains were moving to and fro in the cool autumn night wind.

The transom into the gloomy hall was opened, too; a current of air would move through the room all night.

“Listen, Sandra, you haven’t got a crush on anyone, have you?” the mother demanded.

Sandra laughed quite naturally, as she jumped into bed.

“No, darling, positively not. I assure you,” she said, and if there was a fine note of irony in her voice it was lost on her mother. “I assure you,” Sandra repeated, “that I have not got a crush on anyone!”

She lay awake, on her back, her arms locked behind her head, and stared into the dim spaces of shadow and light that were the big room.

“No—I haven’t got a crush on anyone,” she thought. “This isn’t a crush.... Why, you poor fool, you’re beginning to—to like Carter Cavendish.”

That was it. The conviction seized upon her with all the force of a finished fact. Alexandra was conscious of exasperation and amusement; she was also conscious of something like an odd little thrill of pleasure. That was it—and what a fool! Falling in love with the vice president——

“Sap!” she said, half-aloud.

“What say, darling?” Floss mumbled, rousing.

“Nothing.” Alexandra lay wide-awake, thinking, oddly pleased with the situation. “You idiot,” she reproached herself. “You poor fool—that’s what it’s all about—cutting out his picture, and going into spasms every time he comes out of his office. That’s what it’s all about.... And this,” she told her soul solemnly, after a long, long while—“this is what it feels like, at last. This funny, tickly feeling in one’s heart. Everything—so important. Everything—trembly. ... Funny—to-day’s changed everything.”

It had to end there, of course. The day had been strange, important—but it was over. She had had an unexpected experience, emotionally, but there could be no more of it. The complete folly of nursing sentimental feelings for Carter Cavendish would put her in the Gertrude Curtis class—an unthinkable humiliation.

No, the thing was to get up the next morning, brisk and businesslike, and enjoy the usual session with scented soap and hairbrush and hot coffee, and read the paper, and start for the office, just as usual. Sandra tried to laugh at herself as she threaded the wet, awakening streets on her way to the office. At nine o’clock her neighborhood was still half asleep; the drug stores, the cigar stands were open, but the restaurants were being cleaned, the sidewalks washed, the little ticket offices of the theaters were barred and empty. Nothing was started for the day except Alexandra Trumbull in her brown tweeds, her brown hat, her worn shoes, her washable chamois gloves.

“Suppose I do love him?” she thought, walking along. “It won’t hurt him and it won’t kill me.”

That was the attitude to take. A fierce “What-of-it?” would work the cure. And in the end this awakening to the thrill, the reality, of love would be of value. She thought that she could never go back to the old skeptical ignorance again; she felt old, wise. Love was the only truth in life; everything was different when one loved. That was living, that was learning, and she would welcome living and learning at any price.

But how her world had changed! It was as if clouded glass had been removed from between it and her eyes. Things stood out in clear outlines now, and the girl who was Alexandra Trumbull clearest of all.

She saw herself, a tall, indifferently content docile girl, moving through all the years between twelve and twenty, liking idleness, liking the comfortable squalor of the back bedroom, with a bag of candy and a book, liking the attentions of boys, whether expressed only by eloquent glances in the street or murmured over the bulwark of her mother’s guardian form in the movies. She saw herself gradually introducing her own different standards here and there, as much to her own surprised amusement as that of her mother. Flossy had indulgently observed the finer personal habits, the little niceties of pronunciation affected by her child, without ever suspecting that Sandra’s way was better than her own way. They were two completely different persons; Flossy had never criticized or attempted to influence anyone, least of all her daughter. Sandra, reading, studying, changing, had only done what was natural for her to do.

But now she saw the chasm that the years had channeled between her and her mother; she saw that not one thing in her life was right for the woman who loved Carter Cavendish.

She wanted to be perfect now, and live in some simple, perfect environment. A garden, an old butler, books, a frail old grandmother, a splendid judge or a doctor for a father, all these came into Sandra’s twenty-one-year-old dream as she walked to the office on the day she knew first that she liked Carter Cavendish too well, that she must put him out of her head.

The office was just as usual; cool and wide in the early winter morning; radiators were clanking, but the day was clear and warm, windows were open everywhere. The girls were arriving and getting their desks in order; yesterday’s letters, which old Mr. Runyon had given her late in the afternoon, lay in a neat pile on Sandra’s desk; everything seemed reassuringly commonplace and normal.

Nothing to do but go straight ahead as if nothing had happened. As a matter of fact, nothing had happened. Little Myra Byrnes, looking somewhat less tearful than usual, came to balance on the edge of Sandra’s flat-topped desk, and pass the time of day.

“I’ve got a word I don’t understand here in my notes, Miss Trumbull.”

“I probably don’t know it, either.”

“Well, I know it, as far as that goes. I mean, I’ve heard it. But I always thought it was a swear word,” Myra Byrnes said, anxiously.

“A swear word!” Alexandra echoed, with her slow smile.

“Well, it’s ‘confounded,’ ” Myra explained. “Isn’t that a swear word? It says ‘this issue must not be confounded’—and that doesn’t make sense to me.”

“That could mean ‘confused,’ there,” Alexandra explained.

“You mean my notes are confused?”

“No, I mean that the issue mustn’t be confused with some other issue, d’you see?”

After awhile Myra saw.

“Are you English, Miss Trumbull?”

“Am I? No. Born right here in San Francisco.”

“You talk as if you were English.”

“My father was. But I hardly remember him.”

“I think you’re wonderful, you know!” Myra exclaimed, in a sudden shy rush.

Sandra smiled at her, amazed.

“You think I am?”

“Yes, I do!” Myra persisted.

“I don’t know why,” Sandra protested. But her sudden color showed that she was not displeased.

“You’re so tall and you’re so—lovely, so different from the rest of us!” Myra said ardently, in a quick, laughing, embarrassed rush. “You talk so different from the rest of us, and you’re so kind; you’re like someone just playing at being poor, at being a stenographer!”

“You little idiot!” Sandra said affectionately. But long after the impulsive little Irish girl had gone back to her own work, the memory of her tribute kept Sandra’s heart warm. She worked on in a happy dream that had little to do with the office routine of Cavendish & Bartlett.

“Is Miss Curtis here, do you know?” The voice brought her out of her reverie with a shock. Her heart began to beat fast, she felt her throat close and her hands grow wet as she looked up to see Carter Cavendish pausing, with his hands full of papers, a few feet away from her desk.

Somehow she answered him, somehow told him that Miss Curtis was up in the office of Mr. Peter Cavendish; New York had been calling. Perhaps she did not entirely betray herself, perhaps he did not suspect anything wrong, but Sandra did not know. All the painstaking work of forgetting him, and more, had to be done over again. She was shaken to the innermost fibers of her being, her senses were moving about in a wild confusion, her hands were cold and her head feverish. Sandra sat with her forehead resting on her palms.

“Anything wrong, Miss Trumbull?”

This was the girl at the next desk.

“My head began suddenly to ache,” Sandra said, smiling. She went to work again.