Читать книгу Second Hand Wife - Kathleen Thompson Norris - Страница 7

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It was a week later that Carter saw Alexandra Trumbull again. He was busy in his office, dividing his attention between a heap of letters and the constantly ringing telephone, when a familiar voice said vibrantly, “Mr. Runyon would like you to O. K. this, Mr. Cavendish,” and he looked up to see her standing on the other side of the desk.

“Oh, hello, Miss Trumbull!” Carter said, surprised to feel a sudden odd confusion of his senses.

She answered something, of course, and he said something more himself. But her gold-brown eyes said much more than her words; there was friendliness in the tones of her voice, appeal in the beauty of her shining hair, her transparent skin, her white throat. Carter afterward could not quite remember what he said, or what she said. The light in her concerned smile, as she asked for the injured foot, had an element of spontaneity, of warmth, of eagerness in it. But for Betty’s surprising observations Carter knew he might not have noted it, but Betty had commented upon this girl’s responsive friendliness, and now he saw it.

He thought of the girl at intervals during the day, remembering her clear, flushed face, with the high cheekbones and strange eyes, and the disarming quality of her smile. He remembered her aside to Miss Curtis, “Don’t worry about it, Gertrude. I’ll make sure.” The insignificant phrase took on importance; he neither knew nor cared what it meant, but he recalled it a hundred times, said in the clear-clipped English voice....

Two days later, going through the almost empty office at one o’clock, he saw Sandra alone at her desk and stopped to speak to her.

“Aren’t you back early?”

“I haven’t had my lunch. I’m just going.”

“Come and have lunch with me,” he said, without preamble. The words surprised him no less than they did her. He saw doubt flicker in her eyes, and saw her color come up. “I shouldn’t have asked her,” Carter thought, “and she shouldn’t come.”

But she had risen to her feet.

“Thank you; I’d love to,” she said.

“This is pleasant!” Carter observed, when they were seated in one of the Palace Hotel’s big luncheon rooms. He had instinctively brought her to the place where he usually lunched; the conviction of having acted rather hastily and unwisely was strong upon him; he must avoid the appearance of anything clandestine or irregular. Here, among the familiar tables and lights, everything seemed normal again, reassuring. Their table was inconspicuously placed; they could hear the music, watch the crowd without being conscious of observing eyes. Sandra, he thought, was lovely in the mellow shadows of the little table lamp; there was a faint flush of excitement on her cheeks; her hair shone gold under her brown hat.

Carter wondered what she was thinking. Had he surprised her, or was she so entirely ignorant of convention that she considered this perfectly natural? At all events she was taking it simply. She observed that she was starving, and ordered quickly and definitely.

“Oh, and maybe they have the delicious chocolate cake?” she ended. “I had dinner here once, a year ago at least, and they had the most delicious chocolate cake!—Sort of squares,” she explained to the waiter, “with cream inside.”

The waiter nodded; wrote.

“My income,” said Sandra, looking at her companion—“my income does not run to dinners at the Palace. But a man named Katz, a theater manager—brought Flossy—brought my mother and me here, to talk about something.”

She had been rather silent as they walked the few blocks from the office; so silent that Carter had wondered if she were regretting their little adventure. He was enchanted with this change in her; she was happy and at ease now, at all events.

“The manager of what theater?” he asked, smiling.

“The old Columbia,” she answered. “He was putting a company on the road in stock.”

“You were—you are an actress?” Carter asked, surprised.

“No; but my mother was.” Sandra looked up from her jellied soup. “You wouldn’t know her name,” she told him composedly, with her slow smile.

“Did he want you to try it?” Carter persisted, his interest engaged by this glimpse of a life he did not know.

“Well, now and then they do,” she answered, the pleasant look for which he had found the word “affectionate” lighting her face.

“But you don’t want to?”

“No, I don’t like the stage,” she said. “Not for me.”

“You’re very young to decide.”

“Twenty-one. You should start younger than that for the stage,” she said.

“I should think it would be the very thing you would like.”

“No; not when you’ve seen as much of it as I have. I was brought up in greenrooms—back-stage.”

“Would it have a better future?”

They were not quite comfortable yet: Carter felt constrained and he saw that her hands were nervous and her color high. He thought that when this experience was over it would be a long time before he showed Miss Trumbull any attention again. It had been done on an impulse; not a very wise one.

“Well, I don’t know. It never,” Sandra observed thoughtfully—“it never had much of a future for her.”

“And your father, was he an actor too?”

“No; my father was an Englishman who came out here to Los Gatos. I think,”—Sandra smiled, speaking more naturally now, and with her direct look—“I think his family paid him a hundred pounds a quarter to keep out of sight. I think that was it. He had a ranch in Los Gatos, and my mother went down to San José, playing in a stock company, and that’s how they met. After he died somebody came over from England and settled with Mother and cleared the ranch. She rents it now; it’s a prune ranch. Flossy said—I call my mother Flossy because that’s what all her friends do.” She looked up, explaining, looked down again. “Flossy said,” she added, “that from the look she got at my father’s cousin she would have paid a hundred pounds a quarter to get away from them!”

It was the first touch of humor he had seen in her; Carter laughed joyfully.

“Is your name English?”

“Trumbull? Isn’t it?” she asked, surprised.

“I meant your own name.”

“Oh. Alexandra? Alexandra Mary Fox Trumbull,” she supplied promptly.

“As British as the British lion,” Carter said.

Walking back after lunch they talked of books. He discovered that she read a great deal. When they were going up in the big office building she said that she must go on up to the filing department, and left him with one grateful nod and smile for thanks and good-bye. He got off at his own office floor with a sense of having done something at once stupid and dangerous. Pleasant as it was to lunch with those gold-brown eyes opposite him, to note the roundness of the white throat and the little feathers of gold curling up against the hat brim, it was not wise or kind. Upon sober second thought Carter rather wondered about the whole performance.

He loaned her a book; she read it and brought it back with a fresh, simple, unaffected comment that seemed to him an indication of her own fresh, simple, unspoiled heart. She asked him if he liked Shakespeare.

Carter, with a little compunction, said he had not opened a volume of Shakespeare since college days.

“I like Portia,” Sandra said. “My mother had me study that part in a dramatic school once. But I like Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew best.”

Just before Christmas Miss Curtis was kept at home by a heavy cold for three days; Sandra took her place.

“Ask Miss—ah, Trumbull—to come in,” Carter had said. “She knows about this particular thing.”

So he had Sandra for his companion for several hours a day. His associates and friends who came and went would comment on her when she was not in the room.

“That’s a beautiful girl, Cart.”

“Yes, she’s handsome, isn’t she? And she’s a nice girl too, Miss Trumbull.”

He did not ask her to go to luncheon again, but at Christmas time he sent her a set of Conrad. Floss, seeing the girl stand thoughtfully and a little pale over the opened box, was slightly suspicious.

“What’s that mean, Sandra?”

“I don’t know,” Sandra said.

“You don’t suppose he sends every girl in the office a present?”

“I’ve been helping him since Miss Curtis was ill.”

“And does he talk about books?”

“Well—yes.”

It was a Sunday—Christmas Eve. Floss was going to a movie, but Sandra thought she would rather go out and walk first, joining her mother in the theater later.

“I’ll be in the loges, down front, left-hand side,” Floss said, as she always said.

“I’ll find you.”

Sandra walked out Ellis Street to the park. The day was sunless, silent, mysterious. Voices sounded odd and loud in the quiet streets. Trolley cars jangled by her; churchgoers streamed along the sidewalks. Christmas trees and wreaths showed behind plain bay windows; men with carts were selling mistletoe and potted poinsettia plants.

She had on the brown tweeds and brown fox-skin scarf; men looked at her; she did not see them. Now and then some man in a dark brown coat caught her eyes for a second—immediately she lost interest; it was not Carter, it was never Carter.

Her heart ached with a fierce, steady pain. Sandra felt as if she were alone in the strange, silent, Christmas world.

She thought of Carter in all the luxurious beauty of the old San Mateo home. His mother and his grandmother would be there this week-end, he had told her, for the festival and Patsy’s tree. There would be fires, there would be hospitality there, fine voices, quiet service. Perhaps he would play tennis or golf to-day, and come home to a hot bath, a change to evening wear.... Carter in his dinner jacket, those big shoulders, that brown face in a formal setting. Sandra tried to see him.

He had sent her books. In all the rest of the Christmas rush he had found time to go to some shop and pick out the Conrads and put his card into them. What of it, what of it, what of it? It meant no more than that he liked the substitute clerk who had twice taken Miss Curtis’s place.

“No more than that,” she said half aloud, walking on and on and on. “No more than that!”

She could think of nothing else but Carter Cavendish.

“I must think of something else!” she told herself.

She began to think of him again.

“I must stop this!”

It was devouring her; it was like a fever. The quiet winter streets, the churchgoing persons flowed by her unseen; she did not hear the premature horns. Her head ached with the one thought that hammered—hammered—hammered there like the clapper in a bell.

She must get away from the office of Cavendish & Bartlett; that was obvious. But at the mere thought a sort of weakness and despair swept over her, and she felt her throat thicken and her knees grow shaky.

A sudden memory smote her and she stopped in the street.

“Oh, poor Gertrude Curtis; she feels like this. She’s had it for years! And I laughed at her—I laughed at her.... But she’s different,” mused Alexandra, moving on; “she is proud because he’s a Cavendish. She’s satisfied. I’m not. He could be a beggar ...”

Presently she turned back to grope in the darkness to the seat beside her mother in the movie theater. In a sort of stupor Sandra watched the love story on the screen; the man was Carter, the woman herself. They were married; they had a child. Her throat closed, her mouth filled with water, her hands were icy.

That night, when Floss had been fussing about their cluttered apartment for some time, and Sandra was in bed pretending to read a Conrad novel, Floss sat down suddenly on the bed close to her daughter and touched her knee with a timid hand.

“Hello,” Sandra said, smiling, still holding open the book of which she had hardly been able to read or sense a page. But she knew what was coming: her pulse missed a beat.

“Sandra,” Floss began. Sandra knew that she knew. Her heart gave a strange twist and she felt frightened. She continued to smile at her mother, but the color drained out of her face.

“I’ve been wondering what’s the matter with you,” Flossy began again, and stopped.

Sandra swallowed, with a dry throat.

“The matter?” she echoed feebly.

“Sandra, you aren’t falling in love with Mr. Cavendish?”

A silence. Then Sandra said lightly, with a hard note in her voice:

“No.”

The mother interpreted this aright.

“You mean you have?”

Another pause.

“I suppose so.”

“Why, but Baby—but Baby——” the older woman said, feeling her way. “What’ll—what’ll that get you?”

“Nothing,” Sandra said steadily, clearing her throat.

“How long has this been going on?”

“Weeks. Except that there’s nothing going on.”

“He’s making love to you?”

“No.”

“He sent you books.”

“Well——” Sandra said.

“Darling,” Floss argued, “there isn’t any happiness in this for you.”

A bitter smile twisted the girl’s mouth; she shut the book and put it on the table beside her bed.

“Is that so?” she asked, ironically. And as her mother did not answer she added, in a gentler tone, laying her hand apologetically on the older woman’s hand, “I’m sorry, Floss. But I’m not—exactly enjoying it, as it is.”

“Then you ought to stop it, honey.”

“I know.”

“And are you going to?”

“You mean, get out of Cavendish & Bartlett’s?”

“Well, don’t you think?”

Sandra was silent a long minute. Then she said, simply:

“It’s all I have.”

There was a forlornness, a weariness and helplessness in her aspect that silenced her mother. Floss looked at her daughter for a moment. Sandra’s face was thinner and paler than it had been a few weeks ago; her eyes were set in delicate violet rings.

“Sandra,” asked Floss, grammar forgot in her earnestness, “ain’t he married?”

“Oh, of course.”

“Don’t he love his wife?”

“Devotedly, as far as I know.”

“H’m!” Mrs. Trumbull muttered, nonplussed. “How old is he?” she asked, after a moment.

“Thirty-two or three.”

“He’s handsome, isn’t he?”

“Yes. But it isn’t that.”

“Lissen,” Flossy said in a troubled tone, after a pause in which she had studied her daughter’s impassive face in vain for some light or encouragement, “you know that a man—a man like that isn’t going to do you any good, Sandra?”

Sandra’s serious face brightened with a laugh, and she once again affectionately touched her mother’s hand.

“I’ve been to the movies, Floss!”

“Yes, I know,” the older woman persisted uncomfortably.

“Darling,” Sandra said dryly, “Carter Cavendish doesn’t know I’m alive—not in the sense you mean.”

“Doesn’t?” echoed Floss, with a brightening face.

“No!”

“Then he isn’t trying to make you do—anything you shouldn’t, Sandra?”

“No,” Sandra repeated. And with another rueful laugh she added, “That’s the trouble!”

“You shouldn’t say that,” the older woman said, mildly.

“Oh, Lord, if you only knew the things I’m thinking and wishing and willing to do that I shouldn’t!” Sandra half laughed, half sobbed into the spread fingers with which she covered her suddenly burning face.