Читать книгу Second Hand Wife - Kathleen Thompson Norris - Страница 8

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The days began to go by, the lifeless dark winter days that began with artificial light in the dark back bedroom and moved on to a lighted office, and were ended with more lights everywhere: a green light in a round hood hanging over every desk in the long office, lights flashing in the wet rainy streets, lights dimly alive in the shadows of the back room and glaring boldly over the cheap tablecloth and soaped mirrors of Roselli’s. Sandra felt a great need of darkness, solitude.

She would look at her mother thoughtfully when Floss was not aware of her scrutiny. But for her mother she could run away. Every fiber of her being thirsted for escape.

Early in the year Carter Cavendish had gone to New York for a flying visit of three weeks. There was a great blankness in the office; a great blankness everywhere. Rain fell, there were foggy days when mists circled and smoked mysteriously among the tall business buildings of Montgomery Street; there was lightly falling, warm spring rain again.

“Why am I sitting at this dull, unimportant desk, doing this perfectly unnecessary work?” Sandra would ask herself as the long afternoons droned by. “Why isn’t there any leisure or beauty or dignity in my life? What does a person like Betty Cavendish do, that she should have it all?”

One day Mrs. Cavendish came into the office. She was beautifully groomed as always, a damp rich curve of dark hair set immovably upon the careful peaches and cream of her cheek, her little hat drawn down smartly, her furs, her suit, her gloves perfection. She asked confidently for “Frank Bartlett,” and stared, while she waited, directly at Sandra without the faintest flicker of recognition in her amiably smiling face.

“I’ll see if Mr. Francis Bartlett is in,” Miss Graves said formally. But there was no reproof in her eyes when the wife of the first vice president asked to see the second. Mrs. Cavendish could call Mr. Bartlett “Frank” if she liked.

Mr. Francis Bartlett came out instantly, of course, all smiles. Mrs. Cavendish clung laughing and small and engaging upon his arm as they went back to his office.

“What kind of mischief have you been getting yourself into, Betty, while Cart’s been away?” Sandra heard him ask, indulgently.

“Oh, I’ve been awful!” laughed Mrs. Cavendish, just before the door closed.

After that Sandra could not work at all. She presently heard Miss Graves say to the boy: “Run in, Mike, and tell Mr. Bartlett that the car is waiting for Mrs. Cavendish.”

The back bedroom seemed very dark and gloomy indeed that night. After the long rainy spell Sandra was conscious of the smell of plaster and woolen upholstery and dust.

“The car is waiting for Mrs. Cavendish.” The words kept Sandra tossing and restless all through the dark hours. She pictured all that went with them: the young mistress gracious with her servants, the mother interested in her beautiful little girl. Jealousy devoured her. She writhed at the thought of this other woman who could claim before the world the honor of being Mrs. Carter Cavendish.

On the next Sunday, an exquisite flashing spring day of heat and color and blue skies, she walked far out into the more open, residence section of Sacramento and Clay and Octavia Streets, house hunting. Golden Gate and Eddy were nearer, but there there were too many motor showrooms, too many small hotels and boarding houses. But when she finally did find clean, sunshiny apartments, the rents were alarming. She and Floss would pay no rent for their one room as long as Mrs. Bevilaqua used their furniture. Out here rents began at eighty and ran easily into the hundreds.

Over on sunshiny California Street, far downtown and just above the templed roofs of Chinatown, there were indeed beautiful Spanish apartments of one big room each. This might have been near enough to her old neighborhood to satisfy Floss; it had a magnificent view of the Bay and the waterfront; it was furnished in soft creamy plaster, with Spanish grills and black iron fixtures to carry out the Castilian note. But here the rent was an even hundred.

Sandra went home in the house hunter’s mood of exhaustion and discouragement. That night, desperate almost to bitterness, she discussed suburban cottages with her mother.

“I’d die, Floss said simply, looking up over her soup spoon.

“But, Mother,”—the word was coming into use of late—“it is really terrible, living like this, putting our coffee cups down on the edge of the couch, and keeping potatoes in the bathroom.”

“I’d die anywheres else,” Floss predicted simply. “I’ve been right here for fifteen years. All my friends are here. I don’t have to make any effort to see them.... You know, once, when you were about two,” she presently added, as Sandra, frowning faintly, continued to look down at the tablecloth she was marking with her unused spoon, and did not speak—“once when you were about two your father and I took a little place in Thousand Oaks. It was a friend of his’s house,” Flossy, who never let a matter of grammar annoy her, went on. “It was an awfully cute place—breakfast porch, all that. And view! There was nothing but view, whichever way you looked. Well, your father went off duck hunting with some friends for a few days—that’s what he said, anyway,” Flossy with remembered feeling interrupted herself to interpolate ironically, “and I was there alone with you. My goodness, I thought I’d lose my mind! By eight o’clock at night you’d have thought it was a cemetery. Quiet—it was something awful! Just your voice and my voice and black streets with trees waving over them and a light shining here and there. It almost broke my heart. It wasn’t long after that we moved here, and it was heaven to me to run downstairs again and see all the lights and hear the theater racket.”

“I know,” Sandra admitted in a voice of pain.

“You see, when I came here I rented the whole house,” Floss went on. “Then afterward I was glad enough to get this room for nothing and have Mrs. Bevilaqua take it over. All I had then was my rent from the prune ranch. I used to check coats and hats at the Elks’ and the Shriners’ parties—and glad enough to have it to do! Then I took a job with the telegraph office right down here——”

“I remember, darling.”

“My whole life’s been right here.”

“I know.”

“And if you got married, Sandra, this’d be the place I wanted to be! You can have all the sun porches and back yards you want,” ended Floss with a shudder. “Give me the crowd!”

Sandra laughed and stretched out an affectionate hand. Her lashes were misted; the laughter might as easily have been tears. But Floss neither saw nor suspected that.

“Sandra, you’ve got the sweetest disposition of any human being, man or woman, I ever knew!” her mother said.

The girl made no answer beyond a vague smile. She was hardly listening. True to a race instinct she could not have defined, of whose very existence indeed she was ignorant, she was changing in these days. Carter Cavendish might never know it, but for his sake her voice was gentler, and the smile in her eyes sweeter. For his sake Sandra chose her words carefully, groomed her hands, her hair, with painstaking care. It was as if she prepared herself by fasting and vigil, in soul, mind, and body, like some young knight of old, for accolade.

On the wettest of late January afternoons, when the green lamps of the office had been lighted all day long and sheets of rain slashed at the high windows and ran in gray gutters through the streets, Carter came back. Sandra heard his voice at the door that led to the elevator hall; he came through the office with Mr. Bartlett, returning a smiling greeting here and there; then the door of his office closed behind both men. Sandra had not dared to look up. She worked on busily, blindly, with a fast-beating heart.

At five o clock he reappeared, and she heard him say to someone, in his characteristic half-laughing manner, “I’ve not seen them yet. But I’ve a present for Patsy; couldn’t return without that!”

She looked up; he was looking straight at her. The brown face, the square shoulders, the look about his firm, hard mouth; her eyes could drink them in again. He half smiled, as if there were some little secret joke between them. Then he disappeared and Sandra sat on in a daze, not conscious of what was going on about her, her senses washing back and forth idly in a sea of vague dreams.

Half an hour later, when she was certain he had gone home, she carried a sheaf of papers into his office and laid them on his desk. Miss Curtis was there, just going. The two girls talked together.

“Seems so good to have Mr. Cavendish back!” Gertrude Curtis said.

“Doesn’t it?”

“He’s so marvelous,” the older woman said. “He put over a wonderful deal while he was in New York. Both Mr. Bartlett and Mr. Peter are perfectly delighted with him. They well may be!”

“It’s like a different place when he’s here!”

“Isn’t it?”

Miss Curtis went away and Sandra returned to her desk in the now deserted office. It was after half-past five o’clock. Mike, the boy, was emptying the wire wastebaskets; Huchinson, the janitor, was talking to some peddler or agent, down at the other end of the long room.

She sat down, her fair hair caught in the cone of gold light that poured down directly above it, the purity of her flawless skin and the delicate violet shadows about her eyes enhanced by the artificial light. She had only to put some papers in a drawer, lock the little center drawer, where she kept her fountain pen and other personal treasures, and go home, go home to remember that one moment when Carter had looked straight at her with so kindly, so significant an expression of understanding in his dark eyes. He was home again!

There was a stir at the door; someone coming in. It was Carter. He wore the big loose Raglan coat with which she was familiar, his hat was in his hand, the rain had spattered his fresh, hard brown face and dark, scalloped hair.

“I forgot my——” he began, and stopped.

Sandra had gotten to her feet; she stood looking at him, under the light, her fingertips braced against the big blotter on her desk.

Carter came to the other side of the desk and their eyes drew together. The end of his sentence was lost; he stood still, his lips parted a little, his breath coming short.

“I thought you might be here, alone.”

Sandra said nothing; her eyes were fixed steadily on his.

Carter was standing on the other side of the desk; his face was red, he laughed a little as he spoke.

“It just suddenly occurred to me that you might be here, alone.”

“The others,” she said vaguely, “have gone.”

Carter laughed again, foolishly and excitedly.

“Did you miss me?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, Mr. Cavendish.”

She had to clear her throat to say it, and it sounded odd and flat. Carter Cavendish alone with her in the office, asking her if she had missed him. Her senses revolved slowly—everything revolved....

“Could you come with me now and have a cup of tea?”

“No, I couldn’t.”

Sandra laughed a little, too; they were looking at each other strangely, smiling and yet nervous. There was a pause.

“Have to go straight home?”

“Well—I ought to....”

Another silence. Her eyes were dark gold in her white face; the light above her head turned her loose soft waves of hair to dark gold, too.

Carter drew back a little; swallowed.

“But I must talk to you,” he said, laughing confusedly.

“I think I had better go home,” Sandra said.

She went over to the coat hanger and put on her brown raincoat. She drew her small brown hat snugly down over her hair. When she turned back Carter was still standing where he had been, watching her. They walked out to the elevators together.

Downstairs at the big street door they could see that the darkness outside was slit by the silver needles of the rain. Lights were shining against it; the black street was filled with reflections and blots of light.

Carter put his hand under her elbow; the touch of his fingers robbed Sandra of any power to speak.

“Which way do you go, Miss Trumbull?”

“I—I—this way,” she said, with an effort.

He delayed her in the doorway.

“You look—awfully—well,” he said.

To this Sandra found nothing to say. The home-going world was wheeling about them in the dark night; she was conscious of none of it. She saw nothing but the tall man in the spattered raincoat, who was watching her with so strange an expression in his smiling eyes.

“I often thought of you,” Carter added.

“Oh, did you?” Sandra heard her own unnatural voice ask inanely.

“Yep. Did you know that?”

There was a pause. Then almost without her own volition she said slowly:

“I think I did.”

And then for a long time they stood looking at each other.

“You did?” Carter asked presently, in a changed tone.

“I think so.”

He laughed awkwardly, boyishly.

“You don’t seem very happy about it.”

“About what?” she asked, with a look.

Carter’s expression changed again; sobered.

“The point is,” he said, “how to get you home, in this rain.”

“Oh, I walk!” the girl said quickly.

“My car is right here in the garage.”

“Oh, no, I like to walk! I always walk. It isn’t far.”

“It’s raining.”

“Very lightly, though. I like it!”

“But it’s raining.”

“I like the rain. This hat—everything I have on has been rained on before.”

“Is it far?”

“No. A few blocks. I always walk it. I like to.”

“The East,” he said, “is buried in snow.”

“I can imagine.”

“Do you like it?”

Her eyebrows went up in interrogation.

“Snow.”

“I’ve never seen it.”

“Never seen snow?”

“Never.”

“But you’ve seen it in the Sierras—at Yosemite?”

“No. I’ve never been there.”

His eyes were smiling at some pleasant and exciting thought.

“How you’d love New York!”

“I imagine so. I often think of it.”

“Some day——” Carter began, and stopped abruptly. Sandra’s face grew rosy, and she laughed in embarrassment. Neither spoke for a moment, and then the man went on: “Well, do I see you to-morrow?”

“Oh, yes!”

“I may have to be down early—that is, about nine,” he began inconsequentially. Sandra looked at him respectfully; there seemed to be nothing to say to this. “You won’t,” he persisted, feeling the absurdity of the conversation, trying to extricate himself, “let me take you home?”

“Oh, no, I like the walk!”

“Then I’ll see you to-morrow?”

“To-morrow.”

They looked at each other smiling. Then Sandra nodded, and she and her umbrella vanished into the early winter dark and the glancing silver raindrops. Carter stood for a full minute, for another minute, motionless where she had left him.