CHAPTER VI
THE BAWLING-OUT
Dickie's room in The Aura Hotel was fitted in between the Men's Lavatory and the Linen Room. It smelt of soiled linen and defective plumbing. Also, into its single narrow window rose the dust of ashes, of old rags and other refuse thrown light-heartedly into the back yard, which not being visible from the street supplied the typical housewife of a frontier town with that relaxation from any necessity to keep up an appearance of economy and cleanliness so desirable to her liberty-loving soul. The housekeeper at The Aura was not Mrs. Hudson, but an enormously stout young woman with blonde hair, named Amelia Plecks. She was so tightly laced and booted that her hard breathing and creaking were audible all over the hotel. When Dickie woke in his narrow room after his moonlight adventure, he heard this heavy breathing in the linen room and, groaning, thrust his head under the pillow. With whatever bitterness his kindly heart could entertain, he loathed Amelia. She took advantage of the favor of Sylvester and of her own exalted position in the hotel to taunt and to humiliate him. His plunge under the pillow did not escape her notice.
"Ain't you up yet, lazybones?" she cried, rapping on the wall. "You won't get no breakfast. It's half-past seven. Who's at the desk to see them Duluth folks off? Pap's not going to be pleased with you."
"I don't want any breakfast," muttered Dickie.
Amelia laughed. "No. I'll be bound you don't. Tongue like a kitten and a head like a cracked stove!"
She slapped down some clean sheets on a shelf and creaked toward the hall, but stopped at the open door. Sylvester Hudson was coming down the passage and she was in no mind to miss the "bawling-out" of Dickie which this visit must portend. She shut the linen-room door softly, therefore, and controlled her breathing.
But Dickie knew that she was there and, when his father rapped, he knew why she was there.
He tumbled wretchedly from his bed, swore at his injured ankle, hopped to the door, unlocked it, and hopped back with panic swiftness before his father's entrance. He sat in his crumpled pajamas amidst his crumpled, dingy bedclothes, his hair scattered over his forehead, his large, heavy eyes fixed anxiously upon Sylvester.
"Say, Poppa—" he began.
Then "Pap's" voice cracked out at him.
"You hold your tongue," snapped Sylvester, "or you'll get what's comin' to you!" He jerked Dickie's single chair from against the wall, threw the clothing from it, and sat down, crossing his legs, and holding up at his son the long finger that had frightened Sheila. Dickie blinked at it.
"You know what I was plannin' to do to you after last night? I meant to come round here and pull you out of your covers and onto the floor there"—he pointed to a spot on the boards to which Dickie fearfully directed his own eyes—"and kick the stuffin' out of you." Dickie contemplated the long, pointed russet shoes of his parent and shuddered visibly. Nevertheless in the slow look he lifted from the boot to his father's face, there was a faint gleam of irony.
"What made you change your mind?" he asked impersonally.
It was this curious detachment of Dickie's, this imperturbability, that most infuriated Hudson. He flushed.
"Just a little sass from you will bring me back to the idea," he said sharply.
Dickie lowered his eyes.
"What made me change was—Miss Arundel's kindness. She came and begged you off. She said you hadn't done anything or said anything to frighten her, that you'd been"—Sylvester drawled out the two words in the sing-song of Western mockery—"'sweet and love-ly.'"
Dickie's face was pink. He began to tie a knot in the corner of one of his thin gray sheet-blankets.
"I don't know how sweet and lovely you can be, Dickie, when you're lit up, but I guess you were awful sweet. Anyway, if you didn't say anything or do anything to scare her, you don't deserve a kickin'. But, just the same, I've a mind to turn you out of Millings."
This time, Dickie's look was not ironical. It was terrified. "Oh, Poppa, say! I'll try not to do it again."
"I never heard that before, did I?" sneered Sylvester. "You put shame on me and my bar. And I'm not goin' to stand it. If you want to get drunk buy a bottle and come up here in your room. God damn you! You're a nice son for the owner of The Aura!"
He stood up and looked with frank disgust at the thin, huddled figure.
Under this look, Dickie grew slowly redder and his eyes watered.
Sylvester lifted his upper lip. "Faugh!" he said. He walked over to the door. "Get up and go down to your job and don't you bother Miss Sheila—hear me? Keep away from her. She's not used to your sort and you'll disgust her. She's here under my protection and I've got my plans for her. I'm her guardian—that's what I am." Sylvester was pleased like a man that has made a discovery. "Her guardian," he repeated as though the word had a fine taste.
Dickie watched him. There was no expression whatever in his face and his lips stood vacantly apart. He might have been seven years old.
"Keep away from her—hear me?"
"Yes, sir," said Dickie meekly.
After his father had gone out, Dickie sat for an instant with his head on one side, listening intently. Then he got up, limped quietly and quickly on his bare feet out into the hall, and locked the linen-room door on the outside.
"Amelia's clean forgot to lock it," he said aloud. "Ain't she careless, though, this morning!"
He went back. There was certainly a sound now behind the partition, a sound of hard breathing that could no longer be controlled.
"I'll hand the key over to Mary," soliloquized Dickie in the hollow and unnatural voice of stage confidences. "She'll be goin' in for the towels about noon."
Then he fell on his bed and smothered a fit of chuckling.
Suddenly the mirth died out of him. He lay still, conscious of a pain in his head and in his ankle and somewhere else—an indeterminate spot deep in his being. He had been forbidden to see the girl who ran away out into the night to look at the stars, the girl who had not laughed at his attempt to describe the white ecstasy of the winter moon. He had frightened her—disgusted her. He must have been more drunk than he imagined. It was disgusting—and so hopeless. Perhaps it would be better to leave Millings.
He sat up on the edge of his bed and let his hands hang limply down between his knees. It seemed to him that his thoughts were like a wheel, half-submerged in running water. The wheel went round rapidly, plunging in and out of his consciousness. Hardly had he grasped the meaning of one half when it went under and another blur of moving spokes emerged. Something his father had said, for instance, now began to pass through his mind…. "I've got my plans for her"…. Dickie tried to stop the turning wheel because this speech gave him a distinct feeling of anger and alarm. By an effort of his will, he held it before his contemplation…. What possible plans could Sylvester have for Sheila? Did she understand his plans? Did she approve of them? She was so young and small, with that sad, soft mouth and those shining, misty eyes. Dickie, with almost a paternal air, shook his ruffled head. He shut his eyes so that the long lashes stood out in little points. A vision of those two faces—Sheila's so gleaming fair and open, Sylvester's so dark and shut—stood there to be compared. Her guardian, indeed!
Dickie dressed slowly and dragged himself down to the desk, where very soberly and sadly he gave the key of the linen room to Mary. Then he sat down, turned on the Victor, and lit a cigarette. The "Duluth folks" had gone without any assistance from him. There was nothing to do. It occurred to Dickie, all at once, that in Millings there was always nothing to do. Nothing, that is, for him to do. Perhaps, after all, he didn't like Millings. Perhaps that was what was wrong with him.
The Victor was playing:
"Here comes Tootsie,
Play a little music on the band.
Here comes Tootsie,
Tootsie, you are looking simply grand.
Play a little tune on the piccolo and flutes,
The man who wrote the rag wrote it especially for Toots.
Here comes Tootsie—play a little music on the band."
On the last nasal note, the door of The Aura flew open and a resplendent figure crossed the chocolate-colored varnish of the floor. Tootsie herself was not more "simply grand." This was a young man, perhaps it would be more descriptive to say the young man that accompanies the young woman on the cover of the average American magazine. He had—a nose, a chin, a beautiful mouth, large brown eyes, wavy chestnut hair, a ruddy complexion, and, what is not always given to the young man on the cover, a deep and generous dimple in the ruddiest part of his right cheek. He was dressed in the latest suit produced by Schaffner and Marx; he wore a tie of variegated silk which, like Browning's star, "dartled" now red, now blue. The silk handkerchief, which protruded carefully from his breast pocket, also "dartled." So did the socks. One felt that the heart of this young man matched his tie and socks. It was resplendent with the vanity and hopefulness and illusions of twenty-two years.
The large, dingy, chocolate-colored lobby became suddenly a background to Mr. James Greely, cashier of the Millings National Bank, and the only child of its president.
Upon the ruffled and rumpled Dickie he smiled pleasantly, made a curious gesture with his hand—they both belonged to the Knights of Sagittarius and the Fire Brigade—and came to lean upon the desk.
"Holiday at the bank this morning," he said, "in honor of Dad's wedding-anniversary. We're giving a dance to-night in the Hall. Want to come, Dickie?"
"No," said Dickie, "I hurt my ankle last night on the icy pavement. And anyhow I can't dance. And I sort of find girls kind of tiresome."
"That's too bad. I'm sure sorry for you, Hudson. Particularly as I came here just for the purpose of handing you over the cutest little billy-doo you ever saw."
He drew out of his pocket an envelope and held it away from Dickie.
"You're trying to job me, Jim,"—but Dickie had his head coaxingly on one side and his face was pink.
"I'll give it to you if you can guess the sender."
"Babe?"
"Wrong."
"Girlie?"
"Well, sir, it ain't Girlie's fist—not the fist she uses when she drops me billy-doos."
Dickie's eyes fell. He turned aside in his chair and stopped the grinding of the graphophone. He made no further guess. Jim, with his dimple deepening, tossed the small paper into the air and caught it again deftly.
"It's from the young lady from Noo York who's helping Mrs. Hudson," he said. "I guess she's kind of wishful for a beau. She's not much of a looker Girlie tells me."
"Haven't you met her yet, Jim?" Dickie's hands were in his pockets, but his eyes followed the gyrations of the paper.
"No. Ain't that a funny thing, too? Seems like I never get round to it. I just saw her peeping at me one day through the parlor curtains while I was saying sweet nothings to Girlie on the porch. I guess she was kind of in-ter-ested. She's skinny and pale, Girlie says. Your mother hasn't got any use for her. I bet you, it won't be long before she makes tracks back to Noo York, Dickie. Girlie says she won't be lingering on here much longer. Too much competition."
Jim handed the note to Dickie, who had listened to this speech with his seven-year-old expression. He made no comment, but silently unfolded Sheila's note.
The writing itself was like her, slender and fine and straight, a little reckless, daintily desperate. That "I," now, on the white paper might be Sheila skimming across the snow.
"My dear Dickie—somehow I can't call you 'Mr. Hudson'—I am so terribly sorry about the way I acted to you last night. I don't know why I was so foolish. I have tried to explain to your father that you did nothing and said nothing to frighten me, that you were very polite and kind, but I am afraid he doesn't quite understand. I hope he won't be very cross with you, because it was all my fault—no, not quite all, because I think you oughtn't to have followed me. I'm sure you're sorry that you did. But it was a great deal my fault, so I'm writing this to tell you that I wasn't really frightened nor very angry. Just sorry and disappointed. Because I thought you were so very nice. And not like Millings. And you liked the mountains better than the town. I wanted—I still want—you to be my friend. For I do need a friend here, dreadfully. Will you come to see me some afternoon? I hope you didn't hurt yourself when you slipped on those icy steps.
"Sincerely SHEILA ARUNDEL"
Dickie put the note into his pocket and looked unseeingly at Jim. Jim was turning up the bottoms of his trousers preparing to go.
"So you won't come to our dance?" he asked straightening himself, more ruddy than ever.
"Well, sir," said Dickie slowly and indifferently, "I wouldn't wonder if I would."
CHAPTER VII
DISH-WASHING
On that night, while all Millings was preparing itself for the Greelys' dance, while Dickie, bent close to his cracked mirror, was tying his least crumpled tie with not too steady fingers, while Jim was applying to his brown crest a pomade sent to him by a girl in Cheyenne, while Babe was wondering anxiously whether green slippers could be considered a match or a foil to a dress of turquoise blue, while Girlie touched her cream-gold hair with cream-padded finger-tips, Sheila Arundel prowled about her room with hot anger and cold fear in her heart.
Nothing, perhaps, in all this mysterious world is so inscrutable a mystery as the mind of early youth. It crawls, the beetle creature, in a hard shell, hiding the dim, inner struggle of its growing wings, moving numbly as if in a torpid dream. It has forgotten the lively grub stage of childhood, and it cannot foresee the dragon-fly adventure just ahead. This blind, dumb, numb, imprisoned thing, an irritation to the nerves of every one who has to deal with it, suffers. First it suffers darkly and dimly the pain growth, and then it suffers the sharp agony of a splitting shell, the dazzling wounds of light, the torture of first moving its feeble wings. It drags itself from its shell, it clings to its perch, it finds itself born anew into the world.
When Sheila had left the studio with Sylvester, she was not yet possessed of wings. Now, the shell was cracking, the dragon-fly adventure about to begin. To a changed world, changed stars—the heavens above and the earth beneath were strange to her that night.
It had begun, this first piercing contact of reality, rudely enough. Mrs. Hudson had helped to split the protecting shell which had saved Sheila's growing dreams. Perhaps "Momma" had her instructions, perhaps it was only her own disposition left by her knowing husband to do his trick for him. Sheila had not overstated the unhappiness that Mrs. Hudson's evident dislike had caused her. In fact, she had greatly understated it. From the first moment at the station, when the hard eyes had looked her over and the harsh voice had asked about "the girl's trunk," Sheila's sensitiveness had begun to suffer. It was not easy, even with Babe's good-humored help, to go down into the kitchen and submit to Mrs. Hudson's hectoring. "Momma" had all the insolence of the underdog. Of her daughters, as of her husband, she was very much afraid. They all bullied her, Babe with noisy, cheerful effrontery—"sass" Sylvester called it—and Girlie with a soft, unyielding tyranny that had the smothering pressure of a large silk pillow. Girlie was tall and serious and beautiful, the proud possessor of what Millings called "a perfect form." She was inexpressibly slow and untidy, vain and ignorant and self-absorbed. At this time her whole being was centered upon the attentions of Jim Greely, with whom she was "keeping company." With Jim Greely in her mind, she had looked Sheila over, thin and weary Sheila in her shabby black dress, and had decided that here no danger threatened. Nevertheless she did not take chances. Sheila had been in Millings a fortnight and had not met the admirable Jim. Her attempt that morning to send the note to Dickie by Jim was exactly the action that led to the painful splitting of her shell.
She had seen from her window Sylvester's departure after breakfast. There was something in his grim, angular figure, moving carefully over the icy pavement in the direction of the hotel, that gave her a pang for Dickie. She was sure that Hudson was going to be very disagreeable in spite of her attempt to soften his anger. And she was sorry that Dickie, with his odd, wistful, friendly face and his eyes so wide and youthful and apologetic for their visions, should think that she was angry or disgusted. She wrote her letter in a little glow of rescue, and was proud of the tact of that reference to his "fall down the steps"—for she reasoned that the self-esteem of any boy of nineteen must suffer poignantly over the memory of being knocked down by his father before the eyes of a strange girl. She wrote her note and ran down the stairs, then stopped to wonder how she could get it promptly to Dickie. It was intended as a poultice to be applied after the "bawling-out," and she could not very well take it to him herself. She knew that he worked in the hotel, and the hotel was just around the corner. All that was needed was a messenger.
She was standing, pink of cheek and vague of eye, fingering her apron like a cottage child and nibbling at the corner of her envelope, the light from a window on the stairs falling on the jewel-like polish of her hair, when Girlie opened the door of the "parlor" and came out into the hall. Girlie saw her and half-closed the door. Her lazy eyes, as reflective and receptive and inexpressive as small meadow pools under a summer sky, rested upon Sheila. In the parlor a pleasant baritone voice was singing,
"Treat me nice, Miss Mandy Jane,
Treat me nice.
Don't you know I'se not to blame,
Lovers all act just the same,
Treat me nice…"
Girlie's fingers tightened on the doorknob.
"What do you want, Sheila?" she asked, and into the slow, gentle tones of her voice something had crept, something sinuous and subtle, something that slid into the world with Lilith for the eternal torment of earth's daughters.
"I want to send this note to your brother," said Sheila with the simplicity of the aristocrat. "Is that Mr. Greely? Is he going past the hotel?"
She took a step toward Jim, but Girlie held out her soft long hand.
"Give it to me. I'll ask him."
Sheila surrendered the note.
"You'd better get back to the dishes," said Girlie over her shoulder.
"Momma's kind of rushed this morning. She's helping Babe with her party
dress. I wouldn't 'a' put in my time writing notes to Dickie to-day if
I'd 'a' been you. Sort of risky."
She slid in through the jealous door and Sheila hurried along the hall to the kitchen where there was an angry clash and clack of crockery.
The kitchen was furnished almost entirely with blue-flowered oilcloth; the tables were covered with it, the floor was covered with it, the shelves were draped in it. Cold struck up through the shining, clammy surface underfoot so that while Sheila's face burned from the heat of the stove her feet were icy. The back door was warped and let in a current of frosty air over its sill, a draught that circled her ankles like cold metal. On the table in the middle of the room, "Momma" had placed an enormous tin dish-pan piled high with dirty dishes, over which she was pouring the contents of the kettle. Steam rose in clouds, half-veiling her big, fierce face which, seen through holes in the vapor, was like that of a handsome, vulgar witch.
Through the steam she shot at Sheila a cruel look. "Aren't you planning to do any work to-day, Sheila?" she asked in her voice of harsh, monotonous accents. "Here it's nine o'clock and I ain't been able to do a stroke to Babe's dress. I dunno what you was designed for in this house—an ornament on the parlor mantel, I guess."
Sheila's heart suffered one of the terrible swift enlargements of angry youth. It seemed to fill her chest and stop her breath, forcing water into her eyes. She could not speak, went quickly up and took the kettle from "Momma's" red hand.
The table at which dish-washing was done, was inconveniently high. When the big dishpan with its piled dishes topped it, Sheila's arms and back were strained over her work. She usually pulled up a box on which she stood, but now she went to work blindly, her teeth clenched, her flexible red lips set close to cover them. The Celtic fire of her Irish blood gave her eyes a sort of phosphorescent glitter. "Momma" looked at her.
"Don't show temper!" she said. "What were you doin'? Upstairs work?"
"I was writing a letter," said Sheila in a low voice, beginning to wash the plates and shrinking at the pain of scalding water.
"Hmp! Writing letters at this hour! One of your friends back East? I thought it was about time somebody was looking you up. What do your acquaintance think of you comin' West with Sylly?"
Now that she was at liberty to put a "stroke" of work; on Babe's dress, "Momma" seemed in no particular hurry to do so. She stood in the middle of the kitchen wrapping her great bony arms in her checked apron and staring at Sheila. Her eyes were like Girlie's turned to stone, as blank and blind as living eyes can be.
Sheila did not answer. She was white and her hands shook.
"Hmp!" said "Momma" again. "We aren't goin' to talk about our acquaintance, are we? Well, some folks' acquaintance don't bear talkin' about; they're either too fine or they ain't the kind that gets into decent conversation." She walked away.
Sheila did her work, holding her anger and her misery away from her, refusing to look at them, to analyze their cause. It was a very busy day. The help Babe usually gave, and "Momma's" more effectual assistance, were not to be had. Sheila cleaned up the kitchen, swept the dining-room, set the table and cooked the supper. Her exquisite French omelette and savory baked tomatoes were reviled. The West knows no cooking but its own, and, like all victims of uneducated taste, it prefers the familiar bad to the unfamiliar good.
"You've spoiled a whole can of tomatoes," said Babe.
Sylvester laughed good-humoredly: "Oh, well, Miss Sheila, you'll learn!" This, to Sheila, whose omelette had been taught her by Mimi Lolotte and whose baked tomatoes, delicately flavored with onion, were something to dream about. And she had toasted the bread golden brown and buttered it, and she had made a delectable vegetable soup! She had never before been asked to cook a meal at Number 18 Cottonwood Avenue and she was eager to please Sylvester. His comment, "You'll learn," fairly took her breath. She would not sit down with them at the table, but hurried back into the kitchen, put her scorched cheek against some cold linoleum, and cried.
By the time dinner was over and more dishes ready to be washed, the cook's wounded pride was under control. Her few tears had left no marks on her face. Babe, helping her, did not even know that there had been a shower.
Babe was excited; her chewing was more energetic even than usual. It smacked audibly.
"Say, Sheila, wot'll you wear to-night?" she yelled above the clatter.
"Wear?" repeated Sheila.
"To the dance, you silly! What did you think I meant—to bed?"
Sheila's tired pallor deepened a little. "I am not going to the dance."
"Not going?" Babe put down a plate. "What do you mean? Of course you're going! You've gotta go. Say—Momma, Pap, Girlie"—she ran, at a sort of sliding gallop across the oilcloth through the swinging door into the dining-room—"will you listen to this? Sheila says she's not going to the dance!"
"Well," said "Momma" audibly, "she'd better. I'm agoin' to put out the fires, and the house'll be about 12 below."
Sylvester murmured, "Oh, we must change that."
And Girlie said nothing.
"Well," vociferated Babe. "I call it too mean for words. I've just set my heart on her meeting some of the folks and getting to know Millings. She's been here a whole two weeks and she hasn't met a single fellow but Dickie, and he don't count, and she hasn't even got friendly with any of the girls. And I wanted her to see one of our real swell affairs. Why—just for the credit of Millings, she's gotta go."
"Why fuss her about it, if she don't want to?" Girlie's soft voice was poured like oil on the troubled billows of Babe's outburst.
"I'll see to her," Sylvester's chair scraped the floor as he rose. "I know how to manage girls. Trust Poppa!"
He pushed through the door, followed by Babe. Sheila looked up at him helplessly. She had her box under her feet, and so was not entirely hidden by the dishpan. She drew up her head and faced him.
"Mr. Hudson," she began—"please! I can't go to a dance. You know
I can't—"
"Nonsense!" said Pap. "In the bright lexicon of youth there's no such word as 'can't.' Say, girl, you can and you must. I won't have Babe crying her eyes out and myself the most unpopular man in Millings. Say, leave your dishes and go up and put on your best duds."
"That's talking," commented Babe.
In the dining-room "Momma" said, "Hmp!" and Girlie was silent.
Sheila looked at her protector. "But, you see, Mr. Hudson, I—I—it was only a month ago—" She made a gesture with her hands to show him her black dress, and her lips trembled.
Pap walked round to her and patted her shoulder. "I know," he said. "I savvy. I get you, little girl. But, say, it won't do. You've got to begin to live again and brighten up. You're only seventeen and that's no age for mourning, no, nor moping. You must learn to forget, at least, that is"—for he saw the horrified pain of her eyes—"that is, to be happy again. Yes'm. Happiness—that's got to be your middle name. Now, Miss Sheila, as a favor to me!"
Sheila put up both her hands and pushed his from her shoulder. She ran from him past Babe into the dining-room, where, as she would have sped by, "Momma" caught her by the arm.
"If you're not aimin' to please him," said "Momma" harshly, "wot are you here for?"
Sheila looked at her unseeingly, pulled herself away, and went upstairs on wings. In her room the tumult, held down all through the ugly, cluttered, drudging day, broke out and had its violent course. She flew about the room or tossed on the bed, sobbing and whispering to herself. Her wound bled freely for the first time since it had been given her by death. She called to her father, and her heart writhed in the grim talons of its loneliness. That was her first agony and then came the lesser stings of "Momma's" insults, and at last, a fear. An incomprehensible fear. She began to doubt the wisdom of her Western venture. She began to be terrified at her situation. All about her lay a frozen world, a wilderness, so many thousand miles from anything that she and her father had ever known. And in her pocket there was no penny for rescue or escape. Over her life brooded powerfully Sylvester Hudson, with his sallow face and gentle, contemplative eyes. He had brought her to his home. Surely that was an honorable and generous deed. He had given her over to the care and protection of his wife and daughters. But why didn't Mrs. Hudson like it? Why did she tighten her lips and pull her nostrils when she looked at her helper? And what was the sinister, inner meaning of those two speeches … about the purpose of her being in the house at all? "An ornament on the parlor mantel" … "aiming to please him…." Of the existence of a sinister, inner meaning, "Momma's" voice and look left no doubt.
Something was wrong. Something was hideously wrong. And to whom might she go for help or for advice? As though to answer her question came a foot-step on the stair. It was a slow, not very heavy step. It came to her door and there followed a sharp but gentle rap.
"Who is it?" asked Sheila. And suddenly she felt very weak.
"It's Pap. Open your door, girl."
She hesitated. Her head seemed to go round. Then she obeyed his gentle request.
Pap walked into the room.
CHAPTER VIII
ARTISTS
Pap closed the door carefully behind him before he looked at Sheila. At once his face changed to one of deep concern.
"Why, girl! What's happened to you? You got no call to feel like that!"
He went over to her and took her limp hand. She half turned away. He patted the hand.
"Why, girl! This isn't very pleasant for me. I aimed to make you happy when I brought you out to Millings. I kind of wanted to work myself into your Poppa's place, kind of meant to make it up to you some way. I aimed to give you a home. 'Home, sweet home, there's no place like home'—that was my motto. And here you are, all pale around the gills and tears all over your face—and, say, there's a regular pool there on your pillow. Now, now—" he clicked with his tongue. "You're a bad girl, a regular bad, ungrateful girl, hanged if you aren't! You know what I'd do to you if you were as young as you are little and foolish? Smack you—good and plenty. But I'm not agoin' to do it, no, ma'am. Don't pull your hand away. Smacking's not in my line. I never smacked my own children in their lives, except Dickie. There was no other way with him. He was ornery. You come and set down here in the big chair and I'll pull up the little one and we'll talk things over. Put your trust in me, Miss Sheila. I'm all heart. I wasn't called 'Pap' for nothing. You know what I am? I'm your guardian. Yes'm. And you just got to make up your mind to cast your care upon me, as the hymn says. Nary worry must you keep to yourself. Come on now, kid, out with it. Get it off your chest."
Sheila had let him put her into the big creaking leather chair. She sat with a handkerchief clenched in both her hands, upon which he, drawing up the other chair, now placed one of his. She kept her head down, for she was ashamed of the pale, stained, and distorted little face which she could not yet control.
"Now, then, girl … Well, if you won't talk to me, I'll just light up and wait. I'm a patient man, I am. Don't hurry yourself any."
He withdrew his hand and took out a cigar. In a moment he was sitting on the middle of his spine, his long legs sprawled half across the room, his hands in his pockets, his head on the chair-back so that his chin pointed up to the ceiling. Smoke rose from him as from a volcano.
Sheila presently laughed uncertainly.
"That's better," he mumbled around his cigar.
"I've had a dreadful day," said Sheila.
"You won't have any more of them, my dear," Sylvester promised quietly.
She looked at him with faint hope.
"Yes'm, dish-washing's dead."
"But what can I do, then?"
Hudson nodded his head slowly, or, rather, he sawed the air up and down with his chin. He was still looking at the ceiling so that Sheila could see only the triangle beneath his jaw and the dark, stringy neck above his collar.
"I've got a job for you, girl—a real one."
He pulled out his cigar and sat up. "You remember what I told you the other night?"
"About my being a—a—beacon?" Sheila's voice was delicately tinged with mockery. So was her doubtful smile.
"Yes'm," he said seriously. "Well, that's it."
"What does a beacon do?" she asked.
"It burns. It shines. It looks bright. It wears the neatest little black dress with a frilly apron and deep frilly cuffs. Say, do you recollect something else I told you?"
"I remember everything you told me."
"Well, ma'am, I remember everything you told me. Somebody said she was grateful. Somebody said she'd do anything for Pap. Somebody said—'Try me.'"
"I meant it, Mr. Hudson. I did mean it."
"Do you mean it now?"
"Yes. I—I owe you so much. You're always so very kind to me. And I behave very badly. I was hateful to you this evening. And, when you came to my door, just now, I was—I was scared."
Pap opened his eyes at her, held his cigar away from him and laughed.
The laugh was both bitter and amused.
"Scared of Pap Hudson? You scared? But, look-a-here, girl, what've I done to deserve that?"
He sat forward, rested his chin in his hand, supported by an elbow on his crossed knees and fixed her with gentle and reproachful eyes.
"Honest, you kind of make me feel bad, Miss Sheila."
"I am dreadfully sorry. It was horrid of me. I only told you because I wanted you to know that I'm not worth helping. I don't deserve you to be so kind to me. I—I must be disgustingly suspicious."
"Well!" Sylvester sighed. "Very few folks get me. I'm kind of mis-understood. I'm a real lonesome sort of man. But, honest, Miss Sheila, I thought you were my friend. I don't mind telling you, you've hurt my feelings. That shot kind of got me. It's stuck into me."
"I'm horrid!" Sheila's eyes were wounded with remorse.
"Oh, well, I'm not expecting understanding any more."
"Oh, but I do—I do understand!" she said eagerly and she put her hand shyly on his arm. "I think I do understand you. I'm very grateful. I'm very fond of you."
"Ah!" said Sylvester softly. "That's a good hearing!" He lifted his arm with Sheila's hand on it and touched it with his lips. "You got me plumb stirred up," he said with a certain huskiness. "Well!" She took away her hand and he made a great show of returning to common sense. "I reckon we are a pretty good pair of friends, after all. But you mustn't be scared of me, Miss Sheila. That does hurt. Let's forget you told me that."
"Yes—please!"
"Well, then—to get back to business. Do you recollect a story I told you?"
"A story? Oh, yes—about an Englishman—?"
"Yes, ma'am. That Englishman put his foot on the rail and stuck his glass in his eye and set his tumbler down empty. And he looked round that bar of mine, Miss Sheila. You savvy, he'd been all over the globe, that feller, and I should say his ex-perience of bars was—some—and he said, 'Hudson, it's all but perfect. It only needs one thing.'"
This time Sheila did not ask. She waited.
"'And that's something we have in our country,' said he." Hudson cleared his throat. He also moistened his lips. He was very apparently excited. He leaned even farther forward, tilting on the front legs of his chair and thrusting his face close to Sheila's "'A pretty barmaid!' said he."
There was a profound silence in the small room. The runners of a sleigh scraped the icy street below, its horses' hoofs cracked noisily. The music of a fiddle sounded in the distance. Babe's voice humming a waltz tune rose from the second story.
"A barmaid?" asked Sheila breathlessly. She got up from her chair and walked over to the window. The moon was already high. Over there, beckoning, stood her mountain and her star. It was all so shining and pure and still.
"That's what you want me to be—your barmaid?"
"Yes'm," said Sylvester humbly. "Don't make up your mind in a hurry, Miss Sheila. Wait till I tell you more about it. It's—it's a kind of dream of mine. I think it'd come close to breaking me up if you turned down the proposition. The Aura's not an ordin-ar-y bar and I'm not an ordin-ar-y man, and, say, Miss Sheila, you're not an ordin-ar-y girl."
"Is that why you want me to work in your saloon?" said Sheila, staring at the star.
"Yes'm. That's why. Let me tell you that I've searched this continent for a girl to fit my ideal. That's what it is, girl—my ideal. That bar of mine has got to be perfect. It's near to perfect now. I want when that Englishman comes back to Millings to hear him say, 'It's perfect' … no 'all but,' you notice. Why, miss, I could 'a' got a hundred ordin-ar-y girls, lookers too. The world's full of lookers."
"Why didn't you offer your—'job' to Babe or Girlie?"
Sylvester laughed. "Well, girl, as a matter of fact, I did."
"You did?" Sheila turned back and faced him. There was plenty of color in her cheeks now. Her narrow eyes were widely opened. Astonishingly large and clear they were, when she so opened them.
"Yes'm." Sylvester glanced aside for an instant.
"And what did they say?"
"They balked," Sylvester admitted calmly. "They're fine girls, Miss
Sheila. And they're lookers. But they just aren't quite fine enough.
They're not artists, like your Poppa and like you—and like me."
Sheila put a hand up to her cheek. Her eyes came back to their accustomed narrowness and a look of doubt stole into her face.
"Artists?"
"Yes'm." Sylvester had begun to walk about. "Artists. Why, what's an artist but a person with a dream he wants to make real? My dream's—The Aura, girl. For three years now"—he half-shut his eyes and moved his arm in front of him as though he were putting in the broad first lines of a picture—"I've seen that girl there back of my bar—shining and good and fine—not the sort of a girl a man'd be lookin' for, mind you, just not that! A girl that would sort of take your breath. Say, picture it, Sheila!" He stood by her and pointed it out as though he showed her a view. "You're a cowboy. And you come ridin' in, bone-tired, dusty, with a thirst. Well, sir, a thirst in your throat and a thirst in your heart and a thirst in your soul. You're wantin' re-freshment. For your body and your eyes and your mind. Well, ma'am, you tie your pony up there and you push open those doors and you push 'em open and step plumb into Paradise. It's cool in there—I'm picturin' a July evenin', Miss Sheila—and it's quiet and it's shining clean. And there's a big man in white who's servin' drinks—cold drinks with a grand smell. That's my man Carthy. He keeps order. You bet you, he does keep it too. And beside him stands a girl. Well, she's the kind of girl you—the cowboy—would 'a' dreamed about, lyin' out in your blanket under the stars, if you'd 'a' knowed enough to be able to dream about her. After you've set eyes on her, you don't dream about any other kind of girl. And just seein' her there so sweet and bright and dainty-like, makes a different fellow of you. Say, goin' into that bar is like goin' into church and havin' a jim-dandy time when you get there—which is something the churches haven't got round to offerin' yet to my way of thinkin'. Now. I want to ask you, Miss Sheila, if you've got red blood in your veins and a love of adventure and a wish to see that real entertaining show we call 'life'—and mighty few females ever get a glimpse of it—and if you've acquired a feeling of gratitude for Pap and if you've got any real religion, or any ambition to play a part, if you're a real woman that wants to be an in-spire-ation to men, well, ma'am, I ask you, could you turn down a chance like that?"
He stood away a pace and put his question with a lifted forefinger.
Sheila's eyes were caught and held by his. Again her mind seemed to be fastened to his will. And the blood ran quickly in her veins. Her heart beat. She was excited, stirred. He had seen through her shell unerringly as no one else in all her life had seen. He had mysteriously guessed that she had the dangerous gift of adventure, that under the shyness and uncertainty of inexperience there was no fear in her, that she was one of those that would rather play with fire than warm herself before it. Sheila stood there, discovered and betrayed. He had played upon her as upon a flexible young reed: that stop, her ambition, this, her romanticism, that, her vanity, the fourth, her gratitude, the fifth, her idealism, the sixth, her recklessness. And there was this added urge—she must stay here and drudge under the lash of "Momma's" tongue or she must accept this strange, this unimaginable offer. Again she opened her eyes wider and wider. The pupils swallowed up the misty gray. Her lips parted.
"I'll do it," she said, narrowed her eyes and shut her mouth tight. With such a look she might have thrown a fateful toss of dice.
Sylvester caught her hands, pressed them up to his chest.
"It's a promise, girl?"
"Yes."
"God bless you!"
He let her go. He walked on air. He threw open the door.
There on the threshold—stood "Momma."
"I kind of see," she drawled, "why Sheila don't take no interest in dancin'!"
"You're wrong," said Sheila very clearly. "I have been persuaded. I am going to the dance."
Sylvester laughed aloud. "One for you, Momma!" he said. "Come on down, old girl, while Miss Sheila gets into her party dress. Say, Aura, aren't you goin' to give me a dance to-night?"
His wife looked curiously at his red, excited face. She followed him in silence down the stairs.
Sheila stood still listening to their descending steps, then she knelt down beside her little trunk and opened the lid. The sound of the fiddle stole hauntingly, beseechingly, tauntingly into her consciousness. There in the top tray of her trunk wrapped in tissue paper lay the only evening frock she had, a filmy French dress of white tulle, a Christmas present from her father, a breath-taking, intoxicating extravagance. She had worn it only once.
It was with the strangest feeling that she took it out. It seemed to her that the Sheila that had worn that dress was dead.
CHAPTER IX
A SINGEING OF WINGS
All the vitality of Millings—and whatever its deficiencies the town lacked nothing of the splendor and vigor of its youth—throbbed and stamped and shook the walls of the Town Hall that night. To understand that dance, it is necessary to remember that it took place on a February night with the thermometer at zero and with the ground five feet beneath the surface of the snow. There were men and women and children, too, who had come on skis and in toboggans for twenty miles from distant ranches to do honor to the wedding-anniversary of Greely and his wife.
A room near the ballroom was reserved for babies, and here, early in the evening, lay small bundles in helpless, more or less protesting, rows, their needs attended to between waltzes and polkas by father or mother according to the leisure of the parent and the nature of the need. One infant, whose home discipline was not up to the requirements of this event, refused to accommodate himself to loneliness and so spent the evening being dandled, first by father, then by mother, in a chair immediately beside the big drum. Whether the spot was chosen for the purpose of smothering his cries or enlivening his spirits nobody cared to inquire. Infants in the Millings and Hidden Creek communities, where certified milk and scientific feeding were unknown, were treated rather like family parasites to be attended to only when the irritation they caused became acute. They were not taken very seriously. That they grew up at all was largely due to their being turned out as soon as they could walk into an air that buoyed the entire nervous and circulatory systems almost above the need of any other stimulant.
The dance began when the first guests arrived, which on this occasion was at about six o'clock, and went on till the last guest left, at about ten the next morning. In the meantime the Greelys' hospitality provided every variety of refreshment.
When Sheila reached the Town Hall, crowded between Sylvester and joyous Babe in her turquoise blue on the front seat of the Ford, while the back seat was occupied by Girlie in scarlet and "Momma" in purple velveteen, the dance was well under way. The Hudsons came in upon the tumult of a quadrille. The directions, chanted above the din, were not very exactly heeded; there was as much confusion as there was mirth. Sheila, standing near Girlie's elbow, felt the exhilaration which youth does feel at the impact of explosive noise and motion, the stamping of feet, the shouting, the loud laughter, the music, the bounding, prancing bodies: savagery in a good humor, childhood again, but without the painful intensity of childhood. Sheila wondered just as any débutante in a city ballroom wonders, whether she would have partners, whether she would have "a good time." Color came into her face. She forgot everything except the immediate prospect of flattery and rhythmic motion.
Babe pounced upon a young man who was shouldering his way toward Girlie.
"Say, Jim, meet Miss Arundel! Gee! I've been wanting you two to get acquainted."
Sheila held out her hand to Mr. James Greely, who took it with a surprised and dazzled look.
"Pleased to meet you," he murmured, and the dimple deepened in his ruddy right cheek.
He turned his blushing face to Girlie. "Gee! You look great!" he said.
She was, in fact, very beautiful—a long, firm, round body, youthful and strong, sheathed in a skin of cream and roses, lips that looked as though they had been used for nothing but the tranquil eating of ripe fruit, eyes of unfathomable serenity, and hair almost as soft and creamy as her shoulders and her finger-tips. Her beauty was not marred to Jim Greely's eyes by the fact that she was chewing gum. Amongst animals the only social poise, the only true self-possession and absence of shyness is shown by the cud-chewing cow. She is diverted from fear and soothed from self-consciousness by having her nervous attention distracted. The smoking man has this release, the knitting woman has it. Girlie and Babe had it from the continual labor of their jaws. Every hope and longing and ambition in Girlie's heart centered upon this young man now complimenting her, but as he turned to her, she just stood there and looked up at him. Her jaws kept on moving slightly. There was in her eyes the minimum of human intelligence and the maximum of unconscious animal invitation—a blank, defenseless expression of—"Here I am. Take me." As Jim Greely expressed the look: "Girlie makes everything easy. She don't give a fellow any discomfort like some of these skittish girls do. She's kind of home folks at once."
"We can't get into the quadrille now," said Jim, "but you'll give me the next, won't you, Girlie?"
"Sure, Jim," said the unsmiling, rosy mouth.
Jim moved uneasily on his patent-leather feet. He shot a sidelong glance at Sheila.
"Say, Miss Arundel, may I have the next after … Meet Mr. Gates," he added spasmodically, as the hand of a gigantic friend crushed his elbow.
Sheila looked up a yard or two of youth and accepted Mr. Gates's invitation for "the next."
The head at the top of the tower bent itself down to her with a snakelike motion.
"Us fellows," it said, "have been aiming to give you a good time to-night."
Sheila was relieved to find him within hearing. Her smile dawned enchantingly. It had all the inevitability of some sweet natural event.
"That's very good of—you fellows. I didn't know you knew that there was such a person as—as me in Millings."
"You bet you, we knew. Here goes the waltz. Do you want to Castle it? I worked in a Yellowstone Park Hotel last summer, and I'm wise on dancing."
Sheila found herself stretched ceilingwards. She must hold one arm straight in the air, one elbow as high as she could make it go, and she must dance on her very tip-toes. Like every girl whose life has taken her in and out of Continental hotels, she could dance, and she had the gift of intuitive rhythm and of yielding to her partner's intentions almost before they were muscularly expressed. Mr. Gates felt that he was dancing with moonlight, only the figure of speech is not his own.
Girlie in the arms of Jim spoke to him above her rigid chin. Girlie had the haughty manner of dancing.
"She's not much of a looker, is she, Jim?" But the pain in her heart gave the speech an audible edge.
"She's not much of anything," said Jim, who had not looked like the young man on the magazine cover for several busy years in vain. "She's just a scrap."
But Girlie could not be deceived. Sheila's delicate, crystalline beauty pierced her senses like the frosty beauty of a winter star: her dress of white mist, her slender young arms, her long, slim, romantic throat, the finish and polish of her, every detail done lovingly as if by a master's silver-pointed pencil, her hair so artlessly simple and shining, smooth and rippled under the lights, the strangeness of her face! Girlie told herself again that it was an irregular face, that the chin was not right, that the eyes were not well-opened and lacked color, that the nose was odd, defying classification; she knew, in spite of the rigid ignorance of her ideals, that these things mysteriously spelled enchantment. Sheila was as much more beautiful than anything Millings had ever seen as her white gown was more exquisite than anything Millings had ever worn. It was a work of art, and Sheila was, also, in some strange sense, a work of art, something shaped and fashioned through generations, something tinted and polished and retouched by race, something mellowed and restrained, something bred. Girlie did not know why the white tulle frock, absolutely plain, shamed her elaborate red satin with its exaggerated lines. But she did know. She did not know why Sheila's subtle beauty was greater than her obvious own. But she did know. And so great and bewildering a fear did this knowledge give her that, for an instant, it confused her wits.
"She's going back East soon," she said sharply.
"Is she?" Jim's question was indifferent, but from that instant his attention wandered.
When he took the small, crushable silken partner into his arms for "the next after," a one-step, he was troubled by a sense of hurry, by that desire to make the most of his opportunity that torments the reader of a "best-seller" from the circulating library.
"Say, Miss Arundel," he began, looking down at the smooth, jewel-bright head, "you haven't given Millings a square deal."
Sheila looked at him quizzically.
"You see," went on Jim, "it's winter now."
"Yes, Mr. Greely. It is winter."
"And that's not our best season. When summer comes, it's awfully pretty and it's good fun. We have all sorts of larks—us fellows and the girls. You'd like a motor ride, wouldn't you?"
"Not especially, thank you," said Sheila, who really at times deserved the Western condemnation of "ornery." "I don't like motors. In fact, I hate motors."
Jim swallowed a nervous lump. This girl was not "home folks." She made him feel awkward and uncouth. He tried to remember that he was Mr. James Greely, of the Millings National Bank, and, remembering at the same time something that the girl from Cheyenne had said about his smile, he caught Sheila's eye deliberately and made use of his dimple.
"What do you like?" he asked. "If you tell me what you like, I—I'll see that you get it."
"You're very powerful, aren't you? You sound like a fairy godmother."
"You look like a fairy. That's just what you do look like."
"I like horses much better than motors," said Sheila. "I thought the West would be full of adorable little ponies. I thought you'd ride like wizards, bucking—you know."
"Well, I can ride. But, I guess you've been going to the movies or the
Wild West shows. This town must seem kind of dead after Noo York."
"I hate the movies," said Sheila sweetly.
"Say, it would be easy to get a pony for you as soon as the snow goes. I sold my horse when Dad bought me my Ford."
"Sold him? Sold your own special horse!"
"Well, yes, Miss Arundel. Does that make you think awfully bad of me?"
"Yes. It does. It makes me think awfully 'bad' of you. If I had a horse, I'd—I'd tie him to my bedpost at night and feed him on rose-leaves and tie ribbons in his mane."
Jim laughed, delighted at her childishness. It brought back something of his own assurance.
"I don't think Pap Hudson would quite stand for that, would he? Seems to me as if—"
But here his partner stopped short, turned against his arm, and her face shone with a sudden friendly sweetness of surprise. "There's Dickie!"
She left Jim, she slipped across the floor. Dickie limped toward her. His face was white.
"Dickie! I'm so glad you came. Somehow I didn't expect you to be here.
But you're lame! Then you can't dance. What a shame. After Mr. Greely and
I have finished this, could you sit one out with me?"
"Yes'm," whispered Dickie.
He was not as inexpressive as it might seem however. His face, a rather startling face here in this crowded, boisterous room, a face that seemed to have come in out of the night bringing with it a quality of eternal childhood, of quaint, half-forgotten dreams—his face was very expressive. So much so, that Sheila, embarrassed, went back almost abruptly to Jim. Her smile was left to bewilder Dickie. He began to describe it to himself. And this was the first time a woman had stirred that mysterious trouble in his brain.
"It's not like a smile at all," thought Dickie, the dancing crowd invisible to him; "it's like something—it's—what is it? It's as if the wind blew it into her face and blew it out again. It doesn't come from anywhere, it doesn't seem to be going anywhere, at least not anywhere a fellow knows …" Here he was rudely joggled by a passing elbow and the pain of his ankle brought a sharp "Damn!" out of him. He found a niche to lean in, and he watched Sheila and Jim. He found himself not quite so overwhelmed as usual by admiration of his friend. His mood was even very faintly critical. But, as the dance came to an end, Dickie fell a prey to base anxiety. How would "Poppa" take it if he, Dickie, should be seen sitting out a dance with Miss Arundel? Dickie was profoundly afraid of his father. It was a fear that he had never been allowed the leisure to outgrow. Sylvester with torture of hand and foot and tongue had fostered it. And Dickie's childhood had lingered painfully upon him. He could not outgrow all sorts of feelings that other fellows seemed to shed with their short trousers. He was afraid of his father, physically and morally; his very nerves quivered under the look of the small brown eyes.
Nevertheless, as Sheila thanked Jim for her waltz, her elbow was touched by a cold finger.
"Here I am," said Dickie. He had a demure and startled look. "Let's sit it out in the room between the babies and the dancin'-room—two kinds of a b-a-w-l, ain't it? But I guess we can hear ourselves speak in there. There's a sort of a bench, kind of a hard one…"
Sheila followed and found herself presently in a half-dark place under a row of dangling coats. An iron stove near by glowed with red sides and a round red mouth. It gave a flush to Dickie's pale face. Sheila thought she had never seen such a wistful and untidy lad.
Yet, poor Dickie at the moment appeared to himself rather a dashing and heroic figure. He had certainly shown courage and had done his deed with jauntiness. Besides, he had on his only good suit of dark-blue serge, very thin serge. It was one that he had bought second-hand from Jim, and he was sure, therefore, of its perfection. He thought, too, that he had mastered, by the stern use of a wet brush, a cowlick which usually disgraced the crown of his head. He hadn't. It had long ago risen to its wispish height.
"Jim dances fine, don't he?" Dickie said. "I kind of wish I liked to dance. Seems like athletic stunts don't appeal to me some way."
"Would you call dancing an athletic stunt?" Sheila leaned back against a coat that smelled strongly of hay and tobacco and caught up her knees in her two hands so that the small white slippers pointed daintily, clear of the floor.
Dickie looked at them. It seemed to him suddenly that a giant's hand had laid itself upon his heart and turned it backwards as a pilot turns his wheel to change the course of a ship. The contrary movement made him catch his breath. He wanted to put the two white silken feet against his breast, to button them inside his coat, to keep them in his care.
"Ain't it, though?" he managed to say. "Ain't it an athletic stunt?"
"I've always heard it called an accomplishment."
"God!" said Dickie gently. "I'd 'a' never thought of that. I do like ski-ing, though. Have you tried it, Miss Arundel?"
"No. If I call you Dickie, you might call me Sheila, I think."
Dickie lifted his eyes from the feet. "Sheila," he said.
He was curiously eloquent. Again Sheila felt the confusion that had sent her abruptly back to Jim. She smoothed out the tulle on her knee.
"I think I'd love to ski. Is it awfully hard to learn?"
"No, ma'am. It's just dandy. Especially on a moonlight night, like night
before last. And if you'd 'a' had skis on you wouldn't 'a' broke through.
You go along so quiet and easy, pushing yourself a little with your pole.
There's a kind of a swing to it—"
He stood up and threw his light, thin body gracefully into the skier's pose. "See? You slide on one foot, then on the other. It's as easy as dreaming, and as still."
"It's like a gondola—" suggested Sheila.
Dickie put his head on one side and Sheila explained. She also sang a snatch of a Gondel-lied to show him the motion.
"Yes'm," said Dickie. "It's like that. It kind of has a—has a—"
"Rhythm?"
"I guess that's the word. So's riding. I like to do the things that have that."
"Well, then, you ought to like dancing."
"Yes'm. Maybe I would if it wasn't for havin' to pull a girl round about with me. It kind of takes my mind off the pleasure."
Sheila laughed. Then, "Did you get my note?" she asked.
"Yes'm." Her laughter had embarrassed him, and he had suddenly a hunted look.
"And are you going to be my friend?"
The sliding of feet on a floor none too smooth, the music, the wailing of a baby accompanied Dickie's silence. He was very silent and sat very still, his hands hanging between his knees, his head bent. He stared at Sheila's feet. His face, what she could see of it, was, even beyond the help of firelight, pale.
"Why, Dickie, I believe you're going to say No!"
"Some fellows would say Yes," Dickie answered. "But I sort of promised not to be your friend. Poppa said I'd kind of disgust you. And I figure that I would—"
Sheila hesitated.
"You mean because you—you—?"
"Yes'm."
"Can't you stop?"
He shook his head and gave her a tormented look.
"Oh, Dickie! Of course you can! At your age!"
"Seems like it means more to me than anything else."
"Dickie! Dickie!"
"Yes'm. It kind of takes the awful edge off things."
"What do you mean? I don't understand."
"Things are so sort of—sharp to me. I mean, I don't know if I can tell you. I feel like I had to put something between me and—and things. Oh, damn! I can't make you see—"
"No," said Sheila, distressed.
"It's always that-a-way," Dickie went on. "I mean, everything's kind of—too much. I used to run miles when I was a kid. And sometimes now when I can get out and walk or ski, the feeling goes. But other times—well, ma'am, whiskey sort of takes the edge off and lets something kind of slack down that gets sort of screwed up. Oh, I don't know …"
"Did you ever go to a doctor about it?"
Dickie looked up at her and smiled. It was the sweetest smile—so patient of this misunderstanding of hers. "No, ma'am."
"Then you don't care to be my friend enough to—to try—"
"I wouldn't be a good friend to you," said Dickie. And he spoke now almost sullenly. "Because I wouldn't want you to have any other friends. I hate it to see you with any other fellow."
"How absurd!"
"Maybe it is absurd. I guess it seems awful foolish to you." He moved his cracked patent-leather pump in a sort of pattern on the floor. Again he looked up, this time with a freakish, an almost elfin flicker of his extravagant eyelashes. "There's something I could be real well," he said. "Only, I guess Poppa's got there ahead of me. I could be a dandy guardian to you—Sheila."
Again Sheila laughed. But the ringing of her silver coins was not quite true. There was a false note. She shut her eyes involuntarily. She was remembering that instant an hour or two before when Sylvester's look had held hers to his will. The thought of what she had promised crushed down upon her consciousness with the smothering, sudden weight of its reality. She could not tell Dickie. She could not—though this she did not admit—bear that he should know.
"Very well," she said, in a hard and weary voice. "Be my guardian. That ought to sober any one. I think I shall need as many guardians as possible. And—here comes your father. I have this dance with him."
Dickie got hurriedly to his feet. "Oh, gosh!" said he. He was obviously and vividly a victim of panic. Sheila's small and very expressive face showed a little gleam of amused contempt. "My guardian!" she seemed to mock. To shorten the embarrassment of the moment she stepped quickly into the elder Hudson's arm. He took her hand and began to pump it up and down, keeping time to the music and counting audibly. "One, two, three." To Dickie he gave neither a word nor look.
Sheila lifted her chin so that she could smile at Dickie over Pap's shoulder. It was an indulgent and forgiving smile, but, meeting Dickie's look, it went out.
The boy's face was scarlet, his body rigid, his lips tight. The eyes with which he had overcome her smile were the hard eyes of a man. Sheila's contempt had fallen upon him like a flame. In a few dreadful minutes as he stood there it burnt up a part of his childishness.
Sheila went on, dancing like a mist in Hudson's arms. She knew that she had done something to Dickie. But she did not know what it was that she had done….