Chapter 4
Teresa Harrison lay on a fracture bed, a bar over her chest, on which she could raise herself a little, her face looking old and bleak under disordered hair, a white hospital gown buttoned up to her chin.
“Hello,” she greeted Virginia, “time you got back! Look at me—plastered up like something ready for the Smithsonian—and a million things to do.”
“What in the world happened?” Virginia bent to kiss the strained, colorless face. “I came in late last night and found Mary’s message. I got here as soon as they would let me in.”
“That foul doctor who put bifocal glasses on me is to blame. I’m, not old enough for glasses and I told him so. My headaches come from something else entirely. But he insisted on my wearing the things out of his office, and of course the first pair of steps I went down, I missed my footing. Broke an ankle and a bone in my knee. Lord only knows how long I’ll be here—and all the hotel contracts not closed yet for next summer’s business.”
“You want me to write the letters? I’m so sorry about this—are you in any pain?”
“Plenty of pain—and my disposition is hellish. No—I don’t want you to write letters. You can’t get anywhere writing letters. I found that out long ago. You have to talk to people, see when they’re bluffing and call their bluffs—and do a little bluffing on your own. There’s psychology in it. And I don’t know whether you’ve got it or not. But you’re the only one I can send. You’ll have to leave for Colorado tonight—and you’d better fly because this is the end of the season up there, and all the places will be closing up. I planned to leave Monday, and then this happened. Go to the office and get the Colorado file, and bring it here this afternoon. Get your reservation on the night plane and have Mary get the money ready for you. I gave her a power of attorney—I had to—nobody else here.”
“I hope I can handle it—I’ve never done anything exactly like that—only the old ladies who run tours—and the schoolteachers.”
“That was selling. But when you talk to hotels and sightseeing bus companies and guides, you’re buying—they have something to sell. We’re bringing them customers and we can be hard-boiled as the devil. It all depends now on how hard-boiled you can be. I’d have said last week that you hadn’t a trick or a wile—but now I’m not so sure about you.”
Teresa’s eyes had a resentful glare, and Virginia felt her own skin prickling uncomfortably.
“I don’t understand, Teresa,” she began.
“I think you understand. I’d have sworn that you’d be honest with me—but it seems I was deceived. When I had this fall, I had Mary call up your family in Tennessee. They hadn’t seen you since last Christmas and they had no idea where you were. I suppose it’s that heel of a Mike Paull? Somehow I didn’t expect that sort of thing from you, Virginia. Not that it makes any difference—as far as business is concerned. I’m a modern woman, I hope—but not too modern to have illusions yet, to look for fineness in a few people—”
“Teresa,” said Virginia quickly, knowing that this would have to be set right at once, “I was married to Michael Paull in New York—on Saturday. We planned not to tell anyone till Mike comes back from South America—so I didn’t lie to you. It was a family matter, that took me away—marrying a husband is still a family matter, isn’t it? But please don’t tell anyone about it—not till we’re ready to announce it.”
Teresa looked blank and her lips drew straight and dry. Then she laughed, her brittle, dismissing laugh.
“And I thought you were being cleverly wicked! And instead, you were merely being a fatuous, adolescent idiot! Mike Paull! Why didn’t you marry the wind? It does stay in one place at least part of the time!”
“Mike is dear and fine—and we’re going to be happy,” Virginia said firmly, “And I’ll be very grateful if you won’t be cynical about my husband, Teresa.”
“Good heavens! It’s your privilege to tangle up your life in any absurd way you please—just so long as it doesn’t interfere with my business. And I won’t talk about it—not even to Mary. But you can’t keep a thing like that quiet, you know—it always leaks out somehow—and what’s the use of secrecy, anyway? If you’re married, you’re married. Get on back to the office now, and show up here promptly after lunch. Pack some fairly warm clothes—Colorado weather is tricky in October.”
Virginia had never flown before, and a cold, nervous clutch at her stomach did not relax when the plane lifted and she was high in the silent sky, with only darkness outside the windows and an occasional drifting wraith of cloud. So she sat stiffly, gripping the heavy briefcase Teresa had consigned to her, trying to remember all that she had been instructed to do.
Names first. Always call a man by his name. She had to memorize those. And the figures for last season.
“We sent you ninety people this year, Mr. Brown, as you may remember—”
Again and again she went over it all mechanically, trying not to listen to the motors, not to wait rigidly for something grim to happen. She got into her berth, making a show of not being nervous, a little embarrassed by the stewardess’ anxious attentions. She hung up her skirt and blouse and took off her shoes, then crouched, wrapped in a robe, holding her breath when the plane descended, relaxing in brief relief when it was still, catching her breath and holding on when it rose again.
She was not airsick, that was something to be thankful for. And somewhere, far above the earth, too, was Mike. Flying unafraid, asleep probably, with these same stars shedding pale radiance on silver wings, with this same south wind moving past his window before it came to trail thin scarfs and sashes of pale mist past the dark glass so close to her shoulder.
“The two of us—high above the world—roaring away from each other as fast as we can,” she thought.
Life was strange. She had a feeling that for her it would always be strange. That the little house with the sink-strainer and the lawnmower and the mortgage would always be a dream house—and then she remembered that she had forgotten to put Mike’s money in the bank and clutched up her purse in a panic, rummaging frantically until she felt the flat packet with the rubber bands again.
And then it was somehow morning, and the plane was going down somewhere in the Middle West, and the passengers began bustling their luggage together, when the stewardess came with in apologetic face.
“I’m sorry—this is an emergency-landing field. We’re having a little engine trouble, and the pilots thought it best to land. But there will be only a short delay. We’ll be picked up by another plane almost immediately.”
A very tall and very brown man with white sunlines around his eyes turned around and smiled at Virginia. He must have come aboard in the night, for she was sure she had not seen him before. She would not have forgotten that interesting, challenging face.
“We’re lucky, at that,” he said, “landing right side up and nobody hurt. Like to see the St. Louis paper?” he asked as the plane jolted to a gentle landing. “We’ll probably have a wait here—and not a hot-dog stand in sight.”
“Thank you.” Virginia took the paper and turned at once to Mike’s column. But it was one he had written in New York, about immigrant women at Ellis Island, and she had read it before, fresh from the snapping teeth of Elvira.
But next to it was the column of a gossip-snooper whom Mike detested, and she ran her eyes rapidly over that. A squib halfway down caught her eyes, and she sat rigidly, cold all over, reading it:
The churchyard sparrows are tattling that a certain famous columnist got himself merged of a Saturday to a red-headed gal from the ol’ South. What about that black-haired newspaper gal in New York? She has a ring. Tch! Tch!
Chapter 5
She read the item three times through, a queer tightening at her temples, her hands dry and cold and unsteady.
It couldn’t be—it was someone else—but it had to be, it was so obvious. Someone had recognize
d Mike—the minister? No, she was certain that to that kind old man she had been only one more vaguely identified bride, Mike one more indefinite, nervous groom. He had had to ask them their names twice.
“But I,” she thought, trying to make things come clear and fall into order in the stunned confusion of her mind, “am certainly red-headed and from the South.”
But who was the newspaper girl who had black hair and a ring? Mike had never talked about his past—she realized that Mike had told her almost nothing. Of his work, of the places he had seen and the dangers he had faced—a little of that passed over lightly. But of Michael Paull, of his personal life, practically nothing at all. Even the little she had learned about his father, his family, had been accidentally disclosed.
“Why,” she was thinking in consternation, “I don’t know Mike at all! I didn’t ask him—perhaps he thought I wasn’t interested. But he didn’t ask me either. He doesn’t know anything about my family. He wouldn’t know my father’s name or where to send a message if I died—and neither would I, if something happened to him.”
It was as if she and Mike had begun living when first they met, wiping all the past away, forgetting it entirely. And that was right, that was the way for a marriage to begin. But now here was Mike’s past leering horridly from black type, refusing to be forgotten.
It doesn’t matter—it’s all ended—it doesn’t matter—if it had been important, Mike would have told me about it. . . . She struggled with her inner, prickly unease, trying to convince herself that it did not matter, really. Trying to put away thoughts of Mike’s casual disregard of other people, of other claims, his bland and blithe dismissal of whatever did not interest him at the moment.
Every demanding and tiresome thing was to Mike another mulberry bush. “Here we go—round and round—and I never did like mulberries!”
“If, he did love her”—she let torment clutch at her heart poignantly for a little—“but—oh, he didn’t—he couldn’t—he couldn’t change, he couldn’t love me—and remember her!”
But what if this black-haired girl had loved Mike—loved him as she herself loved him now? A quick pity for this forsaken girl moved her briefly. Agony—to have loved Mike, to love him still perhaps—and then see him go flying away, indifferent, forgetting, ignoring. But Mike was too gentle, too tender, too fine. Mike wouldn’t hurt a woman—or, could he?
Teresa’s bitter words came back, though Virginia tried to close the ears of her mind against them.
“I’ve known that young lunatic longer than you have. He wants what he wants—for himself. He never thinks of anyone but Mike Paull.”
It wasn’t true. Teresa was a cynical and shrewish woman about love, having put it out of her life long ago, being too ruthless in her pursuit of success to stop to consider it. Teresa believed in no men at all any more, and in very few women. She had no means of understanding Mike. If Mike was the light and reckless wind, Teresa was frowning stone, chilly and good only for grinding and crushing, or for building barrier walls. Nothing Teresa could do or say was going to influence her, Virginia, for an instant.
“This is silly,” she brought herself up sternly, “Teresa said I was adolescent. I must be, to let myself get jittery over a silly piece in the paper about something long past and of no consequence at all.”
She made herself smile and recover her poise as she handed back the paper. The stewardess was passing hot cups of coffee and hot toast, soaked with melted butter.
“We’ll be on our way shortly, now,” she said.
“How would you like to get out and stretch your legs?” asked the brown man, when they had finished the coffee. “It was raining when we landed but it seems to have stopped now.”
“Oh, was it raining? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Upset you a little—this landing,” he remarked. “I noticed that you were slightly agitated. It might have been pretty nasty if we had been up fifteen thousand feet when that motor went bad. Might not have been funny at all. On your way west?”
“Denver. And other places. I’m with a travel bureau,” she said.
“I’m Bruce Gamble—” he held out his hand, showed his very nice teeth in a quick, friendly smile. “I’m going to Denver, too. No glamour about my job, however, I sell dynamite.”
“Good gracious—I hope you don’t carry samples?”
“No. I’m with the Du Ponts. We’re manufacturing some new explosives; especially efficient in mining. Just now there’s a little flare-up in the gold-mining business up here in the Rockies, so I’m going up to oversee some experiments and incidentally try to drum up some business.” He helped her down the steps, and she saw how isolated their situation was. A small emergency field, one tiny, white building with a red roof, red markers around the field, a tall, spindly tower of steel with lights strung upon it, and nothing else at all.
The silver plane looked small and lonely in the midst of so much space, and on either side, flat plains swept off toward the horizon. The pilot and co-pilot leaned against a wing, smoking cigarettes with the impatient chagrin of young men whose pride is laid low. They explained the breakdown of a pump to Bruce Gamble, rather brusquely at first, then expanding and growing technical when they saw that he understood their language.
“Fly, do you?”
“Yes, I fly,” he answered, “I have my license.”
They talked planes and engines then, and Virginia listened politely, remembering to keep her purse tight under her elbow. “All my worldly goods,” Mike had said. She looked far into the southward sky. “You couldn’t be cruel and fickle, Mike,” her heart was saying, “you couldn’t.”
“Want to walk a little way?” Bruce Gamble invited, “These boys say it will be an hour, perhaps, before the relief plane gets here. They had to bring it all the way from Chicago.”
The prairie sod was damp and springy with frost, and the wind was fresh and cool. The other passengers, five of them, all men, were huddled in a group, backs to the wind, collars turned up, telling yarns and laughing. The stewardess sat on the step of the plane, clasping her neat, uniformed knees with her arms, her smart little cap tilted over one eye. She looked drowsy and a little pale, and Virginia remembered that the girl had not slept all night; she had heard her light feet going up and down many times in the night. Virginia felt a bit light-headed herself from lack of sleep. She was grateful for the fresh, cold breath of the wind on her face and eyelids.
Bruce Gamble talked well. “They’re reopening some very famous old diggings up there in the hills,” he said. “Mines that were abandoned in the eighties are being extended by new processes and new machinery. In a few spots they’re taking fortunes out of the gulches—not the millions they dug there fifty years ago, when men went wild, but enough to be profitable. I’d like a chance to show you some of it. Will you be up here long?”
“No longer than necessary to close my contracts. I have seven men to see—all rather widely scattered, from the map, and of course, I know very little about the country and the local transportation.”
“Perhaps, if you are making your headquarters in Denver, I’ll see you again?”
“Perhaps,” she was politely indefinite. “I’m Virginia Warfield—of the Harrison Bureau.”
Presently a silver mote appeared against the sky, and then the other plane was down, and half a dozen mechanics with tool kits scrambled out of it.
The baggage and mail were transferred swiftly, and this time Virginia did not wince and clutch at the arms of her seat when the plane lifted and roared into the sky.
“I’ll be a flyer yet, Mike,” she said, to the passing clouds. “And then you won’t be able to escape from me.”
She had been in her room only an hour when her telephone rang.
“Miss Warfield? This is Bruce Gamble. Would you come down about seven and have dinner with a lonesome traveling salesman?”
She couldn�
��t say, “Oh, I’m sorry—but you see I’m a married woman. My husband might not approve.” That would be absurd anyway, Mike would be the first to laugh at such an idea. So she said, “I think that would be very nice. I’ll come on one condition—that my dinner goes on my expense account.”
He did not argue, and she liked his good taste in forbearing.
“At seven then? In the Casanova Room, downstairs.”
She had letters to write, so she spent the next hour at the desk, but only one letter was finished—a long letter to Mike. She told him about flying.
“I suppose some god on a faraway planet looked down and saw two specks floating above this earth, and they were you and me. And now I’m safely down again, and I hope you’ve landed, too.” She said nothing about Bruce Gamble. After all, she did not know Mike’s reactions very well—and things looked so different, so much less casual, set down in black and white. And undoubtedly, there would be lovely ladies in Lima, or Caracas, or other places, whom Mike would have to be gallant to—though the impression lingered in her mind that below the Tropic of Cancer, nice ladies did not go out casually to dine with men. They lived, precious and protected, behind their lattices—or was that all ended, too, along with so many other taboos?
She put on the tweed suit with the soft, gray fur that Mike had insisted on buying for her in New York. She fastened at the throat of her blouse the clip Mike had tossed into her lap that last morning.
“Present for a pretty lady.”
It was an expensive clip with four small diamonds set in an original arrangement of enameled grapes. Securing it firmly, she turned her mind as firmly away from a vagrant thought of that girl in New York who had a ring. A girl with pride, she decided, would have sent a ring back when an affair ended. She refused to let herself consider the fact that for the girl, it might not have been ended—not till the abrupt shock came of learning that Mike had married someone else.
The Mulberry Bush Page 4