The Mulberry Bush

by Helen Topping Miller

  “If she clung, it was her own fault!”

  There might be no truth in it anyway; it might be merely the malicious invention of a man whom Mike hated. At any rate, the clip was lovely, and the cool feel of it against her skin was like a caress from Mike. And the little gray hat that completed the outfit looked smart and sophisticated on her bright hair. Bruce Gamble rose from a sofa in the lobby to meet her, admiration evident in his eyes.

  Without his hat he looked a little older than she had thought him to be, the strong wave of his hair was definitely graying, and at the temples it was white against the dark tan of his skin. “This is fine,” he said, “I was dreading this long evening. Tomorrow I’ll be at work, and the hours move along a little faster when you’re working.” He pulled out her chair and arranged her fur, sat down opposite, and smiled at her.

  “Nice of you to invite me down,” she said. “Otherwise I’d have had an omelet on a tray, and written a few letters—”

  “And then you’d have gone to bed at nine o’clock with a magazine and wondered how in a city of half a million people, one room could be crowded so full of loneliness.”

  “You’ve been traveling a long time, haven’t you? I’m very new at it. I wouldn’t be here at all, except that my lady employer broke some bones, and very frankly I’m scared to death.”

  “I don’t go around with an order book—and a collection of barroom stories,” he said. “I’m a sort of liaison man between the laboratories and the customers. Right now, I’m anxious to see these demonstrations of our explosive. It’s supposed to eliminate dust and gas and several other dangerous features of other mining explosives. I’m especially interested in this formula because I helped work it out.”

  “I,” Virginia said, “sell nice old ladies the idea that their lives will be incomplete until they’ve seen the sun set behind Pelée. And I convince retired businessmen in Nebraska that they should take their wives to Lake Louise or Bermuda. I collect tired schoolteachers and persuade them that a month in a log lodge at St. Vran will bring romance and glamour into their frustrated lives. And then I sell the hotels and camps the argument that they can take these people at a certain rate, so that our bureau can show a margin of profit. Tomorrow, I’m seeing a hotel-keeper near Pike’s Peak and a transportation company, and the next day a dude-ranch owner near the Wyoming border. And the day after that—”

  “The day after that is Sunday. Do you also beard tavern-keepers in their lairs on Sunday?”

  “I have a very special one saved for Sunday. He keeps tavern in an old mining town that was once very rich and arrogant and wild. Now it’s historic only—but we’re sending some dilettante university people up there in July.”

  “I know the place, I think.” He named it and she nodded. “How about driving up with me on Sunday? The place is historic but it isn’t entirely a ghost town any more. There’s quite a lot of activity—not so much excitement as when they paved the street with silver bricks for Ulysses Grant’s carriage to roll over, but it isn’t a place of memories entirely, now.”

  “Too bad. Some of our very best literature will have to be rewritten. And it was very effective material too—the lure of the dramatic past. Did you do that, with your dynamite?”

  “The man who invented a way to pump water up eight thousand feet did most of it. Most of those high mining projects failed for lack of water, originally. Then the water came, and good roads, and some of them are slowly coming back again. Not to their roaring pasts—but to a comfortable present.”

  “How Mike would love all this!” Virginia was thinking. And she made up another letter to him in her mind, a letter that was not written for days, because she had so much to do. But at last Sunday came.

  Chapter 6

  She had gone up Pike’s Peak, and on the way had missed most of the view because she had to count the number of seats in the cog-wheel cars and the buses. She had been driven up a dizzy ascent to a quiet brow where a tower and a carillon and bronze tablets kept alive the memory of Will Rogers, and she had had little chance to explore, because she had had to argue endlessly with the proprietor of a lunch place about box lunches for next summer. She had sat in the offices of hotel managers and listened, though Teresa had cautioned her against that.

  “Don’t let them get started on their sales talk. They’ll recite whole pages from their folders, and then, when you’re completely numb and past resisting, they’ll end up by sticking another dollar on the rate.”

  On the whole she had done very well, as well as Teresa had done the previous year. She had been weary at night, glad to lie in a hot tub, fragrant with pine salts, glad to wrap herself in a silk negligée and stretch out on the bed with a book, after the interminable reports to Washington had been dropped down the mail chute. And twice at night she had been too tired to write a letter to Mike.

  There had been no letters from him, of course. She had left in such haste that she had had no chance to arrange for the forwarding of her personal mail. She mailed Mike’s letters in care of Bill Foster and realized that they might not reach Mike for days, perhaps not for weeks. They might even follow him about and never catch up with him at all. Mike had told her how he might go—pack-train, burro, on foot.

  “How will he look when I see him again?”

  Would there be a self-conscious stiffness, a strangeness? Would they meet awkwardly, struggling to recapture old ground again, rapture past, dreams shared, that gossamer fabric of love they had woven together? Or would the same radiance clothe them again—the same ecstasy sing in their hearts, the same eager gladness spring into their eyes?

  “We had so little time,” she thought anxiously. “So little time for love to grow!”

  Like planting a fragile and lovely flower and then rushing away, trusting to time and the weather to water the delicate roots.

  “It mustn’t die,” she told her pillow in a brief surge of midnight panic. “It mustn’t die!”

  Daylight brought calm and a quiet feeling of amusement for her fears. How could love die—for people who loved as she loved Mike? How Mike would laugh if ever she confessed to him the silly fears she had conjured out of thin air.

  “Ginny, you nutty—Ginny, you silly angel!”

  And then, though she fought it down furiously, would come again that wincing uncertainty, returning as a bitter taste returns to the tongue, as pain returns in the morning. That black-haired girl—had she, too, thought that love lived forever?

  “Stop it, you idiot!” she raged at her mirror. And deliberately and with frigid calm, dressed herself up smartly to go out and beard the lions that Teresa had ordered bearded and signed on the various dotted lines.

  She was glad when Sunday came, and Bruce Gamble drove up to the door of the hotel in a rented car.

  “I hope you’re not a nervous passenger,” he said, as he helped her in. “This road we’re driving today is a trifle steep and crooked.”

  “I went up Pike’s Peak and didn’t grab a thing. If the brakes hold, I promise not to squeal a squeal.”

  “I looked into that. They’ve widened the road, too, since the stagecoaches used to come galloping down with the lady passengers uttering delicate shrieks and fainting at the foot of the mountain.”

  “I couldn’t faint if I tried, and I’m not sure I could shriek—I never have, that I remember.”

  A late, silvery, October glow was in the air, the sun, wine-clear and golden, laid over the peaks, some of them already beginning to show pale caps of snow, a thin bluish-chromium haze.

  “This,” she said, as they began the sharp ascent from the flat floor of the valley, “must have been the way it looked when it was first made, all clean and new.”

  “The way the pioneers saw it when they rode in here, dusty and weary, on footsore horses. They followed the gulches and the streams on the hunt for gold and they were a tough and salty lot. But I’ve often wondered
how their women felt when they saw these remote and savage peaks against the sky. To them, they must have looked pretty grim.”

  “Because,” said Virginia, “women are always looking around for some quiet place where a little house could be tucked away. When they came out here in covered wagons, they brought along their flower seeds, and peony roots, and rose cuttings. And they looked all around this rocky wilderness and wondered how anything could be persuaded to grow here.”

  “But after their men had taken a few millions in gold out of these hills, they stopped mourning about their posy beds,” Gamble said. “They built a college and the finest opera-house east of Philadelphia, with a hundred gaslights in the chandelier to shine down on the ladies in their jewels, and their chignons and bustles. And they gave splendid balls in the hotel, which was a magnificent place for those days.”

  The road was narrow and the curves sharp, the view downward a little terrifying, but Virginia kept her eyes on the distant peaks and would not let herself think of those giddy slopes below. Cars passed, tearing along recklessly, the drivers undisturbed by the hairpin turns.

  “They live here,” Gamble said. “They’re annoyed at us for a couple of nervous tourists. Now, we’re up—and how do you like that world down there?”

  “There’s too much of it,” she said, in a small, hushed voice. So many canons and ragged peaks, so much rugged land going on and on. And beyond was the flatness of the plains, the deltas of the rivers, the marshes and shores, and then the endless miles of ocean! Between herself and Mike. “It seems—too big and almost cruel, doesn’t it?” she said. “Such tremendous, indifferent, unfeeling distances between people.”

  “Left some one behind, did you?” He smiled at her.

  “Oh, yes—numbers of people. I suppose you did too?”

  “Only my little girl, Meredith. She’s eight now. We lost her mother when she was three years old.” He handled the wheel with his left hand deftly, took a leather folder from an inside pocket. “There she is—not a pretty kid, but smart as they make ’em.”

  Virginia looked at the Kodak picture of an earnest, blonde child in white shorts and jersey, who clutched a bewildered puppy in stout, short arms.

  “She’s sweet. Do you see her often?”

  “Once a month, or so. My sister takes care of her. In Baltimore. She’s learning to ride now. Here’s her last letter.” He brought out a penciled envelope from his coat pocket. “Pretty fair writing for a third-grader, I think.”

  “You mean—I’m to read it?”

  “Sure—go ahead and read it.”

  Virginia read:

  Dear daddy, Thank you for the Dopey. Now I have all the darfs. I washed Grumpy and his paint came off. Why I washed him was Skippy chewed him and berried him. I fell down on my skats and skinned my knee. I rode some more Satterday. The horse was name Flash and he was kind of bony. Don’t fall off a mountain.

  Your little girl,

  Merry.

  She liked Bruce Gamble even better, when she had read that naive letter. She liked the tender way he folded it and put it away.

  “I save ’em all,” he said.

  Virginia ached to tell him about Mike. Why had they made this absurd compact of secrecy? It had seemed wise at the time, but now that Teresa knew, what did it matter? If she could talk to someone, her loneliness would be eased a little. But so long as she held Mike to the arrangement, she felt duty-bound to keep silent herself, though now the whole thing seemed a little silly, especially since that nasty little item in the gossip column. She wondered if Mike would see that. Not likely, unless Bill Foster clipped it and mailed it to him.

  She had had an idea of sending it to him herself, with something light and bantering written on it. “Two timer!” or “Villainy Exposed”—something to show him how lightly she was taking it, how inconsequential it all was.

  If Bill sent it to Mike, would he read it and wonder if she had seen it? Would he mention it in his letters—explain if there were anything to explain? She could never, she knew, speak of it herself except in a gay mood of simulated amusement. She would not be a jealous wife. She wondered if Mike would be a jealous husband. Would he be hurt and sulky if he knew that she was here today, walking the steep streets of this old town—streets full of the ghosts of men in boots and big hats, with pistols on their hips and grim lines around their mouths, ghosts of women who looked from the windows of the sagging wooden buildings, bold, painted women—timid, gentle women? Would Mike be stung with the same uneasy doubts that made her heart flinch whenever she let her thoughts wander?

  She looked at Bruce Gamble’s graying temples and considered the absurdity of that. And then he pulled out her chair in the dining room of the old hotel and leaned across a small table, with a look of eager intimacy in his eyes, and she had a twinge of uncertainty, slaying it quickly by telling herself that Bruce Gamble was only being gallant. He would do the same for any lonely woman.

  He went off on business of his own, while she interviewed the men she had come to see and closed her contracts, putting them down to be signed on a table that had once held the silk hat and cane of a president. Then, when Gamble returned, they explored together the once splendid theater, the bar where in the rich, roisterous seventies, gold dust had been weighed on delicate scales in exchange for potent drafts from thick old bottles. At that bar, fur-collared coats and tall hats had jostled buckskins and flannel shirts, men had fought there, men had died, caught up in the violent frenzy of the fever for gold. Then the short October day began to wane, and they drove down the steep, twisting road again, a little silent, a bit oppressed by the past.

  It was as if those lost adventurers went with them, down the trail. Men crouched on the top of stagecoaches with rifles across their knees, women in white hose and strapped shoes, gold earrings in their ears. Men with brown beards and quick angry eyes, men who blustered, and men who spoke slowly and with deadly intent. Hussies, proud, brave women, frightened women—Mike could have put it all into words. But to Virginia it was only an odd, nostalgic pain, and a small cold breath of fear. Life was such a passing thing, life was so soon over!

  And then they were down and speeding along the wide highway, with the autumn day dying in a purple-and-russet haze upon the hills, and traffic roaring by going home. Suddenly Bruce Gamble slowed the car, laid his hand over hers.

  “This has been a happy day for me,” he said. “I knew—when I first saw you that you were a person I could talk to—about the things I like—that old town up there, and Merry—things like that.”

  Now was the time to speak, to end this stupid no sense. Now was the time to say casually, “My husband is in South America. He’s a writer—I wish he could have seen all this.” But she did not say it.

  She said, instead, a trifle awkwardly, drawing he hand away, “You were generous to take pity on working woman. I’d have gone up there in a taxi, probably, and been scared to death.”

  “What I want,” he went on, ignoring her words, “is to see you again. You’re going back to Washington, aren’t you? Baltimore isn’t far. I have to shove off tomorrow—make the Western Slope and Utah, perhaps Nevada. I may not get back to the East again for a month—but when I do—”

  Virginia managed a light laugh. “I’m at the Harrison Travel Bureau. Call me up when you’re in town, and I’ll sell you a nice trip through the Panama Canal, or to the Virgin Islands, with Trinidad thrown in. Or would you prefer Alaska?”

  “Postman’s holiday? When I come home I don’t want more places to go. I want my old corduroy pants and the garden hose to squirt around. I want to put my feet up, and let the pup nuzzle my hand, and have plenty of tobacco for my pipe. I want a fire and hot coffee and no ice water brought in, no telegrams shoved under the door, no telephones jangling. Does that sound pretty deadly?”

  The lawnmower—and the mortgage! A soundproof room for Elvira.

&n
bsp; “It sounds awfully restful. To me, home is a couple of rooms up two flights, with a gas-plate to cook on and a bed that turns into a couch in the daytime. And that does sound deadly.”

  “Home never sounds deadly. Not when you’re tired of being always far away.” The words had a faintly wistful sound.

  A lonely man, a red-headed girl—just the old formula! But something intuitive, something that struck deep, told her that this was no casual meeting to him, that Bruce Gamble would not take some other girl to see the sights of Utah or Nevada.

  She told him goodbye next morning, and three days after, her job finished, went back to Washington by train. She saw Teresa first and found her fuming under her fracture bar, outraged because the doctor would not let her smoke.

  “I didn’t think you had it in you,” Teresa was grudgingly commendatory when she looked over the contracts. “I’ll make a businesswoman of you yet, if that itchfoot you married will let me alone. Why on earth you wanted to throw a good mind away—like some sappy girl out of finishing school—”

  It was dark when Virginia alighted from the Georgetown bus—dark and cold, with a briny mist of rain) falling.

  She ran up the two flights of stairs, leaving her impeding bags on the first landing, groping for her key feverishly.

  Letters—they lay in a heap where they had fallen through the slot in the door. She snatched them up eagerly, thumbed through them swiftly, her fingers turning slowly colder, her heart sinking with incredulous despair.

  Bills and circulars, her stepmother’s spidery handwriting on a blue envelope—but no letter from Mike!

  Chapter 7