The Mulberry Bush

by Helen Topping Miller

  “Gosh—I’ve been an awful fool!” he said aloud, jumping off the bed.

  He dragged Elvira out from under, smacked her down on the table, and shot a sheet of paper into her maw. But when he had written the date, he fiddled with the space key for a nervous interval, then jerked the paper out and crumpled it into a mass. This was something that couldn’t be smoothed out by mail. Something that would have to be settled face to face. If he wrote, that would mean waiting for an answer, and waiting would be misery. And then, what if the answer were all wrong?

  He read Virginia’s letter again, and the mood of leaving things unsaid, the aloofness, the reservations in it were even more apparent. She had written words—but nothing at all of what she was thinking—but that he read between the lines.

  He shoved the typewriter into its traveling case.

  “We’re going back, Elvira,” he said, “right now. And if Bill Foster doesn’t like it, he can go to the devil.”

  He shaved and dressed swiftly and flung his clothes into his bag. Then it occurred to him that he had very little money. He set out to find Dave Martin.

  Dave was sitting at a table in the bar with two Lima newspapermen. Mike walked up abruptly.

  “Lend me all the money you’ve got, Dave. I’m taking the next plane for New York.”

  Dave looked up languidly. “What’s busted? Sit down and have a drink. You know Aguaro and Menendez? Thought you were going down to Antofagasta with us?”

  “Can’t go. Got to go to New York. Give, Dave. I’ve got to get that seven o’clock plane.”

  “Thought you were one of the high-bracket boys? How come you’re mooching off a mere space man? Bill Foster dead, or something?”

  “If I cable Bill for cash, I’ll get a lot of arguments and I can’t wait. I’ve got to go right now. Give down—I’ll write you a personal check. They’ll collect it for you here in four or five days.”

  “Listen, there was one time in Paris—I loaned you some stuff, and did you ever pay me back? The answer is no. Anyway, I’m practically scraping the barrel myself.”

  “You wouldn’t have kept quiet about it till now if I owed you any money. It’s blackmail—but I’ll even pay you that. I’ll put it in the check. How much have you got?”

  Dave turned out his pockets. Two crumpled bills, a handful of silver and one soiled and creased express check for ten dollars.

  “Not enough,” Mike tossed it back on the table. “That’s the way I waste my time, running around with guys who never have any money. Now I’ll have to wait for a check to go through—and in the meantime—”

  “In the meantime, we might as well go to Chile,” Dave said calmly.

  “On what? Pants buttons and beer slugs? I’m not going to Chile.”

  “In Chile,” Dave was unperturbed, “they have lovely, hot, dry nitrate fields. Think of all the new adjectives you could work out. Iodine and water barrels rolling across the desert, dust and the sun on tin roofs. Aguaro has a car. He says it runs.”

  “No sale. I’m going back to New York.”

  “It’s a woman,” Dave told the grinning Latins, “nothing else puts that frenzied glare on his pan. Send her a cable. Or have you got the price of a cable?”

  “You,” said Mike grimly, “can step plumb to hell!”

  “Wrong address. It’s the Atacama Desert—some similarity, I admit, but a good newspaperman always checks all the facts and dodges the squawks later.”

  “To hell,” repeated Mike with vicious emphasis, and strode away.

  Nothing to do but wait for money, and waiting drove him frantic. He had come south with plenty of money, but there had been a poker game almost every night, the Indian guides expected good tips, and sending charges couldn’t be reversed on news cables. Somehow it had all been spent, and his expense check from Bill Foster was late.

  He spent a restless afternoon, making up messages to Virginia, and then tearing them up in disgust. What he wanted to say couldn’t be put into words for a wire, for other people’s eyes to read. And he was uncertain just what he wanted to say.

  The enormity of his neglect pressed upon him more grimly every hour. Three weeks—it couldn’t be three weeks—since he had left her. He looked at the calendar and was stunned to discover that he had been in Lima twenty-six days. Twenty-six days, and she had had one letter. But Ginny would understand. They had had a bargain, they were free. But freedom appeared now, to his anxious thought, to be desperately fraught with danger. If he was free, so was she—so little to hold her—three days of being married—but Ginny was true-blue. She’d be steadfast—she’d be understanding—she loved him. He tried to reassure himself with arguments, but just as a pain ignored is still a pain and a threat, so his inner twinges continued to stab him till he walked the floor, muttering profanely at the delay, calling the desk every hour or so, though he knew very well that even by air it would take a check days to clear.

  His own fault—not bringing express checks, but he had been excited when he left, he had been on his honeymoon—he lay on his back and flung an arm across his eyes and let his thoughts go back to dwell upon everything he remembered about Virginia. Her face—it would not come clear, except for the eyes. Honest eyes, that straightforward look she had, a look that a man could not lie to.

  Black with Ginny would be ink-black and remorseless, and white was white and no evasions would suffice. So, because he was definitely uncomfortable in his mind, he blinded his own eyes to that look of hers, and thought about her hair, so bright and clean and sweet under his lips, thought about her hands and her little, tender laugh.

  “She laughed like my mother,” he remembered, turning torment like a blade in his heart. “Gosh, I love that woman!”

  What was he worrying about, he demanded of himself—and got up to pace the room again. Nothing would be changed. Even if she had seen that rotten piece in the paper—well, he’d fix that up. Laugh it off, as he had been trying to laugh it off to himself ever since he read it. Things like that got printed every day. Nobody was safe.

  As for Harriet—he stopped thinking there. He came to a blank wall that even his own recklessness could not scale or penetrate. A blank wall on which was painted in tall, accusing letters the truth that Mike Paull was a heel and a hound and several other things too low, even, for his trained vocabulary.

  He had bungled things, there was no use denying it. He had to get it straightened out. He had not let himself think about it much. He had gone on drifting above reality, above whatever was past, on the rosy complacency of the present. He was married to a swell girl and that was settled, life was settled, except that somehow it wasn’t.

  Like all blithe and self-centered people, he had taken what came, blandly, as his right; not meaning to be callous, not meaning to be cruel, not even aware that his light-hearted way made for either callousness or cruelty. He had asked little of other people. Let them go their own gay ways, too. No—that wasn’t true. He had asked something of two women—. Oh, Lord, he was in a mess! But it would all smooth out—it would smooth out, if only he could get out of this spiggoty dump!

  How had he ever thought that there was charm in this place? It was a jail! A fancy jail, with ornate elevators and the parrot-rattle of strange languages everywhere he went; the slow movement of dark eyes, the frankly curious stares of brown children and Indians, the service that was a little too obsequious, the food that was good food but not steak broiled under a flame—why the devil couldn’t he stop thinking about things like that?

  It occurred to him with a sense of shock that never before had he spent three days just—thinking. Never before had he stopped to think at all. Life had been too full of things—things he had wanted, things to do, things that delighted him—as Ginny had delighted him, and before that—there it was again, round and round.

  Three days—and then four. No letter from Ginny. But he hadn’t written, eithe
r. He was saving what he had to say until he held her in his arms. And first of all, he would utter a pronunciamento, a bull, a white paper—anyway, a definite and final statement that this secret-marriage stuff was out!

  There was she—and too well he knew how lovely, how desirable she was, how altogether adorable. With that hair like a fine halo, and her fair skin, and her excitingly husky voice—and the way she wore her clothes! He’d seen men turning to glance at her in hard-boiled New York. Dangerous as the devil, letting a girl like that run loose without a wedding ring to warn “Hands Off.” And he hadn’t liked his own situation particularly, either. All these fellows making smart cracks—and not being able to sock anybody without telling them the truth first.

  He’d see that announcements went out the minute he got back—that would stymie all that stuff, and if Teresa Harrison didn’t like it, that was just too bad, too. And then—but beyond that his naive conjecture did not go. The future had always taken care of itself; that it might not continue to do so did not occur to him. That there could be perverse forces, hostile winds, upheavals—that he himself was a perverse force, shattering where he believed himself to be passing lightly—Mike’s volatile temperament could not come to a pause long enough to consider things like that.

  And then, on the fifth day, came Bill Foster’s letter with the expense check. It was enough, not extravagantly enough, but he could get by.

  The plane, winging on jade and amethyst air above jade and amethyst water, seemed fairly to stand still in mid-air. Miami was a white and glaring clutter of stucco and palm trees, vulgarly ornate yachts, blazing coral sand. And once he had written a lot of burbling stuff about that place!

  Then darkness, and wings carrying him north again. North, to where the chill winds would be prowling, and iron winter threatening, where gusts snatched up the sea and slapped it into snarling ridges, where fogs hung low over hidden ports and night was hollow and cold, rather than haunted with warm stars. But he was going north—to Ginny!

  He slept deeply for the first time in days and wakened to the gray fog and rain of a November dawn. The horizon was blurred with the sour smoke of a hundred factories, the taxi driver had a cold, but what of it? This was Newark. An hour or two with Bill Foster tomorrow—tomorrow was Monday—or was it? It must be Monday. He had lost count of the days. He’d file some copy and draw some money from Bill, and then he’d be off—south again! The Susquehanna—and then the Delaware and the Severn slipping underneath, gray ribbons threading the gray earth. Then, through the mist, a tall finger of silver—the monument. Then the Potomac—and up there on the bluffs she would be. One flight—two flights—Mike was insouciant again, his grin expanded.

  “Get my old pipe back, too,” he told himself.

  New York had quickened its pace to the chilling of the weather—a bright, sharp Sunday. Mike flung his bags on the bed in a hotel room, dumped Elvira on a chair—picked up the telephone, and then hung the receiver back again. He wouldn’t call her. Tomorrow night he would just walk in. He dumped Elvira on the desk and spent the afternoon whacking out copy for Bill. Enough copy so that he could loaf for a few days. He’d take Ginny somewhere—let Teresa squawk. She would squawk anyway.

  On Monday he was out early. Ham and eggs for breakfast—no sweetish rolls and no thick, spiced coffee. Ham and eggs and a stack of cakes with syrup running over them. A cigarette and the New York papers. He looked for his own column first, from force of habit. Then a byline caught his eye. Sob story—baby stolen by a heart-hungry woman whose child had died—all the old heartstring stuff. They were still eating it up. They always would. Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry—who had said that? Some wise chap who knew that though wars came and politics veered to right or left, the good old hokum would still be going strong in these cockeyed United States. “By Harriet Hillery.” Well, the kid was doing a swell job. She had always done a swell job. Game as they make them and she had taken some jolts, too—he came up against the wall again. He came up starkly against the sickening realization that Mike Paull was a pretty foul piece of work.

  It made his coffee bitter, it ruined the taste of the cigarette. He drowned the smoke in the cup, tossed a dime on the table, and went out.

  Cold on the street. He had an overcoat somewhere. He’d have to think where. He had an overcoat in Paris —but that was no good. Have to buy a new one maybe—“Taxi!”

  Bill Foster’s office was high up in a proud tower.

  The girl at the outer desk looked up at Mike, open-eyed.

  “But—I just mailed a letter to you, Mr. Paull—to Peru.”

  “Surprise!” said Mike, “I’m here.”

  “Mr. Foster’s busy just now—a lady—”

  “Don’t bother, Garbo—I know my way.”

  He flung the inner door back. Bill Foster stared and frowned.

  “What in the hell?” he began.

  Across the desk, a girl with very black hair and a small red hat perched impudently upon it, raised a pair of perfect eyebrows.

  “Hello, Mike,” said Harriet Hillery.

  Chapter 16

  Mike was a little staggered.

  He had been braced against this meeting, but he was not quite ready. He had meant to choose the time and the place; he had meant to rehearse a little, invent a speech, practise a mood, and there he had been slowed down, knowing Harriet Hillery. Knowing her cool directness, her keenness at seeing through people, probing their pretensions, discounting their emotions. She approached every situation, with a clear-eyed and almost deadly calm, and a courage that made strong men appear weak. And now she stood up and held out her hand, looking levelly and coolly into his eyes.

  “I’m the forgotten woman,” she said, her head up and a little flicker of laughter around her mouth, “but we can still shake hands.”

  “I was going to call you, Harrie—this morning. Hello, Bill.”

  For the first time in his brash young life, Mike was at a loss. He felt, somehow, about two inches high. He felt low enough to walk under a door without opening it. He felt defensive—and crummy.

  “Sit down,” said Bill Foster, “we were just talking about you.”

  “My ears were singeing my hat. Couldn’t think what it was—I knew it wasn’t the climate.”

  “Cut the comedy—and you might explain what you’re doing here.” Bill did not warm up to Mike’s accustomed manner. “No copy for four days—and you walk in.”

  “Got the copy here,” Mike slapped his pocket but he did not sit down. He was feeling strange and troubled, and he wanted to meet it standing up. “And I had to come home, Bill—personal reasons.”

  “We were talking about your personal reasons.” Bill put his hands together severely, and essayed a magisterial look. He could do it—behind a desk that hid his round, jovial stomach. “Sit down and deliver. What about this red-headed girl?”

  “She’s my wife,” Mike jerked his mouth into a slit, “and we won’t discuss her.”

  Harriet Hillery moved her hands a little in her lap, but not even an eyelid flickered.

  Bill Foster scowled. “All right, we won’t discuss her. We’ll discuss you—not the way you treat your friends—that’s your business. But I suppose you know that your stuff has been rotten lately—and that’s my business. We’ve had kicks from half a dozen papers. If getting married makes a lousy writer out of you, that’s certainly my business!”

  Mike sat down. He had to sit down. “You sent me to write about South America, and I wrote about it. I thought my stuff was pretty good.”

  “You wrote about moonlight and mountains and old ruins and dancing Indians,” growled Bill.

  Mike’s dazed and unhappy look moved over Harriet, briefly. The look said, “Does she have to hear this?” but Bill Foster was adamant.

  “I sent you down there to get angles on political affairs,” he said, “not on moonlight—we’ve got moonlight up h
ere, we’ve even got it in the Bronx.”

  “You can’t touch that political situation,” Mike said hotly. “They’re cagey—and even if you got anything, the State Department would kill it.”

  “Since when did the State Department ever put a halter on you? I seem to remember stuff that came out of Prague—and Barcelona.”

  “Bill, Dave Martin’s down there. Dave can’t touch it either. He’s fooling around with nitrate fields and suspected air bases.”

  “Even a suspected air base beats a lot of goat-drivers sleeping in the sun. Three times you used those goats. One time would have been bad enough—but to cram goats into a syndicate column three times—I suppose this is some more of the same?” Bill turned over the copy Mike had flung on the desk.

  “More of the same,” said Mike bitterly.

  “Don’t want it.” Bill tossed the yellow sheets into the wastebasket.

  “I want it.” Mike retrieved the copy angrily. “I’m going to put that stuff into a book.”

  Bill pushed his lower lip up under his thick nose.

  “He’s going to write a book! In a world crawling with travel books, he’s going to write another one—all full of dancing Indians! Listen, bridegroom, your personal affairs may be none of my business—and the things your best friends are saying about you may not concern me, either—but this column is my business. And I want four thousand words from you by noon tomorrow and it had better be good. And no goats! That’s all.” Bill pushed the buzzer, and the girl came in from the outer room with a notebook. “Goodbye, Harriet,” Bill said. “Come up at ten tomorrow and bring that stuff with you.”

  Harriet buttoned her coat. “Take me to lunch, Mike,” she said, exactly as if nothing had happened.

  “All right,” Mike was slightly punch-drunk, and the wrathy things he wanted to say were still befogged in his bewildered brain. He followed Harriet out. If Bill Foster thought he could talk that way—to Michael Paull! Michael Paull, whose picture got into the slicks, whose name was known in half the countries of the world—. “Who the hell does that guy think he is?” he demanded furiously of Harriet, in the hall.