Other Main-Travelled Roads Part 40

A sort of convulsion pa.s.sed over her face, her little hands clinched, and the tears started into her eyes. Her voice was very quiet.

"You think I lie, then?"

"I think you are mistaken, just as other jealous women have--"

"You think I'm jealous, do you?"

"You act like a jeal--"

"Jealous of that gray-haired old wretch? No, sir! I--I--" She struggled to express herself. "I liked him, and I hated to lose all my faith in men. I thought he was good and honest when he prayed--Oh, I've seen him pray in church, the old hypocrite!" Her fury returned at the recollection.

Her companion's face grew grave. The smile went out of his eyes, leaving them dark and sorrowful.

"I understand you now," he said, at last. She turned to look at him.

"My practice in the divorce business out here has almost destroyed my faith in women. If it weren't for my wife and sister--"

She broke in eagerly: "Now I _know_ you know what I mean. Sometimes I think men are--devils!" She thrust this word forth, and her little face grew dark and strained. "But the judge kept me from thinking--I never loved my father; he didn't care for me; all he wanted to do was to make ten thousand barrels of beer a year and sell it; and the judge seemed like a father to me till _she_ came and destroyed my faith in him."

"But--well, let Mrs. S. go. There are lots of good men and pure women in the world. It's dangerous to think there aren't--especially for a handsome young woman like you. You can't afford to keep in that kind of a mood long."

She looked at him curiously. "That's what I like about you," she said, soberly. "You talk to me as if I had some sense--as if I were a human being. If you were to flatter me, now, and make love to me, I never would believe in any man again."

He smiled again in his frank, good way, and drew a picture from his pocket. It was a picture of a woman bending down over a laughing, naked child, sprawling frogwise in her lap. The woman's face was broad and intellectual and handsome. The look of splendid maternity was in her eyes. They both looked at the picture in silence. The girl sighed.

"I wish I was as good as that woman looks."

"You can be if you try."

"Not with a big Chicago brewer for a father, and a husband that beats you whenever the mood takes him."

"I admit that's hard. I think the atmosphere of that Heron Lake hotel isn't any great help to you."

"Oh, they're a gay lot there! We fight like cats and dogs." A look of slyness and boldness came over her face. "Mrs. Sh.e.l.lberg hates me as hard as I do her. She used to go around telling: 'It's very peculiar, you know'"--she imitated her rival's voice--"'but no matter which end of the dining-room I sit, all the men look that way!'"

The young lawyer laughed at her in spite of himself.

And she went on: "But they don't, now. That's the reason she hates me,"

she said, in conclusion. "The men don't notice her when I'm around."

To hear her fresh young lips utter those words with their vile inflections was like taking a sudden glimpse into the underworld, where harlots dwell and the spirits of unrestrained l.u.s.ts dance in the shadowy recesses of the human heart.

Allen, hearing this fragmentary conversation, fascinated yet uneasy, looked at the pair with wonder. They seemed quite unconscious of their public situation.

The young lawyer looked straight before him, while the girl, swept on by her ign.o.ble rage, displayed still more of the moral ulceration which had been injected into her young life.

"I don't see what men find about her to like--unless it is her eyes.

She's got beautiful eyes. But she's vulgar--ugh! The stories she tells--right before men, too! She'd kill any one that got ahead of her, that woman would! And yet she'll come into my room and cry and cry, and say: 'Don't take him away from me! Leave him to me!' Ugh! It makes me sick." She stamped her foot, then added, irrelevantly: "She wears a wig, too. I suppose that old fool of a judge thinks it's her own hair."

The lawyer sat in stony silence. His grave face was accusing in its set expression, and she felt it, and was spurred on to do still deeper injustice to herself--an insane perversity.

"Not that I care a cent--I'm not jealous of her. I ain't so bad off for company as she is. She can't take anybody away from me, but she must go and break down my faith in the judge."

She bit her lips to keep from crying out. She looked out of the window again, seeking control.

The "divorce colony" never appeared more sickening in its inner corruptions than when delineated by this dainty young girl. Allen could see the swarming men about the hotels; he could see their hot, leering eyes and smell their liquor-laden breaths as they named the latest addition to the colony or boasted of their a.s.sociations with those already well known.

The girl turned suddenly to her companion.

"How do those people live out here on their farms?"

She pointed at a small shanty where the whole family stood to watch the train go by.

"By eating boiled potatoes and salt pork."

"Salt pork!" she echoed, as if salt pork were old boot-heels or bark or hay. "Why, it takes four hours for salt pork to digest!"

He laughed again at her childish irrelevancy. "So much the better for the poor. Where'd you learn all that, anyway?"

"At school. Oh, you needn't look so incredulous! I went to boarding-school. I learned a good deal more than you think."

"Well, so I see. Now, I should have said pork digested in three hours, speaking from experience."

"Well, it don't. What do the women do out here?"

"They work like the men, only more so."

"Do they have any new things?"

"Not very often, I'm afraid."

She sighed. After a pause, she said:

"You were raised on a farm?"

"Yes. In Minnesota."

"Did you do work like that?" She pointed at a thrashing-machine in the field.

"Yes, I ploughed and sowed and reaped and mowed. I wasn't on the farm for my health."

"You're very strong, aren't you?" she asked, admiringly.

"In a slab-sided kind of a way--yes."

Her eyes grew abstracted.

"I like strong men. Ollie was a little man, not any taller than I am, but when he was drunk he was what men call a--a holy terror. He struck me with the water-pitcher once--that was just before baby was born. I wish he'd killed me." She ended in a sudden reaction to hopeless bitterness. "It would have saved me all these months of life in this terrible country."

"It might have saved you from more than you think," he said, quietly, tenderly.