Stubble Part 4

Joe returned to his desk, got the memo, and entered the little office again. As he slipped the paper across an intervening table, Mr. b.o.n.e.r straightened from a stooping inspection of a lower desk drawer, and Joe saw him furtively wipe a knife blade on the leg of his trousers and then turn upon him a look of mildest blue. There was a bulge in his left cheek as round as an acorn. Neither spoke. A privacy had been violated. Joe felt like a "Peeping Tom."

Noiselessly he slipped around the corner, back to his desk. The breeze was still blowing merrily through the window and two clerks at desks across the aisle were shoving pencils and rulers and like equipment into their proper drawers with a smug sort of satisfaction shining in their drawn faces. He looked at his watch. It lacked a minute of five-thirty. Then he looked at the stack of reports again, paused, and with an air of sudden decision dropped them into an open drawer.

Opening another drawer he swept all the movable articles on his desk thereinto, careless of the confusion he caused, seized his hat from a peg behind him, and strode across the office, out through the door, into the oak-panelled lobby. For a moment he stood before the clock.

Its hands showed five twenty-nine. He paused, then deliberately punched his number, descended the steps, and went out through the door on to the street. The whistle was blowing as he went down the walk.

The street was deserted. He felt eyes somewhere on his back but walked on in apparent unconcern. He was conscious of a peculiar mixture of emotions, a little guilt, a little shame, a little furtiveness, and more than any, a lifting sense of relief, freedom. The air was light, cool, and invigorating. There was a pleasant crunch of dry dusty cinders beneath his feet. And then he saw a venturesome bluebird come darting across the open fields to the west and perch for a moment on the top strand of the barbed-wire fence of the Plow Works, a few yards ahead of him. It sat there swaying and watching him and, as he approached nearer, it took wing and darted across the Plow Company's grounds eastward toward the city. Joe filliped a wire paper clip after it.

"You had better turn around and go back where you came from," he called after it softly.

He proceeded homeward.

As he climbed the boarding-house stairs to his room he felt listless.

For four weeks he had climbed those listless stairs. There had been one brief respite--the two days of Bloomfield with its easy relaxation. What lay at the end of the road? Whither was he tending?

Mr. b.o.n.e.r's shoes? His desk was the step next below the little private office. He laughed shortly to himself as he opened a bureau drawer and selected a clean white shirt. The touch of the clean linen encouraged him a little. He began to whistle. He had a "date on" with Mary Louise. He had asked her to go to the vaudeville. Two or three hours of pleasant forgetfulness, anyway. Mary Louise--the thought of her brought a vague feeling of unrest. For over two weeks he had tried to get her over the 'phone. She had either been out when he had called or had pleaded some other engagement. Finally he had got the engagement for to-night three days ahead. And she had as good as promised to see him right off, immediately after that week-end in Bloomfield. Stranger! Stranger in the city! That did not sound very much as if she were a stranger. He wondered what she could have been doing. She had met a good many people while she was doing Red Cross, probably, people in the army--men--officers, now in civilian life. Why not? And yet he had felt the least bit irritated and a little bit lonely. For _his_ friends had scattered, it seemed. And then they had not mattered much. And he had rather looked forward to the coming summer with Mary Louise in town. Now he didn't so much. It was foolish, too. There wasn't any reason for it. A man shouldn't pin his resources down to one spot.

He washed, dressed, and then went to dinner at a dairy lunch around the corner. The boarding place furnished breakfasts only. Then there was an hour and a half to kill before he could go for her. She had a room in a down-town apartment, not over three blocks away, and that would take but a very short time. He wandered over to the public square. Some old men were sitting on a row of iron benches lining the sidewalk, facing the street. They surveyed him critically as he pa.s.sed by. He walked up and idly inspected the kiosk where the weather-bureau reports were posted. He noticed it predicted continued fair. Then he turned and walked in the street for about a block, gazing in shop windows. There was nothing in any of them that he particularly wanted.

He stopped at a street corner and looked up and down both streets. A few desultory pedestrians went walking hither and yon, leisurely, with no apparent purpose. It was the lull of supper hour and there was an orange glow that penetrated even down to the streets which were mere canyons between sombre, artificial cliffs of masonry. To the west a small patch of open sky glowed sulphurously through a smoke pall. A city _was_ a poor place to spend time in--really live in, he thought.

And Mary Louise--he wondered if she thought so, too, she who had been raised in the greenest of all green country, in the widest and cleanest of s.p.a.ces. Probably not. At least, it didn't look like it. A city was a good place to work in. One could work anywhere--if the work was all right. She had seemed keen about her work. She probably had had a lot to do, getting things started. She'd probably not had much time. He might have missed her during her leisure hours. It was possible she was as desirous of some outdoors, of some clean air, some blue sky, as he was.

Almost with the force of a decision he turned and walked back to the square and sat down. He looked at the clock. It said five minutes after seven. There was still an hour.

He sat and deliberately waited.

The time eventually pa.s.sed, and before he had really gathered together his thoughts into orderly array she was meeting him at the door of her apartment, a little flushed, a little hurried, quite brisk and apparently eager to be at the business at hand. There was also an air of preoccupation as if she were revolving over in her mind some previous matters of which the threads still remained untangled. In this respect there was change. The old Mary Louise had been as open as a wild rose, as freshly and sweetly receptive to whatever wind came along. She had gathered complexity, was more serious, laughed less, frowned more.

They walked along the street in the gathering darkness soberly, he returning monosyllabic answers to the perfunctory questions which she fired at him, brightly crisp. Like the questionnaire of a superior officer he felt. Then for nearly a block they said nothing. Glancing sidewise at her he caught the straight, almost grim line of her mouth and the little pucker between her brows. As if realizing she was being observed she suddenly asked:

"What are you doing out at the Works?"

Joe paused a moment before replying. "When I was in Texas," he began, "out in the sticks, we had a flood, and the road from headquarters was in danger of being washed away. Culverts too small. Had one n.i.g.g.e.r standing on the bank of one stream by the head of a culvert catching the sticks and brush and dragging them up on the bank so they wouldn't clog up the hole." He spoke in a quietly reminiscent tone.

She turned and looked at him curiously. "But I said, 'What are _you_ doing _now_ at the Works?'"

"I know," he continued, in the same tone. "That's what I'm doing at the Plow Factory. Keeping the water running."

She smiled, just a flash of a smile. "Doesn't sound so bad, even if you are secretive about it. How did the n.i.g.g.e.r take care of his job?"

Joe looked up quickly. "Oh--he? He fell asleep. And then he fell in the creek."

Mary Louise was watching him, waiting for him to finish. At last he seemed to have got her entire attention. "And then?"

"Then he got pneumonia--and died."

They crossed the street. Up ahead the lights of the theatre gleamed dazzling white. The crowd was getting almost too thick to permit conversation.

"You don't like your job then?"

He flared into sudden unexpected defense of it. "Well, I haven't gone to sleep on it yet."

They said no more, for the task of pa.s.sing the ticket chopper and then of getting settled in their seats was all absorbing. And then directly the curtain rose and Joe found himself slipping into a delightfully relaxed forgetfulness. He was being amused. His good humour was returning. He got an occasional glance at Mary Louise, sometimes during contagious gales of laughter that would sweep the audience, and saw her smiling slightly, mostly with her eyes; and was puzzled, for the humour was not that sort. Had he stopped to think, or had he been more experienced, he would not have been thus puzzled, for he would have realized that the sudden putting on of sophistication is always a puzzling thing.

But he banished the question and gave himself up entirely to enjoyment. And when the final curtain fell he rose to his feet with a faint inner sigh of regret. It was with high good humour that he gained his companion's side outside the theatre.

"We'll get a bite to eat down in the Rathskeller," he suggested gaily.

"No, Joe, let's not. This is enough for one evening." She turned as if to start southward, toward home, but he seized her arm, laughing:

"Maybe it's enough for you, but it's not enough for me. Come on. Be a sport. You've been dodging me long enough."

"Dodging you?" She was all hurt surprise as he hurried her along.

Joe's method was improving. "Well, come along, then--if you don't want me to think so."

Mary Louise let it go at that. She came.

A revolving door that swept outward musty and yet alluring odours swept them inward. They descended a flight of winding steps to a subterranean anteroom of stone. Dim lights winked at them from stone niches and from a cleft in the rock to one side a prim little maid in a ruched white cap took Joe's hat. There should have been a troglodyte attendant, instead. On the other side of swinging gla.s.s doors was much clatter and laughter and the indistinct voice of a woman above a rhythmic strumming and the bleat of a saxophone. The transition to this other side was sudden and bewildering. The glimmer burst into a glare, the dim echo swelled into a roar as the door opened, and Joe stood blinking, asking for a table for two. As he threaded his way between tables, past careening waiters swinging aloft perilous trays, a girl in a crimson evening frock came wandering carelessly through the aisle toward him, her hands clasped behind her back, her eyes searching the crowd sitting about her. Her figure was short and pudgy and so violently compressed into her crimson gown that she seemed to be oozing out of a scanty chalice. She was singing a most provocative song and, catching sight of Joe as he struggled along, face uptilted, and, looking into his eyes most impudently, let him have the full import of her words.

Joe gave her a deliberate, knowing wink. With a careless shrug she moved away in search of more promising and sensitive material.

He pa.s.sed, the toxine of gaiety mounting to his head, to a small table tucked into a remote corner, where the waiter was holding out a chair for him.

"Won't do, George," he said, refusing the proffered chair. "We can't be buried way back here. We aren't dead ones, you know."

The waiter raised a deprecating shoulder but Mary Louise broke in, "Oh, don't bother! This is all right, Joe." She had already seated herself and was drawing off her gloves. Her face looked hot and weary, and long wisps of hair were clinging damply to her temples.

"Wish we could have had a table over there," indicating two or three vacant ones near the orchestra and the base of the jongleur's operations. "We're out of it here. Well, at any rate, what are you going to have?"

She turned from a weary inspection of adjoining tables. "Oh, anything.

Some lemonade, I suppose."

"Don't want to celebrate? This is our first party." His eyes and smile were eager.

"No. Of course not, Joe. You know better than that."

"Two lemonades," he said to the waiter regretfully. Somehow it seemed like a waste of atmosphere, a waste of fuel, pulling a rowboat with a turbine--to be drinking lemonade in a place like this. Many bitter similes occurred to him, but he banished them.

"The old girl looks like a rash, doesn't she?" he said, indicating the singer who was wandering about amongst the tables in another part of the room.

Mary Louise looked at him suspiciously. "How's that?"

"She's a-breakin' out."

Neither paid any further attention to this atrocity; she, because she willed otherwise; he, because he was blissfully unaware.

But her apathy was noticeable. He made one or two violent efforts to spur her flagging spirits and then, becoming touched by the contagion of her reserve, lapsed himself into silence. They sat and sipped their lemonades, thoughtfully inspecting their straws, dolefully ruminative.

Their little table was like a blot on a snow-white expanse of joy.

Joe came to the bottom of his gla.s.s and made a vicious noise in the residue of cracked ice. He looked up to see how she might be taking it and saw a gleam of pleasure pa.s.s across her face. It quickly subsided and gave way to a look of preoccupation. He was watching her intently now. And then she smiled and looked beyond him, stretching her hand out in recognition. Someone touched the back of his chair. He looked over his shoulder, saw a man's figure standing there, and then he rose to his feet.

Dimly he heard Mary Louise's introduction. It was a Mr. Claybrook or something like that.