The Last Straw Part 8

"You talk like a convert, Jane!"

"I am, d.i.c.k. Just that. I've seen the evil of my ways, I have seen the light; I'm going to try to justify my existence, going to try to stand for something, to be something, not just a girl with looks or with ...

money.

"I may miss love entirely, but I have realized, all of a sudden, that as yet I'm not fit for the love I wanted. Why, I have nothing to give to a man; I would take all and give nothing. A woman doesn't win a true love by such a transaction. If I can stand alone, if I can fight my own battles, if I can overcome obstacles that are as real as the love I have wanted, then I will be justified in seeking that love....

"And there's another consideration: If this thing I have wanted never does come I have the opportunity of gaining all that you say you could give me by my own efforts: the comforts, the material things. I wouldn't be trading myself for them, you see; I'll be winning them with my hands and what intelligence I may possess."

"Are you sure of that, Jane? Are you sure that a girl who has never done a tap of work in her life, who has not even talked business with business men can come out here and beat this game? Oh, I know what I'm talking about and you don't. I spent all yesterday in town looking up this place because your letter was convincing in at least one thing. I know your enthusiasm, when it's aroused. I know that you'd rush in where a business prince wouldn't even chance a peek!

"When men talk about you in town they grin. The bartender grinned when he told me about you. The banker grinned. The man who drove me out thought it was a fine joke! These men know; they're not skeptical because they know you or your past, but they know the job and that you're a stranger. That's enough. You can't beat another man's game."

"I can try, can't I?"

"But what's the use?"--with a gesture of impatience and a set of the mouth that was far from pleasant. "You're doomed to fail and even if you should hit on the one chance in a thousand of pulling through, what would you get? Less than I can give you in the time it takes to sign my name. You won't let me talk love and you don't seem to have much hope that you ever will find the love you think you want, so let's put love aside once more. Come with me, Jane. I'll give you all you could ever hope to get here and without the cost of the awful effort anything like success would require.

"You've been bored, perhaps, and discouraged. You've taken this thing as a ... a last straw. Won't you listen to reason?"

"The last straw," she repeated. "Yes, I guess that is it. d.i.c.k, do you know how close I came to letting you do the thing you want to do?" She put the question sharply. "I'll tell you: Within three hundred dollars!

That's how close.

"Oh, you don't know the game I've played. No one knows it. You all have just seen the exterior, the show. You've never been behind the scenes with me.

"I never knew my mother. I never knew my father well. I don't know that he cared much for me after she went; perhaps, though, he was only afraid to bring up a girl alone. First, it was boarding school, then finishing school, then a woman companion of the smart sort. Then he died, and we discovered that his fortune was not what it had been, that it was a miserable thing for a girl to depend on who had been trained as I had been trained.

"You met me soon after I was alone. I fell in with your crowd and they picked me up. I didn't like them particularly and certainly I didn't like their life, but it was the only one open for me. We lived hard, heartless lives, made up of week-ends and dances and c.o.c.ktails and greed!

"Materialism is the right charge! I was steeped in it; all those girls were. It was the only thing any of us lived for. Girls sold themselves for material advantage; they loathed it, most of them, but they lied to themselves and tried to make the rest of us believe it was happiness.

They knew, and we knew what it was and we knew, too, that they were helpless to do otherwise.

"Then you came and made love to me on the same cra.s.s basis. I liked you, d.i.c.k. I didn't love you. I cared no more for you than I did for three or four men so I kept putting you off, never actually discouraging you to a point where you would give up. I was simply closing my eyes to the inevitable.

"Now and then we met women, to us strange creatures, who did things. I never can make anyone understand how inferior I felt beside them. Why, I remember one little decorator who, because she was young and cheap, came to do my apartment over. I had her stay for dinner and she was quite overwhelmed with many things.

"When she went away I cried from sheer envy ... and she was going down somewhere into Greenwich Village to sleep in a stuffy little studio.

But she was _doing_ something. I used to feel guilty before my dressmaker and even my maid. I didn't understand why that was, then; it was not a sensation produced by reason; by intuition, rather.

"And then I had to look at things as they were. I paid up everything and totaled my bank balance. Every source of income I had ever had was gone and I had left ... three hundred and two dollars. That was on a Friday, the Friday of our last week-end party at the Hollisters' in Westchester.

"You talked to me again that night after we had been playing billiards.

d.i.c.k, I had made up my mind to take you up. The words were on my lips; I was within a breath of telling you that it was a bargain, that I'd sell myself to you for the things you could buy me....

"I don't know why I didn't. Maybe it was this part of me I had never known until I came here, this part which enthuses so over what lies before me now, the part that used to envy the girls who did things. We went back to town and there was a letter for me from this little frontier law office, telling me I had inherited this ranch. I didn't sleep a minute. I was sole owner of a big business....

"I never can make you understand the relief I experienced! It meant money and money meant that I could go on in the old way, putting off the inevitable, blinding myself to what I actually was.

"That was my motive in coming here: to turn this property into money.

And no sooner had I made the acquaintance of these people than I began to learn that my point of view had been radically different from theirs. I had thought that money would give me the thing I wanted, independence and prestige; but I found that with them, with the best of them, anyhow, that sort of standing was not considered.

"The thing that counts out here is being yourself, d.i.c.k, in making a place by your determination, your wits, by impressing people with the best that is in you. Material things don't count in the mountains; that is, they don't count primarily. They are nice things to possess but the possession of them alone does not bring respect ... the respect of others or self respect. That, I think, is what I want: respect. That is what I am going to win. The only way I can win it is to establish a place for myself by my own efforts. These men doubt that I can do it.

You are right, I believe, when you picture the whole country expecting me to fail. Well, that's an incentive, isn't it, to do my best? That is what I am here to do!

"There, there's Book One." Then looking out into the country....

"There's the rest of the story."

The man did not reply for an instant but stood frowning at the floor.

"And when you fail? What then?"

She laughed almost merrily.

"Don't say _when_ so positively! But if I should fail, d.i.c.k, I might have to take you up! It might break my faith in myself because it's a young, immature faith, but it will give me a chance, a few months of seeing whether I'm of any account. It gives me a hope."

As she spoke of her alternative a glimmer as of hope pa.s.sed across the man's thin, finely moulded face but he did not let her see. He shook his head and said:

"After this the first thing I need is a drink."

"On the sideboard," she answered, "is my stock."

He walked down the room and examined the bottles, then poured out two drinks and returned with them.

"Anyhow, we'll drink to your future, whatever and wherever it may be,"

he said, cynical again.

"That's kind of you, but I'm afraid you'll have to drink alone."

She put the gla.s.s he had handed her on the table.

"It's the first time I've ever seen you refuse a drink."

"A record broken! That, like the rest of the old life, all belongs in Book One."

"You ... you never thought you used enough to hurt?"

"No. I'm sure I never used enough to hurt my body. I never thought I used enough to hurt anything about me ... until last night."

"What made you change your mind?"

She was half impelled to pa.s.s the question off, then said resolutely:

"A man came here to talk to me, one of my cowpunchers. I made a c.o.c.ktail. He threw it away."

"Well, that was a devil of a thing to do. Did you fire him, as he deserved?"

"No,"--deliberately, tracing a line on a rug with her toe and watching it critically--"I took his advice. You see, the men out here expect things from women that no one has ever expected from me before."

He sneered: "Turned Puritan, Jane? A sweet thing to face, trying to be other than yourself, confining yourself to the morals of the crowd."