The Readjustment Part 11

"I'd like to soak that man," he said. "Maybe I will."

"No you won't!" said she.

"Won't I?" he replied.

"Oh, don't think I haven't seen it all. He was horrid. You see, we've got used to him. You're meeting him new, and you don't quite understand him yet."

"Well, I'm going to spend no sleepless nights trying!"

"He's really very clever and kind, at bottom. You'll come to like him as we all do. And he's a man that it's good for you to know."

Bertram seemed to be considering this.

"Well, what did he mean, anyway?" he snapped.

"Nothing. It's just his foolery. We all had to take it from him at first--and then we came to appreciate him."

Bertram answered with an impatient gesture. Kate caught his arm, held it for just a second.

"Now, you wouldn't spoil my day, would you?" she asked softly. "You know I'm responsible for you--"

His frown melted into his smile.

"Sure, if you put it like that!"

"Now, you're a sensible, accommodating, self-restrained lad, and every other adjective in Samuel Smiles. You could charm the b.u.t.tons off a policeman--and you'll see how really nice he can be."

"You'll take out time until I get over my grouch?"

"Of course." They were approaching Masters and Dr. French, who stood waiting by the train platform. "Late and happy!" she called.

Harry Banks, walking ahead beside Marion Slater, had taken his own wordless rebuke from her. During the train pa.s.sage, he made the concession of keeping away from Bertram, and grouped himself off in the other double seat. Bertram, sitting with Kate and the engaged couple, spoke but seldom and then languidly. He did not come face to face with Harry Banks again until the buckboards had delivered them at the Masters ranch.

This estate bore the t.i.tle of "ranch" only by courtesy. Masters himself said that he raised nothing but mild h.e.l.l on his forty acres.

He did have an olive orchard, a small orange grove flourishing by luck of a warm gorge in the hills, and a little fancy stock. Kate and Masters took possession of the new guest at the gate, and carried him over the estate for inspection. Mainly, Bertram took this entertainment sullenly. He warmed a little at the sight of the cattle.

The house, built by Masters's own design, drew only the comment, "pretty nice." After that, Bertram was free to go to his room and dispose his belongings. Returning in a marvelously short time, he came out upon the house-party, grouped all in the big, redwood ceiled living-room.

A fire of driftwood snapped with metallic crackling on the hearth.

Alice Needham sat with Dr. French beside it; Mrs. Masters, pausing in a flight of supervision, had stopped to speak with them; Alice was looking up at her, presenting her fresh, full-faced view to the gaze of the man on the staircase. Marion Slater stood with Masters by one of the Dutch windows, criticizing the design with a painter's half-arm gestures. Banks, by another window, sat dividing his time between a book and the valley below.

It happened then, as Bertram stood there, that Alice Needham looked in his direction. It happened, also, that she was smiling. He caught her smile and smiled back.

That smile was half the secret of his physical charm. In the first place, it broke with wholly unexpected force. His face, what with its heaviness of feature, was a little forbidding and severe. As he bent his unillumined gaze, he appeared stern--even angry. Then, with the sudden preliminary vibration of an earthquake, that smile would begin to quiver about his mouth, to start wrinkles about his eyes. Next, as he bent his head forward toward the target of his charms, it drew back the corners of his mouth to show his white teeth, it pulled eyelids and eyebrows into a tiny slit, through which his pupils twinkled like electric sparks. These movements--wholly muscular at that--spiritualized and transformed his face.

Mrs. Masters, looking up at the interruption, was caught in this flood of charm and good will. Harry Banks, feeling a psychic current running about the room, looked up also; and that smile caught him. It carried away the last trace of his perverse mood. And Bertram heaved himself down the stairs and crossed at once to seat himself beside Alice Needham.

"I see at a glance I'm going to like this party," he said. On other lips there would have been nothing to laugh at in this; but they all did laugh. In a minute more, Harry Banks had dropped his book and crossed over to the fireplace. Bertram, leading the talk now, took him in without a trace of apparent resentment. Kate, emerging from the room, dropped down beside Harry Banks on the floor and joined her cheerful pipe to the symphony of good fellowship. Before luncheon, this find of hers was the centre of the party; events were revolving about him.

In the lazy hour after meat, the engaged couple found chance to slip out into the orange grove. Masters, summoned by his foreman, went to look after a sick cow, Harry Banks went back to his reading, and Alice Needham to a design for a window seat which she was building for the Masters dining-room. These pairings left Bertram and Kate to each other; and presently they were out-of-doors, drawing on into the woods. Masters, from the barn, watched them and noted what a goodly couple, what a faun and dryad in clothes, they were. Kate Waddington was turning over her shoulder her slow and rather lazy smile, which began at her lips and lit her green-grey eyes last of all. That was her best att.i.tude of head. Bertram swung up the trail, making progress by main force--not walking so much as lifting himself on those st.u.r.dy, saddle-sprung legs of his. He was making wide, sweeping gestures; and Kate, as he talked, leaned a little toward him now and then, like a woman absorbed.

Momentarily, she had him on the subject of football. He was touching upon the subject of one Bill Graham, Stanford tackle and opponent in two varsity games, whom she knew and whom he was teaching her to know better. Bertram stooped and gathered a handful of pebbles from the trail to show how Bill Graham used to throw sand in his eyes; he thrust his open hand against an alder, bordering the trail, to show how he contravened these tactics by slamming Bill Graham in the face.

Even so far did loosen his tongue and spirit that he boasted of his victories and excused his defeats. He went further; he touched upon the most frightful disappointment of his career.

"It was in the ten to nothing game," said he. "You remember, don't you, how they had us down on our ten yard line early in the second half? We got the ball away. n.o.body had scored yet. Well, Stuffy Halpin he gave the signal for a delayed pa.s.s on end. That was a freak play we were trying out that year--delayed pa.s.s first and then the back pa.s.sed to me. I jogged Bill Graham and he stumbled down the field just bull-headed--he never did have much football sense. I looked down toward the goal"--(Bertram had been gesticulating wildly; now he gave the outstretched fingers of his right hand a sudden fillip to show the changed direction of his glance) "and I saw a clear field right straight to the fullback or glory--"

"Gracious! What happened?" asked Kate. She was capable, wit and social strategist that she was, of a.s.suming all this interest by way of leading an inept youth to make a fool and a braggart of himself for her amus.e.m.e.nt. But she showed not a glimmer of irony, neither in her mouth nor in her green-grey eyes. She spoke with the straight, sincere interest of a dairymaid listening to the self-told heroisms of a stable boy.

"Stuffy tumbled all over himself and dropped the ball!"

Bertram's answer conveyed all the tragedy in the world.

They were come now to a place where the trail ran steep and the redwoods thickened to make a Californian hillside. It was November, but the season was late. The earth was washed bright by the early rains and not yet sodden with the later ones. The black, shaded loam, bare of gra.s.s, oozed the moisture it was saving for its evergreen redwoods against a rainless summer. In the dark clefts grew scentless things of a delicate, gnome aspect--gold-back fern, maiden-hair overlying dank, cold pools, sorrel, six-foot brake. No blossoms blew among all this greenery; only by that sign and by the wet, perspiring earth might one know that it was autumn on those hills.

The clean ooze and dew started a little stream which ran, choked with maiden-hair, to the trail, and formed a pool. Some philanthropic camper had driven a nail into the rock and hung there a tin cup. Kate (Bertram still talking and gesticulating at her left) threw a perceptive glance.

"How good the water looks!" she said. "I believe I am thirsty!"

While he filled the cup, she seated herself on the rock, disposed herself into a composition; and after they had both drunk, she showed no disposition to move from her perch. In fact, she loosened her brown student beri, shook her hair free, and sat there, a wood-nymph framed by the ruddy brown and dark green of redwood and laurel. He crouched his big frame down beside her, so that she leaned back against the rock. A long silence, and:

"Nature is mighty nice!" he said.

Then, perceiving her as a part of the picture, he added:

"And you're the nicest thing about it."

At this frontal attack, Kate waited to see whether it meant further attack, skirmish, or retreat. His general softness of expression, showed that it meant attack.

Bertram, in fact, was in the mood for attack on rose citadels. A year of life on twelve dollars a week--cheap, crowded lodgings, meals at the Hotel Ma.r.s.eillaise, the landlady's daughter and those of her kind for companionship--and now, in a week, the refinements of the Tiffany house, the refinement plus entertainment of the Masters villa, and these two lovely, fragrant women. It seemed all to roll up in him as he sat there, the woods about him and this golden creature at his side; and it found half-unconscious expression on his lips.

"I'm going to be rich some day," he said.

"I hope so."

"I am, sure. When I get rich I'm going to have a place like this--I'll have a long pull by that time and be able to invite anybody I want--this is the only way to live." His voice fell away.

Then he looked up and bent upon her that smile.

"It's great to have a girl like you to confide in," he said.

"Thank you; but you haven't confided much as yet," responded Kate.

"I don't suppose there is a whole lot to confide. At least, things you'd want to tell a girl like you. Only one thing. I'm in love!"

The arrest of all motion in Kate which followed this declaration was like one of those sudden calms which fall over a field at the approach of evening. It descended upon her in the mid-course of a gesture; it wrapped her about in such a stillness that neither breath nor blood stirred. Then, though only her lips moved, her vocal cords responded to her will.

"And she is to be mistress of the villa when you get rich?"

"If she'll take me," said Bertram. "You see, it is a brand new case.