The Readjustment Part 16

Bert Chester, waiting before Zinkand's an hour later, picked her a block away from the nooning crowd. Before he recognized the olive-green tailor suit which he had come to know, he noticed the firm yet gracile move of her. As she came nearer, he was aware of two loungers waiting, like himself, to keep appointments. He caught this exchange from them:

"Who? The girl in a kind of brownish green?"

"Yes. Isn't she a peach?"

Just then, it seemed to him, did the purely physical charm of her burst upon him for the first time. Supple and swaying, yet plump and round; her head set square with some of a man's strength, on exquisitely sloping shoulders: and the taste--he would have called it so--of her dress! A discriminating woman might have noticed that her costume bordered on ostentatious unostentation. For it was designed in every detail to frame the picture, to set off not only that figure but also the cream of her skin, the tawny hair, even those firm, plump hands.

He found himself remembering that he had just proposed to another girl. The thought flashed in, and flashed out as quickly.

The Cafe Zinkand formed, at the time, a social nodule in the metropolitan parish that San Francisco was. As the Palace Hotel was its Rialto, gathering-place for prosperous adventure, so the Zinkand was its bourne. In this mahoganied and mirrored restaurant with its generous fare, its atmosphere of comfortable extravagance, those who made the city go, who gave its peculiar Saxon-Latin move and glitter, were accustomed to gather and gossip. It blazed with special splendor on the nights when this or that "Eastern attraction" showed at the Columbia Theatre. To stand on such evenings at the Powell Street terminus, to watch those tripping, gaily-dressed, laughing Californian women thronging the belt of city light from the theatre canopy to the restaurant canopy--ah, that was San Francisco! Not Paris, not Buenos Ayres--they say who have travelled far--could show such a procession of Dianaides, such a Greek festival of joy in the smooth, vigorous body and the things which feed and clothe it. With that absence of public conventionality which was another ear-mark of the old city, all sorts and conditions of men and women sat side by side at the tables.

Harlots, or those who might well pa.s.s as such, beside the best morale there is in women; daughters of washerwomen beside daughters of such proud blood as we have; bookmakers' wives, blazing with the jewels which will be p.a.w.ned to-morrow, beside German housewives on a Sat.u.r.day night revel; jockies and touts from the race tracks beside roistering students from Stanford and Berkeley; soldiers of fortune blown in by the Pacific winds, taking their first intoxicating taste of civilization after their play with death and wealth, beside stodgy burghers grown rich in real estate; clerks beside magnates--all united in the worship of the body.

At noon, however, its workaday aspect was on; it was no more than a lunching place. Chester and Kate found seats in a retired corner.

She looked him over with cool mischief while she drew off her gloves and let one white hand, still creased in pink with the pressure of the seams, drop toward him on the table.

"I am not exactly to congratulate you," she said, "but for a man who was turned down last night you don't seem exactly unhappy."

Bertram let several expressions chase themselves over his face before he blurted out:

"What's the matter with me?"

"Not a great deal. Has she so refused you as to make you conscious of sin?"

"It wasn't a cold turn-down. I'd like it better if it was. I'd have something to go on. It's--it's like trying to bite into a billiard ball. I--you know what I mean."

"You mean that she holds herself above you--that she feels superior to you?"

Bertram arrested all motion on that word, sat with the menu card, which he had been twirling, immovable between his hands.

"Yes. If you want to jolt it to me good and hard that way. I guess that is what it does mean."

"I suppose then that the crisis--last night--came about from your little pa.s.sage with the Chinese waiter? It happened while you were out on the balcony didn't it?"

Bertram stared and glowed.

"Say, you're a wonder. You reach out and get things before they come to you at all. That's just what did happen."

"And then? Or pardon me, I don't want you to tell me any more than it's right for you to tell--any more than you feel like telling."

"Oh that's all right. Well, when we got outside it was the same old song. She didn't care enough even to call me down. And like a fool I came out with it. What's the use of telling what she said or what I said? It was just the same way. She kept me dancing. She wouldn't say yes and she wouldn't say no. She seemed anxious about only one thing.

She wanted to know if she'd been fair to me."

"I suppose she has--!" Kate brought this out as though he had put a question to her. "And you want to know what I think?"

"I sure do."

"I think she cares--at least a little--shall I tell you all?"

Bertram, even in the hottest of this conversation, did not forget the needs of his body. The waiter stood at his elbow. He rushed through the order, and continued:

"I want to know everything."

"Well, to begin with--Bert Chester, you're a man."

"I didn't ask for hot air."

"That's all of that. You're an unfinished man. You--haven't had the chance to get all the refinements which people like Eleanor Gray have acquired. Do you see now? You've made it--you've been making it--all for yourself. You had no fortune. It's splendid the way you worked to get all these things. I know the story of how you got through college.

Everyone who knows you is proud of that. But--well Eleanor's mother was rich and proud before she married, and her grandparents were richer and prouder. Then she's lived a great deal alone; and she never really blossomed out until she went abroad. So she learned her social ways from Europeans. She's got a lot of British and Continental ideas.

"With the rest of us, you know, it doesn't make any difference. You could perceive that by the way we've taken you in. Why, it's really a part of you. You're only two years out of college, hardly that; and you're still studying law; but think how people have taken you up! It is simply that Eleanor looks at it in a different way. It's a pretty peculiarity in one of the sweetest girls I know."

Kate paused. Bert made no move to answer. She went on:

"Now about the thing you can't grasp in Eleanor. It's this way. You can't see her nature as another _girl_ can. She's just as sweet and tender and delicate as she can be, and she has high ideals--that's one result of her living away from the world. If she were a little warmer in temperament, it might be different, but--" Kate paused here as though pondering whether to reveal or to conceal the thought of her mind.

"But of course it is the coldness of a diamond or a sapphire or something else very pure and precious."

Bertram Chester pulled himself up at this point and plucked at a place away back in the conversation.

"What are these things that I don't know? Where is it that I fall down?"

"They are some of the finer points."

"Well tell me." Kate noticed that the color had risen in his cheeks and that his eyes drooped from hers.

"They must be corrected as we go on--provided you'll let me correct them."

"That's what I am asking for--but I'd blame well like an example."

"Well, now, we'll take that waiter episode. The kind of people she'd like to know treat servants impersonally. Servants are just conveniences to them, like dumb waiters. So of course,--even if it was only a Chinaman--she didn't like your noticing him and she came out of her sh.e.l.l for just a moment to say so. Do you see now?"

Bertram's dark complexion reddened with the rush of his shame.

"Oh, that's the idea is it? I thought from something she said that she was afraid I'd hurt his feelings. She wants me to put more front on before 'em, does she?"

"Just about that. She doesn't like to see you put yourself on a level with them."

"All right, that was straight over the plate and I got it."

Again Kate reached over to pat his hand.

"Now don't take it seriously; I know--she herself must know--how splendid and able and promising you are--how much of a man!"

Bert spoke in some irritation.