The Gray Dawn

S >> Stewart Edward White >> The Gray Dawn

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28

"Well--you'll find things pretty mixed. Don't expect much; one has to take
things pretty much as one finds them."

To this simple speech was appended one gesture only--a slight raising of
the eyebrows. Yet the effect was to sweep Keith into the intimacy of an
inner circle, to suggest that she, too, found society mixed, and to imply--
very remotely--that at least certain members of the present company itself
were not quite what he--or she--would choose in another environment. In
unconscious response to this unspoken thought, Keith glanced about the
table. There was a good deal of drinking going on; and the fun was becoming
even more obvious and noisy. Mrs. Morrell occasionally sipped at her
champagne. She emitted a slight but rather disturbing perfume.

"Why did you come out here, anyway?" she asked him. "I can't make out. I'm
curious."

"Why shouldn't I?" demanded Keith.

"Well, men come here either for money, for adventure, or to make a career."
She marked each on the tablecloth with the end of a fork. "Which is it?"

"Guess," laughed Keith.

"You don't need money--or else you have a wonderful nerve to take the Boyle
house. I believe you have the nerve, all right. Men with your sort of close
curly hair are never--bashful!" she laughed shortly.

"Boyle's rent is safe--for a while," admitted Keith.

"Career?" she went on, looking him in the eyes speculatively, and allowing
her gaze to sink deep into his. He noticed that her eyes were a gray green,
like semi-precious stones of some sorts, with surface lights, but also with
grayer radiations that seemed to go below the surface to smouldering
depths--disturbing eyes, like the perfume. "Career?" she repeated. "I think
you hold yourself better--a career in the riff-raff of this town." She
shook her head archly. "But adventure! Oh, la! There's plenty of that--all
sorts!" She gave the impression of meaning a great deal more than she said.
"I wish I were a man!" she exclaimed, and laughed.

"I'm glad you're not," rejoined Keith sincerely.

She tapped him lightly on the arm with her fan.

"Oh, la!" she cried.

Keith laughed meaningly and mischievously. He was feeling entirely at home
--in his mental shirtsleeves--thoroughly at ease.

"You're a lawyer, are you not?" she asked him.

"Try to be."

"Going to practise?"

"If any practice comes my way."

She looked at him, smiling slowly.

"Oh, it'll come fast enough." She seized her glass and held it to him.
"Here's to your career!" she cried. "Bottoms up!"

They clinked glasses and drank.

"You must meet people--influential people," she told him. "We must see what
we can do; I'll have some of them in."

"You're simply fine to take all this trouble for me!"

She tapped him again on the arm.

"Silly! We take care of our own people, of _course!_ Let's plan it. Have
you any connections in town at all?"

"Well, I've met quite a few people about town, and I have some letters."

"Casual acquaintances are well enough, but your letters?"

"I have one to Calhoun Bennett, and to Mr. Dempster, and Mr. Farwell, and
Truett--"

But she was making a wry face.

"What's the matter with, them?" he demanded.

"Cal Bennett's all right--but the others--oh, I suppose they're all right
in a business way--but--"

"But, what?"

She made a helpless little gesture.

"I can't describe it--you know--the sort that are always so keen on doing
their _duty!_"

She laughed; and to his subconscious surprise Keith found himself saying
sympathetically:

"I know the sort of people who always pay their debts!"

They looked into each other's eyes and laughed in comradeship. In sober
life Keith did his duty reasonably well, and was never far behind
financially.

She fell silent for a moment; then with a muttered "excuse me," she leaned
directly across his shoulder to impart something low-voiced and giggly to
the woman on his right. To do this she leaned her breast against his arm
and shoulder. The conversation lasted some seconds. Keith could not hear a
word of it; but he was disturbingly aware of her perfume, the softness of
her body, and the warmth that struck even through the intervening clothing.
She drew back with a half apology.

"Feminine nonsense," she told him. "Mere man couldn't be expected to
understand." She was herself a little flushed from leaning over, but she
appeared not to notice Keith's rather breathless state. He muttered
something, and gulped at his champagne.

"Do you know Mrs. Sherwood?" he asked, merely to say something,

But to his surprise Mrs, Morrell answered him shortly, her manner changing:

"No, I don't. We draw the line _somewhere_!"

Again she addressed the woman on the right, but this time without leaning
across:

"Oh, Amy, the fair Patricia has another victim!" and laughed rather
shrilly. Suddenly she rapped the table with the handle of a knife. "Stop
it!" she cried to the company at large. "You're making too much noise!"

They all turned to her except one youth who was too noisily busy with his
partner to have heard her. Failing in another attempt to get his attention,
Mrs. Morrell picked up a chunk of French bread and hurled it at him.

"Good shot!" "Bravo!" "Encore!" came a burst of applause, as the bread,
largely by accident, took him squarely between the eyes.

The youth, though astonished, was game. He retaliated in kind. Keith
whipped up an empty plate and intercepted it. The youth's partner came to
his assistance. Keith, a plate in either hand, deftly protected Mrs.
Morrell from the flying missiles. The implied challenge was instantly
accepted by all. The air was full of bread. Keith's dexterity was tested to
the utmost, but he came through the battle with flying colours. Everybody
threw bread. There was much explosive laughter, that soon became fairly
exhausting. The battle ceased, both because the combatants were out of
ammunition, and because they were too weak from mirth to proceed. Keith
with elaborate mock gallantry turned and presented Mrs. Morrell with the
two plates.

"The spoils of war!" he told her.

"He should be decorated for conspicuous gallantry on the field of battle!"
cried some one.

The idea took. But they could find nothing appropriate until Teeny
McFarlane deliberately stepped up on the table and broke from the glass
chandelier one of its numerous dangling prisms. This called forth a mild
protest from Morrell--"Oh, I say!"--which was drowned in a wild shriek of
delight. The process of stepping down from the table tilted Teeny's wide
skirts so that for an instant a slim silken leg was plainly visible as far
as the knee. "Oh! oh!" cried every one. Some pretended to be shocked, and
covered their faces with spread fingers; others feigned to try for another
look. Teeny was quite unperturbed.

Keith was the centre of attention and a great success. But there were no
more tete-a-tetes. Mrs. Morrell managed to convey the idea that she was
displeased, and Keith was of a sufficiently generous and ingenuous
disposition to be intrigued by the fact. He had no chance to probe the
matter. In a moment or so Mrs. Morrell rose and strolled toward the
drawing-room. The others straggled after her. She rather liked thus to
emphasize her lack of convention as a hostess, making a pose of never
remembering the proper thing to do. Now she moved here and there, laughing
her shrill rather mirthless laugh, calling everybody "dearie," uttering
abrupt little platitudes. Keith found himself left behind, and rather out
in the cold. The company had quite frankly segregated itself into couples.
The room was well adapted to this, filled as it was with comfortable chairs
arranged with apparent carelessness two by two. The men lighted cigars.
Keith saw Nan's eyes widen at this. She was sitting near the fire, and
Sansome had penned her in beyond the possibility of invasion by a third. At
this date smoking was a more or less doubtfully considered habit, and in
the best society men smoked only in certain rigidly specified
circumstances. In a drawing-room such an action might be considered the
fair equivalent to powdering the feminine nose.

In such a condition, Keith was left rather awkwardly alone, and was fairly
thrust upon a fictitious interest in a photograph album, at which he
glowered for some moments. Then by a well-planned and skilfully executed
flank movement he caught Mrs. Morrell.

"Look here," he demanded; "what has the standing army done to deserve
abandonment in a hostile country?"

But she looked at him directly, without response to his playful manner.

"My friend," she said, "this is a pretty free and easy town, as no doubt
you have observed, and society is very mixed. But we haven't yet come to
receiving women like Mrs. Sherwood, or relishing their being mentioned to
us."

"Why, what's the matter with her?" demanded Keith, astonished. "Is she as
far from respectability as all that?"

"Respectable! That word isn't understood in San Francisco." She appeared
suddenly to soften. "You're a dear innocent boy, so you are, and you've got
a dear innocent little wife, and I'll have to look out for you."

Before the deliberate and superior mockery in her eyes as well as in her
voice, Keith felt somehow like a small boy. He was stung to a momentary
astonishing fury.

"By God--" he began, and checked himself with difficulty.

She smiled at him slowly.

"Perhaps I didn't mean all of that," she said; "perhaps only half of it,"
she added with significance. "My personal opinion is that you are likely to
be a curly haired little devil; and when you look at me like that, I'm glad
we're not alone."

She looked at him an enigmatic moment, then turned away from the table near
which they had been standing. "Come, help me break up some of this
'twosing,'" she said.

Shortly after this the party dispersed. Mrs. Morrell said good-bye to them
carelessly, or not at all, according as it happened.

"You must come again, come often," she told the Keiths. "It's pretty dull
unless you make your own fun." She was half sleepily conventional, her lids
heavy. "Perhaps we can have some music soon," she added. The words were
careless, but she shot Keith an especial gleam.

The Keiths walked sociably home together, almost in silence. Keith, after
his habit, super-excited with all the fun, the row, and the half-guilty
boyish feeling of having done a little something he ought not to have done,
did not want to seem too enthusiastic.

"Jolly crowd," he remarked.

"They were certainly noisy enough," said Nan indifferently; then after a
moment, "Where _do_ you suppose some of them get their clothes?"

Keith's mind was full of the excitement of the evening. He found himself
reviewing the company, appraising it, wondering about it. Was Teeny
McFarlane as gay as she appeared? He had never seen women smoke before; but
that dark girl with the red thing in her hair puffed a cigarette. Perhaps
she was Spanish--he had not met her. And Mrs. Morrell--hanged if he quite
dared make her out--it wouldn't do to jump to conclusions nor too hastily
to apply Eastern standards; this was a new country, fatal to make a fool
mistake; well-built creature, by gad--

Nan interrupted his thoughts. He came to with a start.

"I think we'd better put the big armchair in the front room, after all,"
she was saying.

XII

Next morning Keith allayed what little uneasiness his conscience might
harbour by remarking, as he adjusted his collar:

"Mrs. Morrell is an amusing type, don't you think? She's a bit vulgar, but
she seems good hearted. Wonder what colour her hair used to be?"

"I suppose they are all right," said Nan. "They are a little rowdy. They
gave me a headache."

Illogically rehabilitated in his own self-esteem, Keith went on dressing.
He was "on" to Mrs. Morrell; her methods were pretty obvious. Wonder if she
thought she had really fooled him? Next time he would be on guard and beat
her at her own game. She was not a woman to his taste, anyway--he glanced
admiringly at Nan's clean profile against the light--but she was full of
vitality, she was keen, she was brimming with the joy of life.

The long drive over the Peninsula to the sea and back, the episode of the
Spanish people, the rowdy supper party, had one effect, however: it had
made so decided a break in the routine that Keith found himself thrust
quite outside it. He had worked feverishly all the week, at about double
speed; and in ordinary course would have gone on working feverishly at
double speed for another week. Now, suddenly, the thought was irksome. He
did not analyze this; but, characteristically, discovered an irrefutable
reason for not going on with it. They rescued Gringo from Sam's care, and
drove up to the house. On the way Keith said:

"Look here, Nan; do you suppose you and Wing can get on all right this
morning? All the heavy work is done. I really ought to be settling the
office and getting some lines laid for business."

"Why, of course we can get on, silly!" she rejoined. "This isn't your job,
anyway. Of course you ought to attend to your business."

Keith again consulted Palmer, Cook & Co. The same clerk showed him offices.
He was appalled at the rents. Even a miserable little back room in the
obscurer blocks commanded a sum higher than he had anticipated paying.
After looking at a dozen, he finally decided on a front room in the
Merchants' Exchange Building. This was one of the most expensive, but Keith
was tired of looking. The best is the greatest economy in the long run, he
told himself, and with a lawyer, new-come, appearances count for much in
getting clients. Must get the clients, though, to support this sort of
thing! The rest of the morning he spent buying furniture.

About noon he walked back to the Bella Union. His horse and buggy were not
hitched to the rail, so he concluded Nan had not yet returned for lunch.
Mrs. Sherwood, however, was seated in a rocker at the sunny end of the long
veranda. She looked most attractive, her small smooth head bent over some
sort of fancywork. Before she looked up Keith had leisure to note the poise
of her head and shoulders, the fine long lines of her figure, and the
arched-browed serenity of her eyes. Different type this from the full-
breasted Morrell, more--more patrician! Rather absurd in view of their
respective places in society, but a fact. Keith found himself swiftly
speculating on Mrs. Sherwood's origin and experience. She was endowed with
a new glamour because of Mrs. Morrell's enigmatic remark the evening
before, and also--for Keith was very human--with a new attraction. Feeling
vaguely and boyishly devilish, Keith. stopped.

She nodded at him, laying her work aside.

"You are practically invisible." she told him.

"Making ourselves a habitation. Seen Mrs. Keith?"

"No. I don't think she's come in."

Keith hesitated, then:

"I think I'll go up to the house for her."

Mrs. Sherwood nodded, and resumed her work calmly, without further remark.

At the house Keith found Nan, her apron on, her hair done up under a dust
cap, very busy.

"Noon?" she cried, astonished. "It can't be! But I can't stop now. I think
I'll have Wing pick me up a lunch. There's plenty in the house. It's too
much bother to clean up."

Keith demurred; then wanted to stay for the pick-up lunch himself. Nan
would have none of it. She was full of repressed enthusiasm and eagerness,
but she wanted to get rid of him.

"There's not enough. I wouldn't have you around. Go away, that's a good
boy! If you'll leave Wing and me entirely alone we'll be ready to move in
to-morrow."

"Where's Gringo?" asked Keith by way of indirect yielding--he had really no
desire for a picked-up lunch.

"The little rascal! He started to chew everything in the place, so I tied
him in the backyard. He pulls and flops dreadfully. Do you think he'll
strangle himself?"

Keith looked out the window. Gringo, all four feet planted, was
determinedly straining back against his tether. The collar had pulled
forward all the loose skin of his neck, so that his eyes and features were
lost in wrinkles.

"He doesn't yap," volunteered Nan.

Keith gave it as his opinion that Gringo would stop short of suicide,
commended Gringo's taciturnity and evident perseverance, and departed for
the hotel. In the dining-room he saw Mrs. Sherwood in a riding habit,
eating alone. Keith hesitated, then took the vacant seat opposite. She
accorded this permission cordially, but without coquetry, remarking that
Sherwood often did not get in at noon. Immediately she turned the
conversation to Keith's affairs, inquiring in detail as to how the settling
was getting on, when they expected to get in, how they liked the house,
whether they had bought all the furniture.

"You remember I directed you to the auctions?" she said.

She asked all these questions directly, as a man would, and listened to his
replies.

"I suppose you have an office picked out?" she surmised.

At his mention of the Merchants' Exchange Building she raised her arched
eyebrows half humorously.

"You picked out an expensive place."

Keith went over his reasoning, to which she listened with a half smile.

"You may be right," she commented; "the reasoning is perfectly sound. But
that means you must get the business in order to make it pay. What are your
plans?"

He confessed that as yet they were rather vague; there had not been time to
do much--too busy settling.

"The usual thing, I suppose," he added: "get acquainted, hang out a
shingle, mix with people, sit down and starve in the traditional manner of
young lawyers."

He laughed lightly, but she refused to joke.

"There are a good many lawyers here--and most of them poor ones," she told
him. "The difficulty is to stand out above the ruck, to become noticed. You
must get to know all classes, of course; but especially those of your own
profession, men on the bench. Yes, especially men on the bench, they may
help you more than any others--"

He seemed to catch a little cynicism in her implied meaning, and
experienced a sense of shock on his professional side.

"You don't mean that judges are--"

"Susceptible to influence?" She finished the sentence for him with an
amused little laugh. She studied him for an instant with new interest,
"They're human--more human here than anywhere else--like the rest of us--
they respond to kind treatment--" She laughed again, but at the sight of
his face her own became grave. She checked herself. "Everything is so new
out here. In older countries the precedents have all been established. Out
here there are practically none. They are being made now, every day, by the
present judges. Naturally personal influence might get a hearing for one
point of view or the other--"

"I see what you mean," he agreed, his face clearing.

"Join a good fire company," she advised him. "That is the first thing to
do. Each company represents something different, a different class of men."

"Which would you advise?" asked Keith seriously.

"That is a matter for your own judgment. Only, investigate well. Meet all
the people you can. Know the newspaper men, and the big merchants. In your
profession you must cultivate men like Terry, Girvin, Shattuck, Gwin. Keep
your eyes open. Be bold and use your wits. Above all, make friends; that's
it, _make friends_--everybody, everywhere. Don't despise anybody. You will
get plenty of chances." She was sitting erect, and her eyes were flashing.
Her usual slow indolent grace had fallen from her; she radiated energy. Her
slender figure took on a new appearance of knit strength. "Such chances! My
heavens! if I were a man!"

"You'd make a bully man!" cried Keith. Mrs. Morrell, uttering the same
wish, had received from him a different reply, but he had forgotten that.

She laughed again, the tension broke, and she sank back into her usual
relaxed poise.

"But, thank heavens, I'm not," said she.

XIII

Affairs for the Keiths passed through another week of what might be called
the transition stage. It took them that long to settle down in their new
house and into some semblance of a routine--two days to the actual
installation, and the evenings full of small matters to arrange. Nan was
busy all day long playing with her new toy. The housekeeping was
fascinating, and Wing Sam a mixture of delight and despair. Like most women
who have led the sheltered life, she had not realized as yet that the
customs of her own fraction of one per cent, were not immutable. Therefore,
she tried to model the household exactly in the pattern of those to which
she had been accustomed. Wing Sam blandly refused to be moulded.

Thus Nan spent all one morning drilling him in the proper etiquette of
answering doors. Mindful of John McGlynn's advice, she did this by precept,
ringing her own door bell, presenting a card as though calling on herself.
Wing Sam's placid exterior changed not. A half hour later the door bell
rang, but no Wing Sam appeared to answer it. It rang again, and again,
until Nan herself opened the door. On the doorstep stood Wing Sam himself.

"I foolee you, too," he announced with huge delight.

Painstakingly Nan conveyed to him that this was neither an amusing game nor
a practical joke. Later in the day the door bell rang again. Nan, hovering
near to gauge the result of her training, saw Wing Sam plant himself firmly
in the opening.

"You got ticket?" he demanded sternly of the deliveryman outside. "You no
got ticket, you no get in!"

Which, Nan rather hysterically gathered, was what Wing Sam had gained of
the calling-card idea. After that, temporarily as she thought, Nan
permitted him to go back to his own method, which, had she known it, was
the method of every Chinese servant in California. The visitor found his
bell answered by a blandly smiling Wing Sam, who cheerfully remarked:
"Hullo!" It was friendly, and it didn't matter; but at that stage of her
development Nan was more or less scandalized.

Nan's sense of humour always came to her assistance by evening, and she had
many amusing anecdotes to tell Keith, over which both of them laughed
merrily. Gringo added somewhat to the complications in life. He was a fat,
roly-poly, soft-boned, ingratiating puppy, with a tail that waved
energetically but uncontrolledly. Gringo at times was very naughty, and
very much in the way. But when exasperation turned to vengeance he had a
way of keeling over on his back, spreading his hind legs apart in a manner
to expose his stomach freely to brutal assault, and casting one calm china-
blue eye upward.

"Can there anywhere exist any one so hard-hearted as to injure a poor,
absolutely defenceless dog?" he inquired, with full confidence in the
answer.

The iniquities of Gringo and the eccentricities of Wing Sam Nan detailed at
length, and also her experiences with the natives. She as yet looked on
every one as natives. Only later could she expand to the point of including
them in her cosmos of people. Nan was transplanted, and her roots had not
yet struck down into the soil. In her shopping peregrinations she was
making casual acquaintance, and she had not yet become accustomed to it.

"I bought some darling little casseroles at Phelan's to-day," she said.
"The whole Phelan family waited on me. Where do you suppose the women get
their perfectly awful clothes? Mrs. Phelan offered to take me to her
milliner!" or "You know Wilkins--the furniture man where we got the big
armchair? I was in there to-day, and he apologized because his wife hadn't
called!"

They went to bed early, because they were both very tired.

Keith also had generally passed an interesting day. Immediately after
breakfast he went to his office, and conscientiously sat a while. Sometimes
he wrote letters or cast up accounts; but there could not be much of this
to do. About ten or eleven o'clock his impatient temperament had had enough
of this, so he drifted over to the Monumental engine house. After
considerable thought he had decided to join this company. It represented
about the class of men with whom he wanted to affiliate himself--the
influential men of the lawyer, Southern-politician, large business men
type. There were many of these volunteer organizations. Their main purpose
was to fight fire; but they subserved other objects as well--political,
social, and financial. David Broderick, for example, already hated and
feared, partly owned and financed a company of ward-heelers who were
introducing and establishing the Tammany type of spoils politics. Casey,
later in serious trouble, practically manipulated another.

Among the Monumentals, Keith delighted especially in Bert Taylor. Bert
Taylor likewise delighted in Keith. The little chubby man's enthusiasm for
the company, while recognized as most valuable to the company's welfare,
had ended by boring most of the company's members. But Keith was a new
listener and avid for information. He had had no notion of how complicated
the whole matter could be. Bert Taylor dissertated sometimes on one phase
of the subject, sometimes on another.

"It's drills we need, and the fellows won't drill enough!" was Bert
Taylor's constant complaint. "What do they know about hose? They run it out
any way it comes; and roll it up anyhow, instead of doing a proper job."

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28