She had served as a script girl in various studios and for various directors for ten years; earning first twenty, now a hundred dollars a week. She was lovely-looking and she was intelligent; at any moment in those years she might have asked for a screen test, but some quality of initiative or ambition had been lacking. Not a few times had her opinion made or broken incipient careers. Still she waited at directors’ elbows, increasingly aware that the years were slipping away.
That she had picked George as a victim amazed him most of all. Once, during the year before his marriage, there had been a momentary warmth; he had taken her to a Mayfair ball, and he remembered that he had kissed her going home that night in the car. The flirtation trailed along hesitatingly for a week. Before it could develop into anything serious he had gone East and met Kay.
Young Donovan had shown him a carbon of the letters he had signed.
They were written on the typewriter that he kept in his bungalow at the studio, and they were carefully and convincingly worded. They purported to be love letters, asserting that he was Margaret Donovan’s lover, that he wanted to marry her, and that for that reason he was about to arrange a divorce. It was incredible. Someone must have seen him sign them that morning; someone must have heard her say: “Your initials are like Mr. Harris’s.”
George was tired. He was training for a screen football game to be played next week, with the Southern California varsity as extras, and he was used to regular hours. In the middle of a confused and despairing sequence of thought about Margaret Donovan and Kay, he suddenly yawned. Mechanically he went upstairs, undressed and got into bed.
Just before dawn Kay came to him in the garden. There was a river that flowed past it now, and boats faintly lit with green and yellow lights moved slowly, remotely by. A gentle starlight fell like rain upon the dark, sleeping face of the world, upon the black mysterious bosoms of the trees, the tranquil gleaming water and the farther shore.
The grass was damp, and Kay came to him on hurried feet; her thin slippers were drenched with dew. She stood upon his shoes, nestling close to him, and held up her face as one shows a book open at a page.
“Think how you love me,” she whispered. “I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.”
“You’ll always be like this to me.”
“Oh no; but promise me you’ll remember.” Her tears were falling. “I’ll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight.”
The scene dissolved slowly but George struggled into consciousness. He sat up in bed; it was morning. In the yard outside he heard the nurse instructing his son in the niceties of behaviour for two-month-old babies. From the yard next door a small boy shouted mysteriously: “Who let that barrier through on me?”
Still in his pyjamas, George went to the phone and called his lawyers. Then he rang for his man, and while he was being shaved a certain order evolved from the chaos of the night before. First, he must deal with Margaret Donovan; second, he must keep the matter from Kay, who in her present state might believe anything; and third, he must fix things up with Kay. The last seemed the most important of all.
As he finished dressing he heard the phone ring downstairs and, with an instinct of danger, picked up the receiver.
“Hello … Oh, yes.” Looking up, he saw that both his doors were closed. “Good morning, Helen … It’s all right, Dolores. I’m taking it up here.” He waited till he heard the receiver click downstairs.
“How are you this morning, Helen?”
“George, I called up about last night. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”
“Sorry? Why are you sorry?”
“For treating you like that. I don’t know what was in me, George. I didn’t sleep all night thinking how terrible I’d been.”
A new disorder established itself in George’s already littered mind.
“Don’t be silly,” he said. To his despair he heard his own voice run on: “For a minute I didn’t understand, Helen. Then I thought it was better so.”
“Oh, George,” came her voice after a moment, very low.
Another silence. He began to put in a cuff button.
“I had to call up,” she said after a moment. “I couldn’t leave things like that.”
The cuff button dropped to the floor; he stooped to pick it up, and then said “Helen!” urgently into the mouthpiece to cover the fact that he had momentarily been away.
“What, George?”
At this moment the hall door opened and Kay, radiating a faint distaste, came into the room. She hesitated.
“Are you busy?”
“It’s all right.” He stared into the mouthpiece for a moment.
“Well, goodbye,” he muttered abruptly and hung up the receiver. He turned to Kay: “Good morning.”
“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” she said distantly.
“You didn’t disturb me.” He hesitated. “That was Helen Avery.”
“It doesn’t concern me who it was. I came to ask you if we’re going to the Coconut Grove tonight.”
“Sit down, Kay.”
“I don’t want to talk.”
“Sit down a minute,” he said impatiently. She sat down. “How long are you going to keep this up?” he demanded.
“I’m not keeping up anything. We’re simply through, George, and you know it as well as I do.”
“That’s absurd,” he said. “Why, a week ago—”
“It doesn’t matter. We’ve been getting nearer to this for months, and now it’s over.”
“You mean you don’t love me?” He was not particularly alarmed. They had been through
