“I don’t know. I suppose I’ll always love you in a way.” Suddenly she began to sob. “Oh, it’s all so sad. He’s cared for me so long.”
George stared at her. Face to face with what was apparently a real emotion, he had no words of any kind. She was not angry, not threatening or pretending, not thinking about him at all, but concerned entirely with her emotions towards another man.
“What is it?” he cried. “Are you trying to tell me you’re in love with this man?”
“I don’t know,” she said helplessly.
He took a step towards her, then went to the bed and lay down on it, staring in misery at the ceiling. After a while a maid knocked to say that Mr. Busch and Mr. Castle, George’s lawyer, were below. The fact carried no meaning to him. Kay went into her room and he got up and followed her.
“Let’s send word we’re out,” he said. “We can go away somewhere and talk this over.”
“I don’t want to go away.”
She was already away, growing more mysterious and remote with every minute. The things on her dressing-table were the property of a stranger.
He began to speak in a dry, hurried voice. “If you’re still thinking about Helen Avery, it’s nonsense. I’ve never given a damn for anybody but you.”
They went downstairs and into the living-room. It was nearly noon—another bright emotionless California day. George saw that Arthur Busch’s ugly face in the sunshine was wan and white; he took a step towards George and then stopped, as if he were waiting for something—a challenge, a reproach, a blow.
In a flash the scene that would presently take place ran itself off in George’s mind. He saw himself moving through the scene, saw his part, an infinite choice of parts, but in every one of them Kay would be against him and with Arthur Busch. And suddenly he rejected them all.
“I hope you’ll excuse me,” he said quickly to Mr. Castle. “I called you up because a script girl named Margaret Donovan wants fifty thousand dollars for some letters she claims I wrote her. Of course the whole thing is—” He broke off. It didn’t matter. “I’ll come to see you tomorrow.” He walked up to Kay and Arthur, so that only they could hear.
“I don’t know about you two—what you want to do. But leave me out of it; you haven’t any right to inflict any of it on me, for after all it’s not my fault. I’m not going to be mixed up in your emotions.”
He turned and went out. His car was before the door and he said “Go to Santa Monica” because it was the first name that popped into his head. The car drove off into the everlasting hazeless sunlight.
He rode for three hours, past Santa Monica and then along towards Long Beach by another road. As if it were something he saw out of the corner of his eye and with but a fragment of his attention, he imagined Kay and Arthur Busch progressing through the afternoon. Kay would cry a great deal and the situation would seem harsh and unexpected to them at first, but the tender closing of the day would draw them together. They would turn inevitably towards each other and he would slip more and more into the position of the enemy outside.
Kay had wanted him to get down in the dirt and dust of a scene and scramble for her. Not he; he hated scenes. Once he stooped to compete with Arthur Busch in pulling at Kay’s heart, he would never be the same to himself. He would always be a little like Arthur Busch; they would always have that in common, like a shameful secret. There was little of the theatre about George; the millions before whose eyes the moods and changes of his face had flickered during ten years had not been deceived about that. From the moment when, as a boy of twenty, his handsome eyes had gazed off into the imaginary distance of a Griffith Western, his audience had been really watching the progress of a straightforward, slow-thinking, romantic man through an accidentally glamorous life.
His fault was that he had felt safe too soon. He realized suddenly that the two Fairbankses, in sitting side by side at table, were not keeping up a pose. They were giving hostages to fate. This was perhaps the most bizarre community in the rich, wild, bored empire, and for a marriage to succeed here, you must expect nothing or you must be always together. For a moment his glance had wavered from Kay and he stumbled blindly into disaster.
As he was thinking this and wondering where he would go and what he should do, he passed an apartment house that jolted his memory. It was on the outskirts of town, a pink horror built to represent something, somewhere, so cheaply and sketchily that whatever it copied the architect must have long since forgotten. And suddenly George remembered that he had once called for Margaret Donovan here the night of a Mayfair dance.
“Stop at this apartment!” he called through the speaking-tube.
He went in. The negro elevator boy stared open-mouthed at him as they rose in the cage. Margaret Donovan herself opened the door.
When she saw him she shrank away with a little cry. As he entered and closed the door she retreated before him into the front room. George followed.
It was twilight outside and the apartment was dusky and sad. The last light fell softly on the standardized furniture and the great gallery of signed photographs of moving-picture people that covered one wall. Her face was white, and as she stared at him she began nervously wringing her hands.
“What’s this nonsense, Margaret?” George said, trying to keep any reproach out of his voice. “Do you need money that bad?”
She shook her head vaguely. Her eyes were still fixed on him with a sort ofterror; George looked at the floor.
“I suppose
