“How do you know I’m going to let you?” he said, stung.
“I’m a good clerk. You can’t get another as good any cheaper.” She found herself on the defensive and struck wildly. “You ought to anyway let me keep the job, to make up—”
“That’ll do,” he said harshly. Turning away from her he caught McCormick’s eye, which dropped quickly to the message he was sending. “Go take those messages off the hook and get them out, if you want a job so bad.”
She obeyed. It startled her to find she was meeting McCormick’s grin with a little twisted smile almost as cynical. What she wanted to do was to scream.
Late that afternoon she was leaning on the front counter, watching people go by outside the plate-glass windows and wondering what was the truth about them, when she felt McCormick’s gaze upon her. He came a step closer, putting his elbow on the counter beside hers, and spoke confidentially.
“Well, I guess you got the old man buffaloed, all right.”
“I wish you’d leave me alone,” she said in a hard, clear voice.
“Oh, what’s the use of getting sore? You’re a plucky little devil. I like you.” He spoke meditatively, as if considering impersonally his sensations. “Made a killing at poker last night,” he went on. When she did not answer, “There’s no string tied to a little loan.”
But this, even with the flash of hope it offered, was too much to be borne.
“Go away!” she cried. He strolled back to the wires, whistling.
She was checking up the last undelivered message at six o’clock and telling herself that she must go back to Mrs. Campbell’s for the night, when Mr. Roberts laid a telegram on the desk beside her. “I’ll try to keep the office going without your assistance,” he said with an attempt at sarcasm. “Don’t bother about me. Just get out.”
The flowing operator’s script danced before her eyes. She read it twice. “See your service this afternoon. Can offer Miss Davies night duty St. Francis hotel forty-five dollars a month report immediately. Bryant, Mgr.”
“San Francisco?” she stammered, incredulous, gazing at the S.F. dateline. Across the yellow sheet she looked at Mr. Roberts, seeing in his eyes a dislike that was almost hatred. “I’ll go tonight,” she said. “I think everything’s in order. That Ramsey message was out twice.”
When he had gone, she borrowed ten dollars from McCormick, promising to return it at the end of the month. She hardly resented his elaborately kissing the money goodbye, and holding her hand when he gave it to her. But she spent twenty-five cents of it to send a message from the station to Paul, though McCormick would have sent it for her as a note, costing nothing.
VIII
Cooped in a narrow space at the end of a long corridor, Helen sat gazing at the life of a great San Francisco hotel. Every moment the color and glitter shifted under the brilliant light of mammoth chandeliers. Tall, gilded elevator-doors opened and closed; women passed, wrapped in satins and velvets, airy feathers in their shining hair; men in evening dress escorted them; bellboys went by, carrying silver trays and calling unintelligibly, their voices rising above the continuous muffled stir and the faint sounds of music from the Blue Room.
Helen had choked the telegraph-sounder with a pencil, so that she might hear the music. But the tones of the violins came to her blurred by a low hum of voices, by the rustle of silks, by the soft movement of many feet on velvet carpets. Nothing was clear, simple, or distinct in the medley. Her ears were baffled, as her eyes were dazzled and her thoughts confused, by a multiplicity of sensations. San Francisco was a whirlpool, an endless roaring circle, stupendous and dizzying.
This had been her sick impression of it on that first morning, when she struggled through the eddying crowds at the ferry building, lugging her telescope-bag with one hand and with the other trying to hold her hat in place against gusts of wind. Beneath the uproar of streetcar gongs, of huge wagons rumbling over the cobbles, of innumerable hurrying feet, whistles, bells, shouts, she had felt a great impersonal current, terrifying in its heedlessness of all but its own mighty swirl, and she had had the sensation of standing at the brink of a maelstrom.
After ten months the impression still remained. But now she seemed to have been drawn into the motionless vertex. The city roared around her, still incomprehensible, still driven by its own breathless speed, but in the heart of it she was alien and untouched. She had found nothing in it but loneliness.
Her first terrors had vanished, leaving her with a frustrated sense of having been ridiculous in having them. She had gathered her whole strength for a great effort, and she had found nothing to do. Far from lying in wait with nameless dangers and pitfalls for the unwary stranger, the city apparently did not know she was there.
At the main telegraph-office Mr. Bryant had received her indifferently. He was a busy man; she was one detail of his routine work. He directed her to the St. Francis, asked her to report there at five o’clock, and, looking at her again, inquired whether she knew anyone in San Francisco or had arranged for a place to live. Three minutes later he handed her over to a brisk young woman, who gave her an address and told her what car to take to reach it.
She had found a shabby two-story house on Gough Street, with a discouraged palm in a tub on the front porch. A colorless woman showed her the room. It was a small, neat place under the eaves, furnished with an iron bed, a washstand, a chair, and a strip of rag carpet. The bathroom was on the lower floor, and the rent was two dollars and a half a week.
