In the square hotel room, under the garish light that emphasized the ugliness of red carpet and varnished mahogany furniture, she moved about as usual, opening the windows, hanging up her hat and coat, unfastening her bag. She did not forget the customary pleasant word to the bellboy who brought ice-water, and he saw nothing unusual in her white face and bright eyes. This hotel saw her only on her return trips from the tract, and she was always exhausted after making or losing a sale. She locked the door behind him, and began to undress.
Paul must not be involved. She must manage to shield him. A sensation of nausea swept over her. The vulgarity, the cheap coarseness of it! But she must not think. She was too tired. Why had she blundered into such a situation? What change had the years made in Bert? Her thoughts, touching him, recoiled. She would not think of Paul. To have the two in her mind together was intolerable, it was the essence of her humiliation. Married to one man, bound to him by a thousand memories that rushed upon her, and loving another, engaged to him! No fine, self-respecting woman could be in such a position. But she was. She must face that fact. No, she must not face it. Not until she was rested, in command of herself.
She bathed, scrubbing her skin until it glowed painfully. Cold-cream was not enough for her face and hands. She rubbed them with soap, with harsh towels. At midnight she was washing her hair. If only she could slip out of her body, run away from herself into a new personality, forget completely all that she was or had been!
This was hysteria, she told herself. “Only hold on, have patience, wait. The days will go past you. Life clears itself, like running water. It will be all right somehow. Don’t try to think. You’re too tired.”
At dawn her eyelids were weary at last, and she fell asleep. She prolonged the sleep consciously, half waking at intervals as the day grew brighter, pulling oblivion over her head again to shield herself from living, as a child hides beneath a quilt to keep away darkness.
Outside the world had awakened, going busily about its affairs while the day passed over it. The noise of the streets, voices, automobile-horns, rumbling wheels, came through the open windows with the hot sunshine, running like the sound of a river through her sleep. She awoke in the late afternoon, heavy-lidded, with creased cheeks, but once more quietly self-controlled.
Refreshed by a cold plunge, crisply dressed, composed, she ate dinner in the big, softly lighted dining-room, nodding across white tables to the business men she knew. Then, led by an impulse she did not question, she went out into the crowded streets. With her walked the ghost of the girl who had come down from Masonville, dazzled, wide-eyed, so pitifully sure of herself, to learn to telegraph.
Sacramento had changed. It had been a big town; it was now a city, radiating interurban lines, thrusting tall buildings toward the sky, smudging that sky with the smoke of factories and canneries. Its streets were sluggishly moving floods of automobiles; its wharves were crowded with boats; across the wide, yellow river spans of new bridges were reaching toward each other.
All the statistics of the city’s growth, of the great reclamation projects, of the rich farms spreading over the old grain lands, were at Helen’s fingertips. A hundred times she had gone over them, drawn conclusions from them, pounded home-selling arguments with them, since she had added Sacramento valley lands to the San Joaquin properties she handled. But more eloquently her reviving memories showed her the gulf between the old days and the new.
Mrs. Brown’s little restaurant and the room where Helen had lived, were gone. In their place stood a six-story office building of raw new brick. That imposing street down which she had stumbled awkwardly after Mrs. Campbell was now a row of dingy boardinghouses. Mrs. Campbell’s house itself, once so awe-inspiring, had become a disconsolate building with peeling paint, standing in a ragged lawn, and across the porch where she and Paul had said goodbye in the dawn there was now a black and gold sign, “Ah Wong, Chinese Herb Doctor.” She went quickly past it.
For the first time in the hurried years her thoughts turned inward, self-questioning, and she tried to follow step by step the changes that had taken place in her. But she could not see them clearly for the memory of the girl that she had been, a girl she saw now as a piteous young thing quite outside herself, a lovely, emotional, valiant young struggler against unknown odds. She felt an aching compassion, a longing to shield that girl from the life she had faced with such blind courage, to save her youth and sweetness. But the girl, of course, was gone, like the room from which she had looked so eagerly at the automobile.
It was eleven o’clock when she walked briskly through the groups in the hotel lobby, took her key from the room clerk and left a call for the early San Francisco train. She would reach the city in time to get the final contracts for the sale she had made yesterday, to take them to San José and get them signed the same day. The thought of Bert lay like a menace in the back of her mind, but she kept it there. She could not foresee what would happen; she would meet it when it occurred. Meantime she would go about her work as usual. Her attitude toward the future, her attitude toward even herself, was one of waiting. She fell quietly asleep.
On
