She liked to talk to Mr. Clark. Three years of working with him had brought her an understanding of this nervous, quick-witted, harassed man. There was comradeship between them, a sympathy tempered by wariness on both sides. Neither would have lost the slightest business advantage for the other, but beyond that necessary antagonism they were friends. She watched with pleasure the quick play of his mind, managing hers as he would have handled the thoughts of a buyer; she was conscious that he saw the motives behind her method of counterattack; a business interview between them was like a friendly bout between fencers. But he spoke to her sometimes of the wife and children whose pictures were on his desk; she knew how deeply he was devoted to them. And once, during an idle evening in a Stockton hotel, he had held her breathless with the whole story of his business career, talking to her as he might have talked to himself.
Today there seemed to her an added shade of effort in his briskly cheerful manner. The lines around his shrewd eyes had deepened since she first knew him, and it struck her, as she settled into the chair facing his across the flat desk, that his hair was quite gray. With the alert, keen expression taken from his face he would appear an old man.
This expression was intensified when she spoke of the war, questioned its effect on the business. It would have no effect, he assured her. The future had never been brighter; Sacramento lands were booming; fifty new settlers were going into Ripley Farmland Acres that fall. Chaos on the stock market would make the solid investment values of land even more apparent. If the war lasted a year or longer the prices of American crops would rise.
“I was wondering about the psychological effect,” she murmured. Mr. Clark ran a nervous hand through his hair.
“Oh, that’s all right. High prices will take care of the buyer’s psychology.”
She laughed.
“While you take care of the salesman’s.” A twinkle in his eyes answered the smile in hers, but she spoke again before he replied. “Mr. Clark, I’d like to ask you something—rather personal. What do you really get out of business?”
A quizzical smile deepened the lines around his mouth.
“Well, I got two million dollars out of it in the Portland boom! It’s a game,” he said after a moment. “Just a game. That’s all. I’ve made two fortunes—you know that—and lost them. And now I’m climbing up again. Oh, if I had it to do over again, I—” He changed the words on his lips—“I’d do the same thing. No doubt about it. We all think we wouldn’t, but we would. We don’t make our lives. They make us.”
“Fatalist?”
“Fatalist.” They smiled at each other again as she rose and held out her hand. He kept it a moment in a steadying grasp. “By the way, have you heard that your husband’s around?”
“Yes.” She thanked him with her eyes. “Goodbye.”
She was oppressed by a sense of futility, of the hopeless muddle of living, while the train carried her down the peninsula toward San José. To escape from it she concentrated her attention on the afternoon papers.
They were filled with wild rumors, with names of strange towns in Belgium, a mass of clamoring bulletins, confusing, yet somehow making clear a picture of gray hordes moving, irresistible as a monstrous machine, toward France, toward Paris. She was surprised by her passion of resistance. Intolerable, that the Germans should march into Paris! Why should she care so fiercely, she who knew nothing of Paris, nothing but chance scraps of facts about Europe?
“I must learn French,” she said to herself, and was appalled by the multitude of things she did not know, both without and within herself.
The unsigned contracts in their long manila envelope were like an anchor in a tossing sea. She must get them signed that night. It was something to do, a definite action. She telephoned from the station, making an appointment with the buyer, and felt the familiar routine closing around her again while the streetcar carried her down First Street to her office.
Bert was sitting in her chair, smoking and talking enthusiastically to Hutchinson, when she opened the door. The shock petrified them all. The two men stared at her, Hutchinson’s expression of easy good humor frozen on his face; Bert’s hand, extended in the old, flashing gesture, suspended in the air. The door closed behind her.
Later she remembered Hutchinson’s blood-red face, his awkward, even comical, efforts to stammer that he hadn’t expected her, that he must be going, his blind search for his hat, his confused departure. At the moment she seemed to be advancing to meet Bert in an otherwise empty room, and though she felt herself trembling from head to foot her hands and her voice were quite steady.
“How do you do?” she said, beginning to unbutton her gloves:
Though she had not been able to remember his face, it was as familiar as if she had seen it every day; the low white forehead with the lock of fair hair across it, the bright eyes, the aquiline nose, the rather shapeless mouth—No, she had not remembered that his mouth was like that. Her experienced eye saw
