She tried to hold her lips steady.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m glad you got a good job.”
“You mean you aren’t going to miss me when I’m gone?”
“Yes, I’ll miss you.”
“I’m going to miss you an awful lot,” he said huskily. “You going to write to me?”
“Yes, I’ll write if you will.”
“You aren’t going to forget me—you aren’t going to get to going with anybody else—are you?”
She could not answer. The trembling that shook them carried them beyond speech. Wind and darkness melted together in a rushing flood around them. The ache in her throat dissolved into tears, and they clung together, cheek against hot cheek, in voiceless misery.
“Oh, Helen! Oh, Helen!” She was crushed against the beating of his heart, his arms hurt her. She wanted them to hurt her. “You’re so—you’re so—sweet!” he stammered, and gropingly they found each other’s lips.
Words came back to her after a time.
“I don’t want you to go away,” she sobbed.
His arms tightened around her, then slowly relaxed. His chin lifted, and she knew that his mouth was setting into its firm lines again.
“I got to,” he said. The finality of the words was like something solid beneath their feet once more.
“Of course—I didn’t mean—” She moved a little away from him, smoothing her hair with a shaking hand. A new solemnity had descended upon them both. They felt dimly that life had changed for them, that it would never be the same again.
“I got to think about things,” he said.
“Yes—I know.”
“There’s mother. Fifty dollars a month. We just can’t—”
Tears were welling slowly from her eyes and running down her cheeks. She was not able to stop them.
“No,” she said. “I’ve got to do something to help at home, too.” She groped for the shawl at her feet. He picked it up and wrapped it carefully around her.
They walked up and down in the starlight, trying to talk soberly, feeling very old and sad, a weight on their hearts. Ripley was a station in the San Joaquin valley, he told her. He was going to be night operator there. He could not keep a shade of self-importance from his voice, but he explained conscientiously that there would not be much telegraphing. Very few train orders were sent there at night. But it was a good job for a beginner and pretty soon maybe he would be able to get a better one. Say, when he was twenty or twenty-one seventy-five dollars a month perhaps. It wouldn’t be long to wait. They were clinging together again.
“You—we mustn’t,” she said.
“It’s all right—just one—when you’re engaged.” She sobbed on his shoulder, and their kisses were salty with tears.
He left her at her gate. The memory of all the times they had stood there was the last unbearable pain. They held each other tight, without speaking.
“You—haven’t said—tell me you—love me,” he stammered after a long time.
“I love you,” she said, as though it were a sacrament. He was silent for another moment, and in the dim starlight she felt rather than saw a strange, half-terrifying expression on his face.
“Will you go away with me—right now—and marry me—if I ask you to?” His voice was hoarse.
She felt that she was taking all she was or could be in her cupped hands and offering it to him.
“Yes,” she said.
His whole body shook with a long sob. He tried to say something, choking, tearing himself roughly away from her. She saw him going down the road, almost running, and then the darkness hid him.
In the days that followed it seemed to her that she could have borne the separation better if she had not been left behind. He had gone down the shining lines of track beyond Cherokee Hill into a vague big world that baffled her thoughts. He wrote that he had been in San Francisco and taken a ride on a sightseeing car. It was a splendid place, he said; he wished she could see the things he saw. He had seen Chinatown, the Presidio, the beach, and Seal Rocks. Then he had gone on to Ripley, which wasn’t much like Masonville. He was well, and hoped she was, and he thought of her every day and was hers lovingly. Paul. But she felt that she was losing touch with him, and when she contemplated two or three long years of waiting she felt that she would lose him entirely. She thought again of that young couple at Rollo, and pangs of envy were added to the misery in which she was living.
He had been gone two weeks when she announced to her mother that she was going to be a telegraph-operator. She held to the determination with a tenacity that surprised even herself. She argued, she pleaded, she pointed out the wages she would earn, the money she could send home. There was a notice in the Masonville weekly paper, advertising a school of telegraphy in Sacramento, saying: “Operators in great demand. Graduates earn $75 to $100 a month up.” She wrote to that school, and immediately a reply came, assuring her that she could learn in three months, that railroad and telegraph companies were clamoring for operators, that the school guaranteed all its graduates good positions. The tuition was fifty dollars.
Her father said he guessed that settled it.
But in the end she won. When he renewed the mortgage he borrowed another hundred dollars from the bank. Fifty dollars seemed a fortune on which to live for three months. Her mother and she went over her clothes together, and her mother gave her the telescope-bag in which to pack them.
An awkward intimacy grew up between the two while they worked. Her mother said it was just as well for her to have a good
