Then she thought, smiling, that in a little while she would go downstairs and eat supper in a restaurant, and then she would buy a tablet and pencil and, coming back to this beautiful room, she would sit down all alone and write a letter to Paul.
IV
The thought of Paul was the one clear reality in Helen’s life while she blundered through the bewilderments of the first months in Sacramento. It was the only thing that warmed her in the midst of the strangeness that surrounded her like a thin, cold fog.
There was the school. She did not know what she had expected, but she felt vaguely that she had not found it. Faithfully every morning at eight o’clock she was at her table in the dingy back room, struggling to translate the dots and dashes of the Morse alphabet into crisp, even clicks of the sounder. There were three other pupils, farm boys who moved their necks uncomfortably in stiff collars and reddened when they looked at her.
There was a wire from that room into the front office. Sometimes its sounder opened, and they knew that Mr. Weeks was going to send them something to copy. They moved to that table eagerly. There were days when the sounder did not click again, and after a while one of the boys would tiptoe to the office and report that Mr. Weeks was asleep. On other days the sounder would tap for a long time meaninglessly, while they looked at each other in bewilderment. Then it would make a few shaky letters and stop and make a few more.
Then for several days Mr. Weeks would not come to the school at all. They sank into a kind of stupor, sitting in the close, warm room, while flies buzzed on the windowpane. Helen’s moist fingertips stuck to the hard rubber of the key; it was an effort to remember the alphabet. But she kept at work doggedly, knowing how much depended upon her success. Always before her was the vision of the station where she would work with Paul, a little yellow station with housekeeping rooms upstairs. She thought, too, of the debt she owed her father, and the help she could give him later when she was earning money.
Bit by bit she learned a little about the other pupils. Two of them had come down from Mendocino County together. They had worked two summers to earn the money, and yet they had been able to save only seventy-five dollars for the tuition. However, they had been sharp enough to persuade Mr. Weeks to take them for that sum. They lived together in one room, and cooked their meals over the gas-jet. It was one of them who asked Helen if she knew that gas would kill a person.
“If you turned it on for a long time and set fire to it, I suppose it would burn you up,” she said doubtfully.
“I don’t mean that way,” he informed her, excited. “It kills you if you just breathe it long enough. It’s poison.” After that she looked with terrified respect at the gas-jet in her room, and was always very careful to turn it off tightly.
The other boy had a more knowing air and smoked cigarettes. He swaggered a little, giving them to understand that he was a man of the world and knew all the wickedness of the city. He looked at Helen with eyes she did not like, and once asked her to go to a show with him. Although she was very lonely and had never seen a show in a real theater, she refused. She felt that Paul would not like her to go. At the end of three months in Sacramento these were the only people she knew, except Mrs. Brown.
She felt that she would like Mrs. Brown if she knew her better. Her shyness kept her from saying more than “Good evening,” when she handed her meal-ticket over the restaurant counter to be punched, and for some inexplicable reason Mrs. Brown seemed shy with her. It was her own fault, Helen thought; Mrs. Brown laughed and talked gaily with the men customers, cajoling them into buying cigars and chewing-gum from her little stock.
Helen speculated about Mr. Brown. She never saw him; she felt quite definitely that he was not alive. Yet Mrs. Brown often looked at her wide wedding-ring, turning it on her finger as if she were not quite accustomed to wearing it. A widow, and so young! Helen’s heart ached at the thought of that brief romance. Mrs. Brown’s thin figure and bright yellow hair were those of a girl; only her eyes were old. It must be grief that had given them that hard, weary look. Helen smiled at her wistfully over the counter, longing to express her friendliness and sympathy. But Mrs. Brown’s manner always baffled her.
These meetings were not frequent. Helen tried to make her three-dollar meal ticket last a month, and that meant that only five times a week she could sit in state, eating warm food in an atmosphere thick with smells of coffee and stew and hamburger steak. She had learned that cinnamon rolls could be bought for half price on Saturday nights, and she kept a bag of them in her room, and some fruit. This made her a little uneasy when she saw Mrs. Brown’s anxious eye on the vacant tables; she felt that she was defrauding Mrs. Brown by eating in her room.
Mrs. Brown worked very hard, Helen knew. It was she who swept the hall and kept the rooms in order. She did not do it very well, but Helen saw
