CHAPTER IV
The next evening when Claire arrived at the Café Ithaca she found that the inevitable had happened. Lycurgus had engaged a staff of entertainers. There were two women, a "professor" who played rag on the piano, and a man with an assortment of percussion instruments, including drums, which he managed to manipulate with extraordinary dexterity.
"We're just trying this as a kind of lay-off," explained one of the women to Claire, with professional hauteur. "We've been doing all the best places, and we're that worn out! What's your line?"
"I play the piano," returned Claire.
The woman shifted a gilt hairpin, sweeping the room as she did so with a critical glance.
"Well, I shouldn't think they'd need more 'n one good rag-player here," she announced, with impartial candor.
"They don't," said Claire. "I'm pretty bad at it myself."
"Oh, I'm sure I didn't mean nothing personal," threw back the other, surprised and mollified by Claire's modest claims. "I guess you must have some sort of class! Otherwise you wouldn't figure at all!"
Jimmy explained the new condition to Claire. "The boss wants you to play Greek tunes. I told you not to worry."
Things moved rather furiously this first night, and the noise and bang lured some of the Greek patrons into the back room. The women sang dreadfully—the big blonde who had talked to Claire, in a deafening, female baritone; the other woman with the painful self-consciousness of one struggling to retain the remnants of a voice that had once had promise. This second woman had large, appealing brown eyes that seemed always on the verge of tears, especially when she sang.
"She's got two kids and a sick sister to support," Claire's blond friend volunteered during a pause in the evening's entertainment. "Kit's had some pretty tough goings, all right, but then I guess we ain't none of us been brought up in steam-heated go-carts. I've taken three fliers at getting married myself, so I ought to qualify for a certificate from that old trouble school. Oh, I'm nothing if not game! A gentleman friend said to me only last night, 'Say, Madge, what I like about you is that you're always ready to take a chance.' And I am—otherwise I wouldn't be here. What rake-off does the old boy give you on the drinks you sell?"
"Drinks I sell?" echoed Claire. "Why, I don't sell drinks."
"Oh, come now, don't get haughty! Of course you don't draw 'em out at the spigot. You're there with the big suggestion, ain't you, when the boys don't know whether to order beer or White Rock?"
"No, I can't say that I am. You see, we haven't been running much of a café here so far."
"Well, I should say you haven't! You've been running a Childs restaurant. But you just watch me wake 'em up!" And with that Madge crossed over to a table in the corner where six Greeks were having cognac and Turkish coffee, and she sat down.... Presently Jimmy flew in with three bottles of beer. Madge waved a triumphant hand to Claire, who had just begun to play a Greek shepherd dance.
"Didn't I tell you I'd wake 'em up?" she called out, gaily.
Claire saw Lycurgus coming toward her, rubbing his hands with satisfaction.
"Ah, Miss Robson, that girl ... she knows how! I guess now we do a good business, eh?"
Claire threw him a warped smile as she began to play. But in spite of the fact that a score or more of the old patrons were within earshot, there was no attempt at folk-dancing.
"This is the end!" thought Claire, as she yielded her place to the "professor."
At that moment Doctor Danilo came in.
"Improvements?" he half questioned, lifting his eyebrows significantly to Claire. "Let us sit down and have coffee."
He had brought her two books on Serbia—a brief history and a sketch of modern conditions. Claire bent forward attentively as he opened first one and then the other, explaining the pictures, tracing the war's progress on the inevitable maps. Finally she said:
"Did you interest your patient?"
"Scarcely. He was not in good condition to-day. But then one never can tell. Knocks upon the head are full of possibilities. He is indifferent. If he were not an American, I would think him in love. But Americans, really, they never have time for foolishness."
He sat with Claire until long after midnight. When she arose to leave he insisted upon taking her home in his car.
The next evening Madge said to her:
"No wonder you don't waste your time on the other guys around here! Folks who can make home-runs don't figure on stealing any bases."
There followed a hectic period of prosperity for the Café Ithaca. At once it seemed that everybody in San Francisco knew of it and was determined to lay violent hands upon its cut-to-measure gaiety. The entertainers were changed rapidly. Madge departed one evening in a blaze of wrath because some "fresh guy" laughed at her friend Kit's painful attempts at song. Kit threw herself upon a chair in the dressing-room and sobbed her heart out.
"Don't you care, Kit, he wasn't no gentleman!" It had been pathetic to discover what comfort these two women managed to extract from so frugal a solace.
So this was the gay and frivolous life of the café entertainer at close range! It never really had occurred to Claire to fancy that most of these women were meeting the responsibilities of life with a ghastly smile. Even Madge had her duties. There was a crippled child in some hospital, the sad spawn of a weak relation, that Madge was sponsoring. Claire had heard of this quite by accident one night when Madge's temper caught her off guard. A party of vaudeville performers had come in for a midnight frolic, and in the course of the hilarity one of the women stood up on her chair and sang a tear-starting ballad about a gray-haired mother and a family mortgage and a wayward son who seemed to continue his course merely to provide a becoming background for his mother's silver hair. Quantities of loose change had met this effort, and the lady gathered up the scant folds of her very red dress as she bent over and picked up every coin, to the last penny.
"Can you beat that?" Madge had demanded fiercely of Claire. "I'm getting kinder tired of the way Lycurgus lets this foreign talent walk away with the goods. I don't care for myself, but I need every extra dime I pick up." And she had explained to Claire about this warped fragment of humanity and her responsibility. "I'm its god-mother, and I come through with all the extra money I rake in."
After that Claire found the insolently flung coins assuming new values.
But all the entertainers were not cast in the heroic mold of self-sacrifice. Claire discovered that there was just as much heartlessness, and greed, and middle-class smugness among these people as there was in any other walk of life. In short, Claire was learning something about the law of average, learning to be unsurprised by a flash of gold in the dullest panful, or as equally unmoved when some dazzling bit proved dross.
She began to wonder how long she could stand the new atmosphere of the Café Ithaca. There was a certain irony in discovering herself on the verge of rout by the intrusion of her own countrymen. There was no doubt that a corroding influence was eating out the simplicity of the old life of the quarter. In the coffee-houses the alien customs still persisted, and the men danced their dances of greeting with all the old fervor, sipping their grenadine syrup and Turkish coffee between-times, but in the Café Ithaca rag-time was king, and the Greeks were learning that it was neither necessary nor desirable to leave untouched the fingers of their female partners.
"That, in itself, means nothing," Danilo had said to Claire one evening, as they sat discussing the subject; "but it is dangerous for a people to lose its symbols ... unless there is offered something better, and I cannot say...."
He swept the room with a significant glance.
Claire had to admit that nothing better had been offered, nor anything quite so good. She had practically nothing to do, now. Once in a while some Greek asked her to play one of the old folk tunes, but her efforts fell upon irresponsive ears. She knew, also, that some of the entertainers resented her professional aloofness. Not that she consciously stood apart from them. But they were quick to measure the difference in her attitude, the fact that she appeared to have very little to do, and that she was not expected to cajole the unattached male frequenters into buying drinks. She could not have said just why this last service was not insisted upon, now that she had so little opportunity to earn her salary, but she concluded it was one of those intangible situations which continually put to rout the theory that cold logic sways the world. Measured by every practical standard, Claire should have either earned her way or been dismissed; but Lycurgus for some mysterious reason saw fit to ignore the claims of expediency in Claire's case.
Danilo had become a frequent—almost a nightly—visitor at the Café Ithaca. He came with books for Claire, about Serbia, about the war, about the place America was playing in the struggle. In the intervals she contrived to learn something about Stillman. His accident had kept him indoors longer than the doctor had expected. It appeared that these two suddenly had become warm friends.
"I find he has been to my country," Danilo told her one night. "He has been everywhere; but why not? One must pass the time in some way.... 'You are a waster,' I said to him yesterday."
"And what did he say to that?" Claire asked, eagerly.
"He said: 'I am a reaction.... I come of a people who lived hard. The race is resting up after the struggle. For over three hundred years we have been subduing the wilderness. That is why we are willing to let the others step in and do the work.' But he is not quite fair to himself, now.... I understand that he is doing great things for his own government. His friends say he is quite changed.... He is a fine man. Already I think of him as a brother."
Claire glimpsed a new Stillman in these fragments which the doctor brought her. It was the man-to-man Stillman, without artifice and reservations. And she had an added sense of masculine unity, of the impenetrable circle that men draw about their conduct, so far as the other sex is concerned. She found that he had been moved to even deeper revelations under the sympathetic intriguing of one of his own kind. He even told the doctor about his wife.
"I do not think he is a man who has many confidants," Danilo explained. "I do not know why he tells these things to me. Perhaps my profession has something to do with it. It is not such a great step from physical to spiritual confessions. And then I am really not a part of his intimate circle. He has nothing to fear from finding himself betrayed in his own house, so to speak. But there is one thing I have not yet learned. And what is more, I do not think I shall—from him. There is a woman, somewhere. But a man like Stillman does not speak of the thing near his heart."
She felt herself tremble. The doctor leaned forward.
"I am talking too much about this patient of mine," he laughed. "I'm stirring your imagination. I keep forgetting that I have my own hand to play."
Claire drew back. His dark eyes were lit with sudden fire. She trembled again, but this time like a blade of dry grass caught in the hot wind-eddies of a near-by blaze.
"Ah, doctor! You are like them all!" suddenly escaped her.
"All?" His voice quivered with indignation. She had never seen any one so wounded. For a moment she was stunned. She did not reply.
He rose with a quick, nervous movement.
"I must be going," he said, harshly. "A doctor, you know ... yes, a doctor's time is never his own."
She knew that he was lying. His face had lost its glowing color, his full lips had thinned. She had never experienced anything like this before. It was not the grossness of Flint nor the restrained ardor of Stillman; it was desire charmed by the hope of virtue and angered at the possibility of finding this hope a mirage. And it was something even more exacting than this—it was desire allied to egotism, a wish to be first in the field.... So it had come ... at last! It had come and she felt afraid!...
On her way home that night she thought it all over. Yes, somehow, with joy covering her parted lips tempestuously, she had the will to think calmly on one point. To-morrow she would tell Danilo that she knew Stillman. She must tell him. She had not meant to be deceitful, but for some reason it was not easy for her to discuss even casual masculine relationships with Danilo. It would be hard, but she must tell him ... everything! Everything?... Even about that last night when.... Well, perhaps there were some things that still belonged to her.... some secrets that were her very own.
Danilo stayed away from the Café Ithaca for two days. He came in again, smiling. But he did not mention Stillman's name, and Claire's resolution to tell him that she knew his patient was put to rout. Instead, he talked about Claire's personal fortunes with a direct and puzzling sympathy. He wanted to know everything—about herself, her prospects, her mother. Claire found it impossible to resent his inquisitiveness. There was something bland and childlike about it. At the conclusion of their talk he said:
"I should like to call on your mother, sometime. Not professionally ... just as a friend."
He arrived at the Clay Street flat the next afternoon. Claire had prepared her mother for the visit.
"A new doctor," she had explained, without going into any further details. Mrs. Robson had got to a point where she asked no questions.
He stepped laughingly into Mrs. Robson's cramped bedroom, and as she turned her face broke into a smile. It was the first laugh and the first smile that this dreary room had seen for months. He talked about the weather, became interested in a picture that hung on the wall, told an amusing story that he had chanced upon that morning. It was as if a window suddenly had been opened to a cleansing breeze.
After that he came every day. He was never empty-handed. He brought flowers, or sweetmeats from the Greek quarter, or delicate morsels that he picked up in the markets. Mrs. Robson grew to watch for his coming. He called her "Little Mother" in the Russian fashion. She would smile warmly as she listened to him linger caressingly over this term of endearment. He seemed to have the greatest respect for Mrs. Robson, but he was brutally indifferent to the poor little seamstress, Miss Proll, whom he ran into once or twice as he was leaving the house.
"These spinsters!" he would say with scorn, as she passed him on the stairs.
He seemed to concede anything to a woman who had fulfilled the obligations of motherhood, but he found nothing to excuse the lack.
His visits quite transformed the atmosphere of the Robson household. It was incredible that ten minutes a day in the thrall of a personality, hearty and masculine, could so change the anemic current of gloom that had encompassed these women. Mrs. Robson began to take a fragmentary interest in life. Indeed, if it had not been for the noncommittal words of the doctor in answer to Claire's inquiries regarding her mother's chance for improvement, she would have been misled into hoping for better days.
It was plain that Danilo's own hearthstone was a tradition, something stretching back into a misty past, and that he was finding a stimulation in crossing the threshold of this far Western home. All his life had been spent in wanderings. There was a touch of the nomad about him. He had starved in Paris, studied relentlessly in Berlin, and walked the streets of New York penniless. He had lived in hospitals, and wretched rooming-houses, and cold, impersonal hotels. The first years of his youth had been surrendered ruthlessly to his profession. There was a shade of cruelty in the pictures which he drew of his relentless ardor for learning, in those soul-thirsty days. One would have thought that all these years of wandering had taken the edge off any national feeling, but he seemed suddenly to have flamed with the old folk-consciousness, as some bare twig bursts into a white heat of bloom with the coming of spring. Now all the fury that moved him to assault the ramparts of learning was being poured out in the prospect of personal sacrifice for his native land. He was caught up in this cloud of fire and transfigured. When he spoke of these things Claire felt awe. She had never yet beheld a man gripped by an emotional enthusiasm.
"You are wondering, no doubt," he would say again and again, "why I have not gone back ... before! But it seemed best ... to wait. My country will need men of my profession, later.... Later, I shall do things. I shall bind up wounds. Ah, it had not been easy to persuade myself to wait. It is never easy. To move with the crowd, that is easy ... even when the crowd moves to certain death. But to sit and wait for your appointed time ... with people sneering beneath their smiles ... no, that is not easy!"
Once she asked him about his parents. His father, it appeared, had been a professor of Greek in the university at Belgrade; his mother from peasant stock, the daughter of a prosperous landed proprietor. He seemed more proud of this peasant stock than of his father's high breeding. Claire was puzzled. To her American ears the very word peasant savored of unequality, of a certain checkmated opportunity.
"My father saw my mother during the season of fruit blossoms. He was traveling through the country after an illness, and my mother was standing in her father's orchard, among the flowering plum-trees. My father was no longer a young man, but it was the spring of the year!" he finished, with an eloquent gesture.
Now his father was dead. His mother ... he did not know. He had received no tidings for months. But it appeared that news of his people had always been infrequent. It was not precisely neglect—Claire was sure that the memory of these kinsfolk was always with him, something almost too real and tangible to call for confirmation in the shape of a formal exchange of greetings.
"Next fall, if she is still alive, I shall see this mother of mine," he finished.
Claire had a picture of him enfolding, unashamed, a stooping, wrinkled peasant woman in his eager arms—a peasant woman with a gaudy kerchief on her head. But she was surprised when on the next day he brought a picture of his mother to her.
She had a grave, handsome face, and her costume was at once simple and fashionable. And she was anything but bowed with age.
"And here are my two brothers and a sister!"
Claire took the photographs from him. "Oh, then there are others!"
"Others? Did you fancy that my mother was an American?" He laughed....
One afternoon early in May he came in with an unusual amount of bundles.
"See, Little Mother!" he called out, gaily, to Mrs. Robson. "To-day is my name-day and we shall have a feast!"
Mrs. Robson stared faintly.
"Ah, you do not understand! It is St. George's Day—the saint for whom I am named. In my country there would be a celebration, I can tell you!"
He was brimming over with good spirits. He had brought a chicken, a small tub of bitter, ripe olives, and three bottles of red wine and a ceremonial cake. He had even invested in a cheap icon, and a tiny glass swinging-lamp to burn before it, and he set the holy image up in a corner of the dining-room, much to Mrs. Robson's weak dismay. Even Claire felt a measure of disapproval at this act, as if acquiescence made her subscribe to something that she had no faith in. Danilo really had prepared all this good cheer for Mrs. Robson, and he moved a couch from the living-room into the dining-room and carried Mrs. Robson in.
He had flowers for the center of the table, too; not the flamboyant blossoms of the florist shops, but a shy little bouquet of wild bloom that he had picked only that morning in the sand-hills near Ingleside, where he had gone to see a sick countryman.
"He lives in the most wretched hut imaginable," he told them. "But such a view! Upon a hillside, and the whole Pacific Ocean at his feet. He leases a patch of land from the water company, and grows violets and purple cabbages and rows of pale-green lettuce. It is extraordinary how much he accomplishes in such a small space. And he is in love ... it is too absurd!... with a little short, squat Italian girl whose father has the bit of land adjoining. She is pretending to be indifferent, the little baggage! And he has taken to his bed and fancies he has an incurable disease. After all, there is nothing so foolish as a man when he takes the notion!"
He helped lay the cloth, tugging in sly, boyish fashion at his end until he brought the smiles to Claire's grave face.
"There, that is better! Now you look as if it were a feast-day!... Come, do you realize that I am thirty-two to-day? Perhaps that is why you look so sad!... Yes, there is no mistake, I am getting old. Wait, I will show you how I wish that chicken cooked."
And he rushed Claire off her feet and into the kitchen. His spirits were contagious. Claire found herself singing, and she heard her mother's laugh echoing like a faint tinkling bell through the gloom of some sunless street.
By five o'clock the feast was over. For the first time since her illness Mrs. Robson had been tempted beyond the mere duty of eating. She had even had some wine—about a half-glassful which Danilo had held for her to sip. He had fed her, too, with an unobtrusive, almost matter-of-fact tenderness which carried no suggestion of her helplessness.
As he was leaving he said to Claire:
"There will be no end of celebrating at the Ithaca to-night. I shall see you there. I am going to dinner with my rich patient.... You remember ... Stillman. He asked me to have a meal at the St. Francis. I suppose we shall have champagne.... Perhaps, if he is in the humor, I shall bring him down to the café."
Claire went back into the dining-room and began to clear away the litter. She had an impulse to telephone Lycurgus and tell him that she could not come to the café that night. To face Stillman seemed impossible. The afternoon had been so full of cheer, so simple and pleasant. Was it all to end in some dreary complication? Why was it her lot to always feel these sharp reactions whenever she surrendered to happiness? But the more she thought about excusing herself to Lycurgus the more distasteful such a course seemed. To-night was a feast-night, and there would, doubtless, be a company of the old patrons looking forward to the familiar dances and national tunes. No, there was nothing to do but go through with it.
She debated over what to wear. So far, she had appeared at the café in the simplest of street costumes. Perhaps that was why she had always been able to maintain a certain air of standing out of the gaudy current of café life. But she felt to-night it might be a graceful act if she went in braver apparel, a tribute to these people who had been her friends. And suddenly she remembered that Lycurgus's given name was George. Then it was a feast-day for him, too! She threw Gertrude Sinclair's discarded finery on the bed and ran through it. Here was the black gown that she had worn at the Russian Ballet, and the gold-embroidered costume that had done such service during her nights with Mrs. Condor. She passed them by and looked at a pale-blue scrap of a dress, and a lacy trifle all white with a wide pink sash, and a barbaric-looking spangled affair that she had never had quite the courage to wear. She would wear it to-night and startle these friends of hers. She would wear it to-night and play her new rôle to the limit. A café entertainer? Well, and why not?
She put the dress on and found herself startled by the effect. She had drawn back her hair in the exaggerated simplicity that was the mode, allowing two formal ringlets to escape and curl their suggestive way just below either temple. At the corner of one eye a beauty patch gave her glance a sinister coquettishness. She could not have imagined herself so changed. The gown was a shimmering blue-green mass, cut very low, and with the narrowest of shoulder-straps. For a moment Claire had a misgiving. What could she be thinking of to hazard such a costume? But there succeeded a tempestuous wish to be daring, to try her feminine lure to its utmost power, to dazzle for once in her life. And Danilo? What would he think of her? He would be surprised!
She put on her shabby coat and wound a black-lace scarf about her hair. Then she looked into the glass again. Now she might be the old Claire of church social days, for any outside sign to the contrary. She had worn this very cloak and scarf on the night when she had first seen Danilo, less than six months ago! She pushed aside her lace head-covering, and the beauty patch and the intriguing ringlets peeped out. Six months ago she would have been incapable of this deliberate accentuation of her personality. She would not have lacked the desire, perhaps, but she would have been without the skill to accomplish it. What had been taking place in her soul? She had a feeling, as she stared at herself in the glass, that defiance lay back of most of the broken rules of life. She was defiant—defiant! She brought her fist down upon the bureau, and it came to her that she had put this dress on, not to please her Greek friends, not to honor Lycurgus, not to surprise Danilo! No, she had put it on because she hoped to see Stillman at the Café Ithaca. She had put it on out of sheer bravado. She could not bear to have Stillman feel that she was in that place under protest, playing the game half-heartedly. No, she wanted him to think that she liked the life, that she had no regrets, that she was proud and self-contained and reliant. She wanted to wound him.
Outside, the evening was clear and cool. A wind had been blowing all day—the first trade-wind of the season. Presently, she thought, summer would be upon them with its misty, tremulous nights and its wind-swept days. She knew little of the traditional summer of the calendar, warm and opulent. San Francisco had a trick of ignoring climatic rules, playing the coquette with the sun, drawing a veil from the sea across its gray-green face. But Claire had always liked these wayward summer months, liked the swift changes, the salty tang in the air, the voice of the wind in the afternoon among the eucalyptus-trees. There was a certain robust melancholy about all these things, a wind-clean virility.
As she rode down Third Street it seemed to her that the sidewalks were less crowded than usual. The younger men were already off to war. Only a broken few remained, and summer was beckoning these afield, luring them from the paved streets with glib, false promises. By the end of October they would be drifting back again, disillusioned, betrayed by the wanton countryside, seeking to forget all the fine things that had been their springtime hope. They would be drifting back to the mercenary embraces of the town, like embittered lovers turning to the husks of hired caresses for their solace. But spring would come again, and all the old hope and faith and courage with it. Was not life, after all, a succession of springs luminous with promise, and summers whose harvests must, of necessity, fall far short of all the brave anticipations? What summer could possibly yield the marvelously golden fruits of spring's devising?
And, thinking of these things, Claire had a passionate wish that spring might be forever stayed; that life might be a keen, virgin hope, unrealized, but ever ardent, and blinded with the light of fancy.