II
He went out of the house, banging the door behind him. No pride—what was a woman without pride? If she set no value on herself, how was a man to hold her dear?
He thought of Mabel, of all the American girls he had known. There was not one among them who would have bent her head humbly to that old fellow—not one; only this Ingeborg, this little alien with the dark braids about her head.
Halfway down the street he remembered his bag. He turned and strode back, ran up the steps, and rang the bell violently. Perhaps she would come again. What did he care?
But it was Oscar who opened the door.
“My bag!” said the young man.
“Well, there it is,” said Oscar. “In this house we are not thieves.”
The young man took up the bag, and for a moment the two of them looked at each other.
“So was I a fine fellow when I was young,” thought Oscar. Aloud he said, with a sort of mildness: “Too bad that that dumb one didn’t keep you your room! If you had come to me, it would have been different.”
“A nice thing for me!” said the young man. “A night like this—and I gave up my old room. A fellow I know told me to come here—name of Nielsen.”
“Nielsen?” repeated Oscar, staring thoughtfully at him. “Well, maybe I find something. One room I have, but that’s not for a young fellow like you—a fine room, with a piano in it. Maybe I let you have that room for one night at the price of the other, because that dumb one—”
“Oh, I’ll pay you for your fine room with a piano!” interrupted the young man. “You can charge what you like—I don’t care!”
Oscar Anders accepted the challenge.
“Pay nothing at all—I don’t care!” he said.
He threw open the door of the fine room, the front parlor, and lit the gas.
“Make yourself at home,” he said carelessly; for he would not let the fellow see how much he thought of this parlor.
The young man brought out a wallet, and again he and Oscar looked at each other; and there was the same pride in both of them.
“What’s your name, hey?” asked Oscar.
“My name? Jespersen’s my name.”
Oscar began to laugh.
“Jespersen you call it?” he said. “Yespersen, I guess! That’s a name from the old country.”
“Well, I’m not from the old country. I was born here.”
Oscar spoke to him in Danish.
“Forget it!” said Jespersen curtly.
“That’s right!” agreed Oscar. “I’m an American, too.”
“Oh, you’re a squarehead!” said Jespersen.
They both laughed at that. They sat down on two slender chairs covered with faded tapestry, and began to smoke in the dim and chilly parlor.
“Gunnar Jespersen—that’s my name,” said the young man. “My father was a Dane and my mother was Swedish, but I was born here.”
“Twenty-five years I am here,” said Oscar slowly. “It is a good country, but some of the old ways are good, too.” He smoked for awhile in silence. “You been a sailor,” he remarked, looking at the other’s hand, with an anchor tattooed on its back.
Gunnar did not answer that.
“Better for me if I were a sailor now!” he thought.[Pg 509]
For there would come across him, without warning in these days, terrible fits of bitterness and gloom. At the bottom of his soul there was a stern austerity, born in him and bred in him. He could laugh as much as he liked, he could swagger in his triumph, but in his soul he was sick and ashamed.
What was it that he had done?
Six months ago he had been at Long Beach, strolling along the sands, in his best shore clothes. He had been all alone, but he didn’t mind that. There was plenty to look at. Now and then some girl would smile at him, and he would smile back scornfully and go on his way.
And then he had met Mabel. At first he could not believe that it was he that she was looking at like that, out of the corners of her long black eyes. Heaven knows Gunnar was proud enough, but he could hardly believe that. The way she was dressed! The air she had!
She was with another girl, and it was the other girl who had dropped her purse almost at Gunnar’s feet. He had picked it up, and had spoken to them arrogantly; but the more curt and scornful he was, the more did Mabel smile on him, she with her pearls and her gloves and her drawling voice. Ignoring her friend, she had walked close beside Gunnar.
“It’s a shame,” she had said, “for you to be just a sailor!”
That made him angry. He was studying navigation, he was going to take an examination and get his mate’s ticket, and some day he would be master of a ship.
“My father’s the superintendent of a factory,” she said. “I know he’ll give you a job.”
“I don’t want any more jobs,” declared Gunnar.
But, all the same, he went to her father the next day, and he did get a job, and after two months he was made foreman. Now he had a little car of his own, and two suits of clothes, and a fine watch. He was making good money, and he wanted more. He had never thought much about money until he met Mabel.
Sometimes she came to the factory to drive her father home, and always she stopped to talk to Gunnar. She didn’t care how much the men stared.
“Gunnar,” she said one day, “I want you to come to the house to dinner.”
“Not me!” said Gunnar.
But he went, and he could not forget it. In the factory, grimy, in his rough work clothes, he would remember how he had sat at table in their fine house that night, with the girl opposite him, in a glittering low-cut dress, and her mother and father making much of him. They wanted him for their girl—he knew that. They would help him along in the world, for her sake, and to his ruin—he knew that, too.
For she waked everything that was worst in him. Sometimes in his heart he called her a devil, yet he could not escape from her. Waking and sleeping, his one dream was to conquer her, to make more money, to have a house such as she lived in, to have a place in her world, and to be his own master in it.