CHAPTER VII
During the following weeks Ramon worked even less than was his custom. He also neglected his trips to the mountains and most of his other amusements. They seemed to have lost their interest for him. But he was a regular attendant upon the weekly dances which were held at the country club, and to which he had never gone before.
The country club was a recent acquisition of the town, backed by a number of local business men. It consisted of a picturesque little frame lodge far out upon the mesa, and a nine-hole golf course, made of sand and haunted by [lizards] and rattlesnakes. It had become a centre of local society, although there was a more exclusive organization known as the Forty Club, which gave a formal ball once a month. Ramon had never been invited to join the Forty Club, but the political importance of his family had procured him a membership in the country club and it served his present purpose very well, for he found Julia Roth there every Saturday night. This fact was the sole reason for his going. His dances with her were now the one thing in life to which he [pg 61] looked forward with pleasure, and his highest hope was that he might be alone with her.
In this he was disappointed for a long time because Julia was the belle of the town. Her dainty, provocative presence seemed always to be the centre of the gathering. Women envied her and studied her frocks, which were easily the most stylish in town. Men flocked about her and guffawed at her elfin stabs of humour. Her program was always crowded with names, and when she went for a stroll between dances she was generally accompanied by at least three men of whom Ramon was often one. And while the others made her laugh at their jokes or thrilled her with accounts of their adventures, he was always silent and worried—an utter bore, he thought.
This girl was a new experience to him. With the egotism of twenty-four, he had regarded himself as a finished man of the world, especially with regard to women. They had always liked him. He was good to look at and his silent, self-possessed manner touched the feminine imagination. He had had his share of the amorous adventures that come to most men, and his attitude toward women had changed from the hesitancy of adolesence to the purposeful, confident and somewhat selfish attitude of the male accustomed to easy conquest.
This girl, by a smile and touch of her hand, seemed to have changed him. She filled him with a mighty yearning. He desired her, and yet there was a puzzling element in his feeling that seemed to transcend desire. And he was utterly without his usual confidence and purpose. He had reason enough to doubt his success, but aside from that she loomed in his imagination as something high and unattainable. He had no plan. His strength seemed to have oozed out of him. He pursued her persistently enough—in fact too persistently—but he did it because he could not help it.
The longer he followed in her wake, the more marked his weakness became. When he approached her to claim a dance he was often aware of a faint tremble in his knees, and was embarrassed by the fact that the palms of his hands were sweating. He felt that he was a fool and swore at himself. And he was wholly unable to believe that he was making any impression upon her. True, she was quite willing to flirt with him. She looked up at him with an arch, almost enquiring glance when he came to claim her for a dance, but he seldom found much to say at such times, being too wholly absorbed in the sacred occupation of dancing with her. And it seemed to him that she flirted with every one else, too. This did not in the least mitigate his devotion, but it [pg 63] made him acutely uncomfortable to watch her dance with other men, and especially with Conny Masters.
Masters was the son of a man who had made a moderate fortune in the tin-plate business. He had come West with his mother who had a weak throat, had fallen in love with the country, and scandalized his family by resolutely refusing to go back to Indiana and tin cans. He spent most of his time riding about the country, equipped with a note book and a camera, studying the Mexicans and Indians, and taking pictures of the scenery. He said that he was going to make a literary career, but the net product of his effort for two years had been a few sonnets of lofty tone but vague meaning, and a great many photographs, mostly of sunsets.
Conny was not a definite success as a writer, but he was unquestionably a gifted talker, and he knew the country better than did most of the natives. He made real to Julia the romance which she craved to find in the West. And her watchful and suspicious family seemed to tolerate if not to welcome him. Ramon knew that he went to the Roth’s regularly. He began to feel something like hatred for Conny whom he had formerly liked.
This feeling was deepened by the fact that Conny seemed to be specially bent on defeating [pg 64] Ramon’s ambition to be alone with the girl. If no one else joined them at the end of a dance, Conny was almost sure to do so, and to occupy the intermission with one of his ever-ready monologues, while Ramon sat silent and angry, wondering what Julia saw to admire in this windy fool, and occasionally daring to wonder whether she really saw anything in him after all.
But a sufficiently devoted lover is seldom wholly without a reward. There came an evening when Ramon found himself alone with her. And he was aware with a thrill that she had evaded not only Conny, but two other men. Her smile was friendly and encouraging, too, and yet he could not find anything to say which in the least expressed his feelings.
“Are you going to stay in this country long?” he began. The question sounded supremely casual, but it meant a great deal to him. He was haunted by a fear that she would depart suddenly, and he would never see her again. She smiled and looked away for a moment before replying, as though perhaps this was not exactly what she had expected him to say.
“I don’t know. Gordon wants mother and me to go back East this fall, but I don’t want to go and mother doesn’t want to leave Gordon alone.… We haven’t decided. Maybe I won’t go till next year.”
“I suppose you’ll go to college won’t you?”
“No; I wanted to go to Vassar and then study art, but mother says college spoils a girl for society. She thinks the way the Vassar girls walk is perfectly dreadful. I offered to go right on walking the same way, but she said anyway college makes girls so frightfully broad-minded.…”
Ramon laughed.
“What will you do then?”
“I’ll come out.”
“Out of what?”
“Make my d�but, don’t you know?”
“O, yes.”
“In New York. I have an aunt there. She knows all the best people, mother says.”
“What happens after you come out?”
“You get married if anybody will have you. If not, you sort of fade away and finally go into uplift work about your fourth season.”
“But of course, you’ll get married. I bet you’ll marry a millionaire.”
“I don’t know. Mother wants me to marry a broker. She says the big financial houses in New York are conducted by the very best people. But Gordon thinks I ought to marry a professional man—a doctor or something. He thinks brokers are vulgar. He says money isn’t everything.”
“What do you think?”
“I haven’t a thought to my name. All my thinking has been done for me since infancy. I don’t know what I want, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t get it if I did.… Come on. They’ve been dancing for ten minutes. If we stay here any longer it’ll be a scandal.”
She rose and started for the hall. He suddenly realized that his long-sought opportunity was slipping away from him. He caught her by the hand.
“Don’t go, please. I want to tell you something.”
She met his hand with a fair grip, and pulled him after her with a laugh.
“Some other time,” she promised.
CHAPTER VIII
In most of their social diversions the town folk tended always more and more to ape the ways of the East. Local colour, they thought, was all right in its place, which was a curio store or a museum, but they desired their town to be modern and citified, so that the wealthy eastern health-seeker would find it a congenial home. The scenery and the historic past were recognized as assets, but they should be the background for a life of “culture, refinement and modern convenience” as the president of the Chamber of Commerce was fond of saying.
Hence the riding parties and picnics of a few years before had given way to aggressively formal balls and receptions; but one form of entertainment that was indigenous had survived. This was known as a “mesa supper.” It might take place anywhere in the surrounding wilderness of mountain and desert. Several auto-loads of young folk would motor out, suitably chaperoned and laden with provisions. Beside some water hole or mountain stream fires would be built, steaks broiled and coffee brewed. Afterward [pg 68] there would be singing and story-telling about the fire, and romantic strolls by couples.
It was one of these expeditions that furnished Ramon with his second opportunity in three weeks to be alone with Julia Roth. The party had journeyed to Los Ojuellos, where a spring of clear water bubbled up in the centre of the mesa. A grove of cottonwood trees shadowed the place, and there was an ancient adobe ruin which looked especially effective by moonlight.
The persistent Conny Masters was a member of the party, but he was handicapped by the fact that he knew more about camp cookery than anyone else present. He had made a special study of Mexican dishes and had written an article about them which had been rejected by no less than twenty-seven magazines. He made a specialty of the enchilada, which is a delightful concoction of corn meal, eggs and chile, and he had perfected a recipe of his own for this dish which he had named the Conny Masters junior.
As soon as the baskets were unpacked and the chaperones were safely anchored on rugs and blankets with their backs against trees, there was a general demand, strongly backed by Ramon, that Conny should cook supper. He was soon absorbed in the process, volubly explaining every step, while the others gathered about him and offered [pg 69] encouragement and humorous suggestion. But there was soon a gradual dispersion of the group, some going for wood and some for water, and others on errands unstated.
Ramon found himself strolling under the cottonwoods with Julia. Neither of them had said anything. It was almost as though the tryst had been agreed upon before. She picked her way slowly among the tussocks of dried grass, her skirt daintily kilted. A faint but potent perfume from her hair and dress blew over him. He ventured to support her elbow with a reverent touch. Never had she seemed more desirable, nor yet, for some reason, more remote.
Suddenly she stopped and looked up at the great desert stars.
“Isn’t it big and beautiful?” she demanded. “And doesn’t it make you feel free? It’s never like this at home, somehow.”
“What is it like where you live?” he enquired. He had a persistent desire to see into her life and understand it, but everything she told him only made her more than ever to him a being of mysterious origin and destiny.
“It’s a funny little New York factory city with very staid ways,” she said. “You go to a dance at the country club every Saturday night and to tea parties and things in between. You fight, [pg 70] bleed and die for your social position and once in a while you stop and wonder why.… It’s a bore. You can see yourself going on doing the same thing till the day of your death.…”
Her discontent with things as they are found ready sympathy.
“That’s just the way it is here,” he said with conviction. “You can’t see anything ahead.”
“Oh, I don’t think its the same here at all,” she protested. “This country’s so big and interesting. It’s different.”
“Tell me how,” he demanded. “I haven’t seen anything interesting here since I got back,—except you.”
She ignored the exception.
“I can’t express it exactly. The people here are just like people everywhere else—most of them. But the country looks so big and unoccupied. And blue mountains are so alluring. There might be anything beyond them … adventures, opportunities.…”
This idea was a bit too rarefied for Ramon, but he could agree about the mountains.
“It’s a fine country,” he assented. “For those that own it.”
“It’s just a feeling I have about it,” she went on, trying to express her own half-formulated idea. “But then I have that feeling about life in [pg 71] general, and there doesn’t seem to be anything in it. I mean the feeling that it’s full of thrilling things, but somehow you miss them all.”
“I have felt something like that,” he admitted. “But I never could say it.”
This discovery of an idea in common seemed somehow to bring them closer together. His hand tightened gently about her arm; almost unconsciously he drew her toward him. But she seemed to be all absorbed in the discussion.
“You have no right to complain,” she told him. “A man can do something about it.”
“Yes,” he agreed, speaking a reflection without stopping to put it in conventional language. “It must be hell to be a woman … excuse me … I mean.…”
“Don’t apologize. It is—just that. A man at least has a fighting chance to escape boredom. But they won’t even let a woman fight. I wish I were a man.”
“Well; I don’t,” he asserted with warmth, unconsciously tightening his hold upon her arm. “I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re a woman.”
“Oh, are you?” She looked up at him with challenging, provocative eyes.
For an instant a kiss was imminent. It hovered between them like an invisible fairy presence [pg 72] of which they both were sweetly aware, and no one else.
“Hey there! all you spooners!” came a jovial and irreverent voice from the vicinity of the camp fire. “Come and eat.”
The moment was lost; the fairy presence gone. She turned with a little laugh, and they went in silence back to the fire. They were last to enter the circle of ruddy light, and all eyes were upon them. She was pink and self-conscious, looking at her feet and picking her way with exaggerated care. He was proud and elated. This, he knew, would couple their names in gossip, would make her partly his.