CHAPTER XI
IN THE PUBLIC EYE
No sight more familiar to the corner of Main and Resident Streets than that of Sylvester Hudson's Ford car sliding up to the curb in front of his hotel at two o'clock in a summer afternoon. He would slip out from under his steering-wheel, his linen duster flapping about his long legs, and he would stalk through the rocking, meditative observers on the piazza and through the lobby past Dickie's frozen stare, upstairs to the door of Miss Arundel's "suite." There he was bidden to come in. A few minutes later they would come down together, Sheila, too, passing Dickie wordlessly, and they would hum away from Millings leaving a veil of golden dust to smother the comments in their wake. There were days when Sheila's pony, a gift from Jim Greely, was led up earlier than the hour of Hudson's arrival, on which days Sheila, in a short skirt and a boy's shirt and a small felt Stetson, would ride away alone toward the mountain of her dreams. Sometimes Jim rode with her. It was not always possible to forbid him.
The day after Cosme Hilliard's spectacular passage was one of Hudson's days. The pony did not appear, but Sylvester did and came down with his prize. The lobby was crowded. Sheila threaded her way amongst the medley of tourists, paused and deliberately drew near to the desk. At sight of her Dickie's whiteness dyed itself scarlet. He rose and with an apparent effort lifted his eyes to her look.
They did not smile at each other. Sheila spoke sharply, each word a little soft lash.
"I want to speak to you. Will you come to my sitting-room when I get back?"
"Yes'm," said Dickie. It was the tone of an unwincing pride. Under the desk, hidden from sight, his hand was a white-knuckled fist.
Sheila passed on, trailed by Hudson, who was smiling not agreeably to himself. Over the smile he gave his son a cruel look. It was as though an enemy had said, "Hurts you, doesn't it?" Dickie returned the look with level eyes.
The rockers on the piazza stopped rocking, stopped talking, stopped breathing, it would seem, to watch Sylvester help Sheila into his car; not that he helped her greatly—she had an appearance of melting through his hands and getting into her place beside his by a sort of sleight of body. He made a series of angular movements, smiled at her, and started the car.
"Well, little girl," said he, "where to this afternoon?"
When Sheila rode her pony she always rode toward The Hill. But in that direction she had never allowed Sylvester to take her. She looked vaguely through the wind-shield now and said, "Anywhere—that cañon, the one we came home by last week. It was so queer."
"It'll be dern dusty, I'm afraid."
"I don't care." Sheila wrapped her gray veil over her small hat which fitted close about her face. "I'm getting used to the dust. Does it ever rain around Millings? And does it ever stop blowing?"
"We don't like Millings to-day, do we?"
Sylvester was bending his head to peer through the gray mist of her veil. She held herself stiffly beside him, showing the profile of a small Sphinx. Suddenly it turned slightly, seemed to wince back. Girlie, at the gate of Number 18 Cottonwood Avenue, had stopped to watch them pass. Girlie did not speak. Her face looked smitten, the ripe fruit had turned bitter upon her ruddy lips. The tranquil emptiness of her beauty had filled itself stormily.
Sheila did not answer Hudson's reproachful question. She leaned back, dropped back, rather, into a tired little heap and let the country slide by—the strange, wide, broken country with its circling mesas, its somber grays and browns and dusty greens, its bare purple hills, rocks and sand and golden dirt, and now and then, in the sudden valley bottoms, swaying groves of vivid green and ribbons of emerald meadows. The mountains shifted and opened their cañons, gave a glimpse of their beckoning and forbidding fastnesses and closed them again as though by a whispered Sesame.
"What was the row last night?" asked Sylvester in his voice of cracked tenderness. "Carthy says there was a bunch of toughs. Were you scared good and plenty? I'm sorry. It don't happen often, believe me.
"I wish you could 'a' heard Carthy talkin' about you, Sheila," went on Sylvester, his eyes, filled with uneasiness, studying her silence and her huddled smallness, hands in the pockets of her light coat, veiled face turned a little away, "Say, that would 'a' set you up all right! Talk about beacons!"
Here she flashed round on him, as though her whole body had been electrified. "Tell me all that again," she begged in a voice that he could not interpret except that there was in it a sound of tears. "Tell me again about a beacon …"
He stammered. He was confused. But stumblingly he tried to fulfill her demand. Here was a thirst for something, and he wanted above everything in the world to satisfy it. Sheila listened to him with unsteady, parted lips. He could see them through the veil.
"You still think I am that?" she asked.
He was eager to prove it to her. "Still think? Still think? Why, girl, I don't hev to think. Don't the tillbox speak for itself? Don't Carthy handle a crowd that's growing under his eyes? Don't we sell more booze in a week now than we used to in a—" Suddenly he realized that he was on the wrong tack. It was his first break. He drew in a sharp breath and stopped, his face flushing deeply.
"Yes?" questioned Sheila, melting her syllables like slivers of ice on her tongue. "Go on."
"Er—er, don't we draw a finer lot of fellows than we ever did before? Don't they behave more decent and orderly? Don't they get civilization just for looking at you, Miss Sheila?"
"And—and booze? Jim Greely, for instance, Mr. James Greely, of the Millings National Bank—he never used to patronize The Aura. And now he's there every night till twelve and often later, for he won't obey me any more. I wonder whether Mr. and Mrs. Greely are glad that you are getting a better type of customer! Mrs. Greely almost stopped me on the street the other day—that is, she almost got up courage to speak to me. Before now she's cut me, just as Girlie does, just as your wife does, just as Dickie does—"
"Dickie cut you?" Sylvester threw back his head and laughed uneasily, and with a strained note of alarm. "That's a good one, Miss Sheila. I kinder fancied you did the cuttin' there."
"Dickie hasn't spoken to me since he came to me that day when he heard what I was going to do and tried to talk me out of doing it."
"Yes'm. He came to me first," drawled Sylvester.
They were both silent, busy with the amazing memory of Dickie, of his disheveled fury, of his lashing eloquence. He had burst in upon his family at breakfast that April morning when Millings was humming with the news, had advanced upon his father, stood above him.
"Is it true that you are going to make a barmaid of Sheila?"
Sylvester, in an effort to get to his feet, had been held back by
Dickie's thin hand that shot out at him like a sword.
"Sure it's true," Sylvester had said coolly. But he had not felt cool. He had felt shaken and confused. The boy's entire self-forgetfulness, his entire absence of fear, had made Hudson feel that he was talking to a stranger, a not inconsiderable one.
"It's true, then." Dickie had drawn a big breath. "You—you"—he seemed to swallow an epithet—"you'll let that girl go into your filthy saloon and make money for you by her—by her prettiness and her—her ignorance—"
"Say, Dickie," his father had drawled, "you goin' to run for the legislature? Such a lot of classy words!" But anger and alarm were rising in him.
"You've fetched her away out here," went on Dickie, "and kinder got her cornered and you've talked a lot of slush to her and you've—"
Here Girlie came to the rescue.
"Well, anyway, she's a willing victim, Dickie," Girlie had said.
Dickie had flashed her one look. "Is she? I'll see about that.
Where's Sheila?"
And then, there was Sheila's memory. Dickie had come upon her in a confusion of boxes, her little trunk half-unpacked, its treasures scattered over the chairs and floor. Sheila had lifted to him from where she knelt a glowing and excited face. "Oh, Dickie," she had said, her relief at the escape from Mrs. Hudson pouring music into her voice, "have you heard?"
He had sat down on one of the plush chairs of "the suite" as though he felt weak. Then he had got up and had walked to and fro while she described her dream, the beauty of her chosen mission, the glory of the saloon whose high priestess she had become. And Dickie had listened with the bitter and disillusioned and tender face of a father hearing the prattle of a beloved child.
"You honest think all that, Sheila?" he had asked her patiently.
She had started again, standing now to face him and beginning to be angry at his look. This boy whom she had lifted up to be her friend!
"Say," Dickie had drawled, "Poppa's some guardian!" He had advanced upon her as though he wanted to shake her. "You gotta give it right up, Sheila," he had said sternly. "Sooner than immediately. It's not to go through. Say, girl, you don't know much about bars." He had drawn a picture for her, drawing partly upon experience, partly upon his imagination, the gift of vivid metaphor descending upon him. He used words that bit into her memory. Sheila had listened and then she had put her hands over her ears. He pulled them down. He went on. Sheila's Irish blood had boiled up into her brain. She stormed back at him.
"It's you, it's your use of The Aura that has been its only shame,
Dickie," was the last of all the things she had said.
At which, Dickie standing very still, had answered, "If you go there and stand behind the bar all night with Carthy to keep hands off, I—I swear I'll never set foot inside the place again. You ain't agoin' to be my beacon light—"
"Well, then," said Sheila, "I shall have done one good thing at least by being there."
Dickie, going out, had passed a breathless Sylvester on his way in. The two had looked at each other with a look that cut in two the tie between them, and Sheila, running to Sylvester, had burst into tears.
* * * * *
The motor hummed evenly on its way. It began, with a change of tune, to climb the graded side of one of the enormous mesas. Sheila, having lived through again that scene with Dickie, took out a small handkerchief and busied herself with it under her veil. She laughed shakily.
"Perhaps a beacon does more good by warning people away than by attracting them," she said. "Dickie has certainly kept his word. I don't believe he's touched a drop since I've been barmaid, Mr. Hudson. I should think you'd be proud of him."
Sylvester was silent while they climbed the hill. He changed gears and sounded his horn. They passed another motor on a dangerous curve. They began to drop down again.
"Some day," said Sylvester in a quiet voice, "I'll break every bone in Dickie's body." He murmured something more under his breath in too low a tone, fortunately, for Sheila's ear. From her position behind the bar, she had become used to swearing. She had heard a strange variety of language. But when Sylvester drew upon his experience and his fancy, the artist in him was at work.
"Do you suppose," asked his companion in an impersonal tone, "that it was really a hard thing for Dickie to do—to give it up, I mean?"
"By the look of him the last few months," snarled Sylvester, "I should say it had taken out of him what little real feller there ever was in."
Sheila considered this. She remembered Dickie, as he had risen behind the desk half an hour before. She did not contradict Sylvester. She had learned not to contradict him. But Dickie's face with its tight-knit look of battle stood out very clear to refute the accusation of any loss of manliness. He was still a quaint and ruffled Dickie. But he was vastly aged. From twenty to twenty-seven, he seemed to have jumped in a few weeks. A key had turned in the formerly open door of his spirit. The indeterminate lips had shut hard, the long-lashed eyes had definitely put a guard upon their dreams. He was shockingly thin and colorless, however. Sheila dwelt painfully upon the sort of devastation she had wrought. Girlie's face, and Dickie's, and Jim's. A grieving pressure squeezed her heart; she lifted her chest with an effort on a stifled breath.
"God! Sheila," said Sylvester harshly. The car wobbled a little. "Ain't you happy, girl?"
Sheila looked up at him. Her veil was wet against her cheeks.
"Last night," she said unevenly, "a man was going to kiss me on my mouth and—and he changed his mind and kissed my hand instead. He left a smear of blood on my fingers from where those—those other men had struck his lips. I don't know why it f-frightens me so to think about that. But it does."
She seemed to collapse before him into a little sobbing child.
"And every day when I wake up," she wailed, "I t-taste whiskey on my tongue and I—I smell cigarette smoke in my hair. And I d-dream about men looking at me—the way Jim looks. And I can't let myself think of Father any more. He used to hold his chin up and walk along as if he looked above every one and everything. I don't believe he'd ever seen a barmaid or a drunken man—not really seen them, Mr. Hudson."
"Then he wasn't a real artist after all," Sylvester spoke slowly and carefully. He was pale.
"He l-loved the stars," sobbed Sheila, her broken reserve had let out a flood; "he told me to keep looking at the stars."
"Well, ma'am," Sylvester spoke again, "I never knowed the stars to turn their backs on anything. Barmaids or drunks or kings—they all look about alike to the stars, I reckon. Say, Sheila, maybe you haven't got the pluck for real living. Maybe you're the kind of doll-baby girl that craves sheltering. I reckon I made a big mistake."
Sheila moved slightly as though his speech had pricked her.
"It kind of didn't occur to me," went on Sylvester, "that you'd care a whole lot about being ig-nored by Momma and Mr. and Mrs. Greely and Girlie. Say, Girlie's got to take her chance same's anybody else. Why don't you give Jim a jolt?"
Sheila at this began to laugh. She caught her breath. She laughed and cried together.
Sylvester patted her shoulder. "Poor kid! You're all in. Late hours too much for you, I reckon. Come on now—tell Pap everything. Ease off your heart. It's wonderful what crying does for the nervous system. I laid out on a prairie one night when I was about your age and just naturally bawled. You'd 'a' thought I was a baby steer, hanged if you wouldn't 'a' thought so. It's the fight scared you plumb to pieces. Carthy told me about it and how you let the good-looking kid out by the back. I seen him ride off toward Hidden Creek this morning. He was a real pretty boy too. Say, Sheila, wasn't you ever kissed?"
"No," said Sheila. "And I don't want to be." Sylvester laughed with a little low cackle of intense pleasure and amusement. "Well, you shan't be. No, you shan't. Nobody shall kiss Sheila!"
His method seemed to him successful. Sheila stopped crying and stopped laughing, dried her eyes, murmured, "I'm all right now, thank you, Mr. Hudson," and fell into an abysmal silence.
He talked smoothly, soothingly, skillfully, confident of his power to manage "gels." Once in a while he saw her teeth gleam as though she smiled. As they came back to Millings in the afterglow of a brief Western twilight, she unfastened her veil and showed a quiet, thoughtful face.
She thanked him, gave him her hand. "Don't come up, please, Mr. Hudson," she said with that cool composure of which at times she was surprisingly capable. "I shall have my dinner sent up and take a little rest before I go to work."
"You feel O.K.?" he asked her doubtfully. His brown eyes had an almost doglike wistfulness.
"Quite, thank you." Her easy, effortless smile passed across her face and in and out of her eyes.
Hudson stood beside his wheel tapping his teeth and staring after her. The rockers on the veranda stopped their rocking, stopped their talking, stopped their breathing to see Sheila pass. When she had gone, they fastened their attention upon Sylvester. He was not aware of them. He stood there a full three minutes under the glare of publicity. Then he sighed and climbed into his car.