III
An hour later George went upstairs in a daze. The clumsiness of the affair was at once outrageous and astounding. That a friend of seven years should suddenly request his signature on papers that were not what they were purported to be made all his surroundings seem diaphanous and insecure. Even now the design engrossed him more than a defence against it, and he tried to recreate the steps by which Margaret had arrived at this act of recklessness or despair.
She had served as a script girl in various studios and for various directors for ten years; earning first twenty, now a hundred dollars a week. She was lovely-looking and she was intelligent; at any moment in those years she might have asked for a screen test, but some quality of initiative or ambition had been lacking. Not a few times had her opinion made or broken incipient careers. Still she waited at directors’ elbows, increasingly aware that the years were slipping away.
That she had picked George as a victim amazed him most of all. Once, during the year before his marriage, there had been a momentary warmth; he had taken her to a Mayfair ball, and he remembered that he had kissed her going home that night in the car. The flirtation trailed along hesitatingly for a week. Before it could develop into anything serious he had gone East and met Kay.
Young Donovan had shown him a carbon of the letters he had signed.
They were written on the typewriter that he kept in his bungalow at the studio, and they were carefully and convincingly worded. They purported to be love letters, asserting that he was Margaret Donovan’s lover, that he wanted to marry her, and that for that reason he was about to arrange a divorce. It was incredible. Someone must have seen him sign them that morning; someone must have heard her say: “Your initials are like Mr. Harris’s.”
George was tired. He was training for a screen football game to be played next week, with the Southern California varsity as extras, and he was used to regular hours. In the middle of a confused and despairing sequence of thought about Margaret Donovan and Kay, he suddenly yawned. Mechanically he went upstairs, undressed and got into bed.
Just before dawn Kay came to him in the garden. There was a river that flowed past it now, and boats faintly lit with green and yellow lights moved slowly, remotely by. A gentle starlight fell like rain upon the dark, sleeping face of the world, upon the black mysterious bosoms of the trees, the tranquil gleaming water and the farther shore.
The grass was damp, and Kay came to him on hurried feet; her thin slippers were drenched with dew. She stood upon his shoes, nestling close to him, and held up her face as one shows a book open at a page.
“Think how you love me,” she whispered. “I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.”
“You’ll always be like this to me.”
“Oh no; but promise me you’ll remember.” Her tears were falling. “I’ll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight.”
The scene dissolved slowly but George struggled into consciousness. He sat up in bed; it was morning. In the yard outside he heard the nurse instructing his son in the niceties of behaviour for two-month-old babies. From the yard next door a small boy shouted mysteriously: “Who let that barrier through on me?”
Still in his pyjamas, George went to the phone and called his lawyers. Then he rang for his man, and while he was being shaved a certain order evolved from the chaos of the night before. First, he must deal with Margaret Donovan; second, he must keep the matter from Kay, who in her present state might believe anything; and third, he must fix things up with Kay. The last seemed the most important of all.
As he finished dressing he heard the phone ring downstairs and, with an instinct of danger, picked up the receiver.
“Hello … Oh, yes.” Looking up, he saw that both his doors were closed. “Good morning, Helen … It’s all right, Dolores. I’m taking it up here.” He waited till he heard the receiver click downstairs.
“How are you this morning, Helen?”
“George, I called up about last night. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”
“Sorry? Why are you sorry?”
“For treating you like that. I don’t know what was in me, George. I didn’t sleep all night thinking how terrible I’d been.”
A new disorder established itself in George’s already littered mind.
“Don’t be silly,” he said. To his despair he heard his own voice run on: “For a minute I didn’t understand, Helen. Then I thought it was better so.”
“Oh, George,” came her voice after a moment, very low.
Another silence. He began to put in a cuff button.
“I had to call up,” she said after a moment. “I couldn’t leave things like that.”
The cuff button dropped to the floor; he stooped to pick it up, and then said “Helen!” urgently into the mouthpiece to cover the fact that he had momentarily been away.
“What, George?”
At this moment the hall door opened and Kay, radiating a faint distaste, came into the room. She hesitated.
“Are you busy?”
“It’s all right.” He stared into the mouthpiece for a moment.
“Well, goodbye,” he muttered abruptly and hung up the receiver. He turned to Kay: “Good morning.”
“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” she said distantly.
“You didn’t disturb me.” He hesitated. “That was Helen Avery.”
“It doesn’t concern me who it was. I came to ask you if we’re going to the Coconut Grove tonight.”
“Sit down, Kay.”
“I don’t want to talk.”
“Sit down a minute,” he said impatiently. She sat down. “How long are you going to keep this up?” he demanded.
“I’m not keeping up anything. We’re simply through, George, and you know it as well as I do.”
“That’s absurd,” he said. “Why, a week ago—”
“It doesn’t matter. We’ve been getting nearer to this for months, and now it’s over.”
“You mean you don’t love me?” He was not particularly alarmed. They had been through scenes like this before.
“I don’t know. I suppose I’ll always love you in a way.” Suddenly she began to sob. “Oh, it’s all so sad. He’s cared for me so long.”
George stared at her. Face to face with what was apparently a real emotion, he had no words of any kind. She was not angry, not threatening or pretending, not thinking about him at all, but concerned entirely with her emotions towards another man.
“What is it?” he cried. “Are you trying to tell me you’re in love with this man?”
“I don’t know,” she said helplessly.
He took a step towards her, then went to the bed and lay down on it, staring in misery at the ceiling. After a while a maid knocked to say that Mr. Busch and Mr. Castle, George’s lawyer, were below. The fact carried no meaning to him. Kay went into her room and he got up and followed her.
“Let’s send word we’re out,” he said. “We can go away somewhere and talk this over.”
“I don’t want to go away.”
She was already away, growing more mysterious and remote with every minute. The things on her dressing-table were the property of a stranger.
He began to speak in a dry, hurried voice. “If you’re still thinking about Helen Avery, it’s nonsense. I’ve never given a damn for anybody but you.”
They went downstairs and into the living-room. It was nearly noon—another bright emotionless California day. George saw that Arthur Busch’s ugly face in the sunshine was wan and white; he took a step towards George and then stopped, as if he were waiting for something—a challenge, a reproach, a blow.
In a flash the scene that would presently take place ran itself off in George’s mind. He saw himself moving through the scene, saw his part, an infinite choice of parts, but in every one of them Kay would be against him and with Arthur Busch. And suddenly he rejected them all.
“I hope you’ll excuse me,” he said quickly to Mr. Castle. “I called you up because a script girl named Margaret Donovan wants fifty thousand dollars for some letters she claims I wrote her. Of course the whole thing is—” He broke off. It didn’t matter. “I’ll come to see you tomorrow.” He walked up to Kay and Arthur, so that only they could hear.
“I don’t know about you two—what you want to do. But leave me out of it; you haven’t any right to inflict any of it on me, for after all it’s not my fault. I’m not going to be mixed up in your emotions.”
He turned and went out. His car was before the door and he said “Go to Santa Monica” because it was the first name that popped into his head. The car drove off into the everlasting hazeless sunlight.
He rode for three hours, past Santa Monica and then along towards Long Beach by another road. As if it were something he saw out of the corner of his eye and with but a fragment of his attention, he imagined Kay and Arthur Busch progressing through the afternoon. Kay would cry a great deal and the situation would seem harsh and unexpected to them at first, but the tender closing of the day would draw them together. They would turn inevitably towards each other and he would slip more and more into the position of the enemy outside.
Kay had wanted him to get down in the dirt and dust of a scene and scramble for her. Not he; he hated scenes. Once he stooped to compete with Arthur Busch in pulling at Kay’s heart, he would never be the same to himself. He would always be a little like Arthur Busch; they would always have that in common, like a shameful secret. There was little of the theatre about George; the millions before whose eyes the moods and changes of his face had flickered during ten years had not been deceived about that. From the moment when, as a boy of twenty, his handsome eyes had gazed off into the imaginary distance of a Griffith Western, his audience had been really watching the progress of a straightforward, slow-thinking, romantic man through an accidentally glamorous life.
His fault was that he had felt safe too soon. He realized suddenly that the two Fairbankses, in sitting side by side at table, were not keeping up a pose. They were giving hostages to fate. This was perhaps the most bizarre community in the rich, wild, bored empire, and for a marriage to succeed here, you must expect nothing or you must be always together. For a moment his glance had wavered from Kay and he stumbled blindly into disaster.
As he was thinking this and wondering where he would go and what he should do, he passed an apartment house that jolted his memory. It was on the outskirts of town, a pink horror built to represent something, somewhere, so cheaply and sketchily that whatever it copied the architect must have long since forgotten. And suddenly George remembered that he had once called for Margaret Donovan here the night of a Mayfair dance.
“Stop at this apartment!” he called through the speaking-tube.
He went in. The negro elevator boy stared open-mouthed at him as they rose in the cage. Margaret Donovan herself opened the door.
When she saw him she shrank away with a little cry. As he entered and closed the door she retreated before him into the front room. George followed.
It was twilight outside and the apartment was dusky and sad. The last light fell softly on the standardized furniture and the great gallery of signed photographs of moving-picture people that covered one wall. Her face was white, and as she stared at him she began nervously wringing her hands.
“What’s this nonsense, Margaret?” George said, trying to keep any reproach out of his voice. “Do you need money that bad?”
She shook her head vaguely. Her eyes were still fixed on him with a sort ofterror; George looked at the floor.
“I suppose this was your brother’s idea. At least I can’t believe you’d be so stupid.” He looked up, trying to preserve the brusque masterly attitude of one talking to a naughty child, but at the sight of her face every emotion except pity left him. “I’m a little tired. Do you mind if I sit down?”
“No.”
“I’m a little confused today,” said George after a minute. “People seem to have it in for me today.”
“Why, I thought”—her voice became ironic in midsentence—“I thought everybody loved you, George.”
“They don’t.”
“Only me?”
“Yes,” he said abstractedly.
“I wish it had been only me. But then, of course, you wouldn’t have been you.”
Suddenly he realized that she meant what she was saying.
“That’s just nonsense.”
“At least you’re here,” Margaret went on. “I suppose I ought to be glad of that. And I am. I most decidedly am. I’ve often thought of you sitting in that chair, just at this time when it was almost dark. I used to make up little one-act plays about what would happen then. Would you like to hear one of them? I’ll have to begin by coming over and sitting on the floor at your feet.”
Annoyed and yet spellbound, George kept trying desperately to seize upon a word or mood that would turn the subject.
“I’ve seen you sitting there so often that you don’t look a bit more real than your ghost. Except that your hat has squashed your beautiful hair down on one side and you’ve got dark circles or dirt under your eyes. You look white, too, George. Probably you were on a party last night.”
“I was. And I found your brother waiting for me when I got home.”
“He’s a good waiter, George. He’s just out of San Quentin prison, where he’s been waiting the last six years.”
“Then it was his idea?”
“We cooked it up together. I was going to China on my share.”
“Why was I the victim?”
“That seemed to make it realer. Once I thought you were going to fall in love with me five years ago.”
The bravado suddenly melted out of her voice and it was still light enough to see that her mouth was quivering.
“I’ve loved you for years,” she said—“since the first day you came West and walked into the old Realart Studio. You were so brave about people, George. Whoever it was, you walked right up to them and tore something aside as if it was in your way and began to know them. I tried to make love to you, just like the rest, but it was difficult. You drew people right up close to you and held them there, not able to move either way.”
“This is all entirely imaginary,” said George, frowning uncomfortably, “and I can’t control—”
“No, I know. You can’t control charm. It’s simply got to be used. You’ve got to keep your hand in if you have it, and go through life attaching people to you that you don’t want. I don’t blame you. If you only hadn’t kissed me the night of the Mayfair dance. I suppose it was the champagne.”
George felt as if a band which had been playing for a long time in the distance had suddenly moved up and taken a station beneath his window. He had always been conscious that things like this were going on around him. Now that he thought of it, he had always been conscious that Margaret loved him, but the faint music of these emotions in his ear had seemed to bear no relation to actual life. They were phantoms that he had conjured up out of nothing; he had never imagined their actual incarnations. At his wish they should die inconsequently away.
“You can’t imagine what it’s been like,” Margaret continued after a minute. “Things you’ve just said and forgotten, I’ve put myself asleep night after night remembering—trying to squeeze something more out of them. After that night you took me to the Mayfair other men didn’t exist for me any more. And there were others, you know—lots of them. But I’d see you walking along somewhere about the lot, looking at the ground and smiling a little, as if something very amusing had just happened to you, the way you do. And I’d pass you and you’d look up and really smile: ‘Hello, darling!’ ‘Hello, darling’ and my heart would turn over. That would happen four times a day.”
George stood up and she, too, jumped up quickly.
“Oh, I’ve bored you,” she cried softly. “I might have known I’d bore you. You want to go home. Let’s see—is there anything else? Oh, yes; you might as well have those letters.”
Taking them out of a desk, she took them to a window and identified them by a rift of lamplight.
“They’re really beautiful letters. They’d do you credit. I suppose it was pretty stupid, as you say, but it ought to teach you a lesson about—about signing things, or something.” She tore the letters small and threw them in the wastebasket: “Now go on,” she said.
“Why must I go now?”
For the third time in twenty-four hours sad and uncontrollable tears confronted him.
“Please go!” she cried angrily—“or stay if you like. I’m yours for the asking. You know it. You can have any woman you want in the world by just raising your hand. Would I amuse you?”
“Margaret—”
“Oh, go on then.” She sat down and turned her face away. “After all you’ll begin to look silly in a minute. You wouldn’t like that, would you? So get out.”
George stood there helpless, trying to put himself in her place and say something that wouldn’t be priggish, but nothing came.
He tried to force down his personal distress, his discomfort, his vague feeling of scorn, ignorant of the fact that she was watching him and understanding it all and loving the struggle in his face. Suddenly his own nerves gave way under the strain of the past twenty-four hours and he felt his eyes grow dim and his throat tighten. He shook his head helplessly. Then he turned away—still not knowing that she was watching him and loving him until she thought her heart would burst with it—and went out to the door.