The Avalanche

I

Hélène, as Ruyler had anticipated, refused positively to accept Mrs. Thornton’s invitation.

“Do you think I’d leave you—­to come home to a dreary house every night?  Even if I don’t see much of you, at least you know I’m there; and that if you have an evening off you have only to say the word and I’ll break any engagement—­you have always known that!”

Ruyler had not, but she looked so eager and sweet—­she was lunching with him at the Palace Hotel on the day following his interview with Spaulding—­that he hastened to assure her affectionately that the certainty of his wife’s desire for his constant companionship was both his torment and his consolation.

Hélène continued radiantly: 

“Besides, darling, Polly Roberts is staying on.  Rex can’t get away yet.”

“Polly Roberts is not nearly good enough for you.  She hasn’t an idea in her head and lives on excitement—­”

Hélène laughed merrily.  “You are quite right, but there’s no harm in her.  After all, unless one goes in for charities (and I can’t, Price, yet; besides the charities here are wonderfully looked after), plays bridge, has babies, takes on suffrage—­what is there to do but play?  I suppose once life was serious for young women of our class; but we just get into the habit of doing nothing because there’s nothing to do.  Take to-morrow as an example:  I suppose Polly and I will wander down to The Louvre in the morning and buy something or look at the new gowns M. Dupont has just brought from Paris.

“Then we’ll lunch where there’s lots of life and everybody is chatting gayly about nothing.

“Then we’ll go to the Moving Pictures unless there is a matinée, and then we’ll motor out to the Boulevard, and then back and have tea somewhere.

“Or, perhaps, we’ll motor down to the Club at Burlingame for lunch and chatter away the day on the veranda, or dance.  This afternoon we’ll probably ring up a few that are still in town, and dance in Polly’s parlor at the Fairmont.”

Hélène’s lip curled, her voice had risen.  With, all her young enjoyment of wealth and position, she had been bred in a class where to idle is a crime.  “Just putting in time—­time that ought to be as precious as youth and high spirits and ease and popularity!  But what is one to do?  I have no talents, and I’d lose caste in my set if I had.  I don’t wonder the Socialists hate us and want to put us all to work.  No doubt we should be much happier.  But now—­even if you retired from business, you’d spend most of your time on the links.  We poor women wouldn’t be much better off.”

“It does seem an abnormal state of affairs; I’ve barely given it a thought, it has always been such a pleasure to find you, after a hard day’s work, looking invariably dainty, and pretty, and eloquently suggestive of leisure and repose.  But—­to the student of history—­I suppose it is a condition that cannot last.  There must be some sort of upheaval due.  Well, I hope it will give me more of your society.”

They smiled at each other across the little table in perfect confidence.  They were lunching in the court, and after she had blown him a kiss over her glass of red wine, her eyes happened to travel in the direction of the large dining-room.  She gave a little exclamation of distaste.

“There is maman lunching with that hateful old Mr. Lawton.  He was in her sitting-room when I ran in to call on her yesterday, and nearly snapped my head off when I asked him if he wouldn’t buy my electric for Aileen.  He said it was time she began to learn a few economies instead of more extravagances.  Poor darling Aileen.  She has to stay in town, too, for he won’t open the house in Atherton until he is ready to go down himself every night.”

“Is he an old friend of your mother’s?”

“She and Papa met him when they were here, and Mrs. Lawton was very kind when I was born.  It’s too bad Mrs. Lawton’s dead.  She’d be a nice friend for maman.”

“Perhaps your mother is asking Mr. Lawton’s advice about the investment of money.”

He had been observing his wife closely, but it was more and more apparent that if Mr. Lawton held the key to her mother’s past she had not been informed of the fact.  She answered indifferently: 

“Possibly.  One can get much higher interest out here than in France, and maman would never invest money without the best advice.  She loves me, but money next.  Oh, là! là!”

“Has she said anything more about going back to Rouen?”

“I didn’t have a word with her alone yesterday, but I’ll ask her to-day.  Poor maman!  I fancy the novelty has worn off here, and she would really be happier with her own people and customs.  She hates traveling, like all the French; but don’t you think that, after a bit we shall be able to go over to Europe at least once a year?”

“I am sure of it.  And while I am attending to business in London you could visit your mother in Rouen.  Tell her that one way or another I’ll manage it.”

And this seemed to him an ideal arrangement!

II

When they left the table and walked through the more luxurious part of the court, they saw Madame Delano alone and enthroned as usual in the largest but most upright of the armchairs.  And as ever she watched under her fat drooping eyelids the passing throng of smartly dressed women, hurrying men, sauntering, staring tourists.  Here and there under the palms sat small groups of men, leaning forward, talking in low earnest tones, their faces, whether of the keen, narrow, nervous, or of the fleshy, heavy, square-jawed, unimaginative, aggressive, ruthless type, equally expressing that intense concentration of mind which later would make their luncheon a living torment.

Hélène threw herself into a chair beside her mother and fondled her hand.  Ruyler noted that after Madame Delano’s surprised smile of welcome she darted a keen glance of apprehension from one to the other, and her tight little mouth relaxed uncontrollably in its supporting walls of flesh.  But she lowered her lids immediately and looked approvingly at her daughter, who in her new gown of gray, with gray hat and gloves and shoes, was a dainty and refreshing picture of Spring.  Then she looked at Ruyler with what he fancied was an expression of relief.

“I wonder you do not do this oftener,” she said.

“I never know until the last moment when or where I shall be able to take lunch, and then I often have to meet three or four men.  Such is life in the city of your adoption.”

“There is no city in the world where women are so abominably idle and useless!” And at the moment, whatever Madame Delano may have been, her voice and mien were those of a virtuous and outraged bourgeoisie.  “You are all very well, Ruyler, but if I had known what the life of a rich young woman was in this town, I’d have married Hélène to a serious young man of her own class in Rouen; a husband who would have given her companionship in a normal civilized life, who would have taken care of her as every young wife should be taken care of, and who would have insisted upon at least two children as a matter of course.  With us The Family is a religion.  Here it is an incident where it is not an accident.”

Ruyler, who was still standing, looked down at his mother-in-law with profound interest.  He had never heard her express herself at such length before.  “Do you think I fail as a husband?” he asked humbly.  “God knows I’d like to give my wife about two-thirds of my time, but at least I have perfect confidence in her.  I should soon cease to care for a wife I was obliged to watch.”

“Young things are young things.”  Madame Delano looked at Hélène, who had turned very white and had lowered her own lids to hide the consternation in her eyes.  But as her mother ceased speaking she raised them in swift appeal to Ruyler.

“Maman says I coquette too much,” she said plaintively, and Price wondered if a slight movement under the hem of Madame Delano’s long skirts meant that the toe of a little gray shoe were boring into one of the massive plinths of his mother-in-law.  “But tell him, maman, that you don’t really mean it.  I can’t have Price jealous.  That would be too humiliating.  I’m afraid I do flirt as naturally as I breathe, but Price knows I haven’t a thought for a man on earth but him.”  The color had crept back into her cheeks, but there was still anxiety in her soft black eyes, and Price was sure that the little pointed toe once more made its peremptory appeal.

Madame Delano looked squarely at her son-in-law.

“That’s all right—­so far,” she said grimly.  “Hélène is devoted to you.  But so have many other young wives been to busy American husbands.  Now, take my advice, and give her more of your companionship before it is too late. Watch over her.  There always comes a time—­a turning-point—­European husbands understand, but American husbands are fools.  Woman’s loyalty, fed on hope only, turns to resentment; and then her separate life begins.  Now, I’ve warned you.  Go back to your office, where, no doubt, your clerks are hanging out of the windows, wondering if you are dead and the business wrecked.  I want to talk to Hélène.”

III

In spite of his wise old French mother-in-law’s insinuations, Ruyler felt lighter of heart as he left the hotel and walked toward his office than he had since Sunday.  Of two things he was certain:  there was no ugly understanding between the mother and daughter over that unspeakable past, and Madame Delano’s new attitude toward her daughter was merely the result of an over-sophisticated mother’s apprehensions:  those of a woman who was looking in upon smart society for the first time and found it alarming, and—­unwelcome, but inevitable thought—­peculiarly dangerous to a young and beautiful creature with wild and lawless blood in her veins.

However, it was patent that so far her apprehensions were merely the result of a rare imaginative flight, the result, no doubt, of her own threatened exposure.  Once more he admired her courage in returning to San Francisco, and as he recalled the covert air of cynical triumph, with which she had accepted his offer for her daughter’s hand, he made no doubt that one object had been to play a sardonic joke on the city she must hate.

He renewed his determination to keep what guard he could over his young wife, and wondered if his brother Harold, who also had elected to enter the old firm, could not be induced to come out and take over a certain share of the responsibility.  The young man had paid him a visit a year ago and been enraptured with life in California.

True, he was accustomed to make quick decisions without consulting any one, and he should find a partner irksome, but he was beginning to realize acutely that business, even to an American brain, packed with its traditions and energies, was not even the half of life, should be a means not an end; he set his teeth as he walked rapidly along Montgomery Street and vowed that he would keep his domestic happiness if he had to retire on what was available of his own fortune.  He even wondered if it would not be wise to buy a fruit ranch, where he and Hélène could share equally in the management, and begin at once to raise a family.  They both loved outdoor life, and this life of complete frivolity, in which she seemed to be hopelessly enmeshed, might before long corrode her nature and blast the mental aspirations that still survived in that untended soil.  When this great merging deal was over he should be free to decide.