The Avalanche

I

During the next few days Ruyler saw little of his wife.  He was obliged to take two business trips out of town and as he could not return until ten o’clock at night he advised her to have company to dinner and take her guests to the play.  But she preferred to dine with Polly Roberts and Aileen Lawton, and she spent her days for the most part at Burlingame, motoring down with one or more of her friends, or sent for by some enthusiastic girl admirer already established there for the summer.

Ruyler was quite willing to forego temporarily his plan of personal guardianship, as the more she roamed abroad unattended the better could Spaulding watch her associates.  The detective had his agents in society, as well as in the Palace Hotel, and on the third day he sent a brief note to Ruyler announcing that he had “lit on to something” that would make his employer’s “hair curl, but no more at present from yours truly.”

“This time,” he added, “I’m on the right track and know it.  No more fancy theories.  But I won’t say a word till I can deliver the goods.  Give your wife all the rope you can.”

Price and Hélène met briefly and amiably and she did not again broach the subject of the loan for her friend, nor did she ask for her jewels.  It was apparent that she was proudly determined to conceal whatever terrors or even worries that might haunt her, but the effort deprived her of all her native vivacity; she was almost formal in manner and her white face grew more like a classic mask daily.

On the evening before the Thornton fête, however, Price was able to dine at home.  They met at table and he saw at once that she either had recovered her spirits or was making a deliberate attempt to create the impression of a carefree young woman happy in a tête-à-tête dinner with a busy husband.

Her talk for the most part was of the great entertainment at San Mateo.  The weather promised to be simply magnificent.  Wasn’t that exactly like Flora Thornton’s luck?  The immense grounds were simply swarming with workmen; wagon-loads of all sorts of things went through the gates after every train—­simply one procession after another; but no one else could so much as get her nose through those gates.

Hélène, with all her old childish glee, related how she and Aileen, Polly (who apparently had forgotten her impending doom), and two or three other girls, had called up Mrs. Thornton on the telephone every ten minutes for an hour—­pretending it was long distance to make sure of a personal response—­and begged to be allowed to go over and see the preparations, until finally, in a towering rage, her ladyship had replied that if they called her again she would withdraw her invitations.

“How we did long for an airship.  It would have been such fun, for she does so disapprove of all of us; thinks us a little flock of silly geese.  Well, we are, I guess, but wasn’t she one herself once?  She has a pretty hard time even now making life interesting for herself—­out here, anyhow.

“Yesterday we motored down to Menlo and dropped in at the Maynards.  There were a lot of the props of San Francisco society, all as rich as croesus, sitting on the veranda crocheting socks or sacks for a crop of new babies that are due.  One or two were hemstitching lawn, or embroidering a monogram, or something else equally useless or virtuous.  They were talking mild gossip, and didn’t even have powder on.  It was ghastly—­”

“Hélène,” said Ruyler abruptly, “what do you think is the secret of happiness—­I mean, of course, the enduring sort—­perhaps content would be the better word.  Happiness is too dependent upon love, and love was never meant for daily food.  You are not by nature frivolous, and you are capable of thought.  Have you ever given any to the secret of content?”

“Yes, work,” she answered promptly.  “Everybody should have his daily job, prescribed either by the state or by necessity; but something he must do if both he and society would continue to exist.”

Ruyler elevated his eyebrows and looked at her curiously.  “Socialism.  I didn’t know you had ever heard of it.”

“Aileen and I are not such fools as we look—­as you were good enough to intimate just now.  We went to a series of lectures early last winter over at the University, on Socialism—­a lot of us formed a class, but all except Aileen and I dropped out.

“We continued to read for a time after the lectures were over, but of course that didn’t last.  One drops everything for want of stimulus, and when one begins to flutter again one is lost.

“But I heard and read and thought enough to deduce that the only vital interest in life after one’s secret happiness—­which one would not dare spread out too thin if one could in this American life—­is necessary work well done.  And that is quite different from those fussy interests and fads we create or take up for the sake of thinking we are busy and interested.

“Polly’s mother once told me she never was so happy in her life as during those weeks after the earthquake and fire when all the servants had run away and she had to cook for the family out in the street on a stove they bought down in a little shop in Polk Street and set up and surrounded on three sides by ‘inside blinds.’  She happened to have a talent for cooking, and without her the family would have starved.  Polly tied a towel round her head and did the housework, or stood in a line and got the daily rations from the Government.  She never thought once of—­”

“Of what?”

“Oh, of doing anything rather than expire of boredom.  She and Rex had been married a year and were living at home.  Rex and Mr. Carter helped excavate down in the business district, as the working class wouldn’t lift a finger as long as the Government was feeding them.”

“There you are!  Their ideal is complete leisure, and that of our delicate products of the highest civilization—­compulsory jobs!  What does progress mean but the leisure to enjoy the arts and all the finer fruits of progress?  What else do we men really work for?”

“Progress has gone too far and defeated its own ends.  Every healthy human being should be forced to work six hours a day.

“That would leave eight for sleep and ten for enjoyment of the arts and luxuries.  Then we really should enjoy them, and if we couldn’t have them unless we did our six hours’ stint, ennui and the dissipations that it breeds would be unknown.

“I can tell you it is demoralizing, disintegrating, to wake up morning after morning—­about ten o’clock!—­and know that you have nothing worth while to do for another day—­for all the days!—­that you have no place in the world except as an ornament!  Women of limited incomes and a family of growing children have enough, to do, of course—­too much—­they never can feel superfluous and demoralized—­except by envy—­but as for us!  Why, I can tell you, it is a marvel we don’t all go straight to the devil.”

They were alone with the coffee, and she was pounding the table with her little fist.  Her cheeks were deeply flushed and her black somber eyes were opening and closing rapidly, as if alternately magnetized by some ugly vision and sweeping it aside.

Price watched her with deep interest and deeper anxiety.  “A good many women go to the devil,” he said.  “But you are not that sort.”

“Oh, I don’t know.  I never could get up enough interest in another man to solve the problem in the usual way—­but there are other resources—­I—­well—­”

“What?” Price sat up very straight.

“Oh, dance ourselves into tuberculosis,” she said lightly, and dropping her eyelashes.  “And tuberculosis of the mind, certainly.  On the whole, I think I prefer physical to spiritual death….

“However—­I found out one thing to-day.  The dancing is to be out of doors.  There will be an immense arbor or something of the sort erected on the lawn above the sunken garden.  My gown is a dream and I shall wear the ruby.”

“Yes,” he said smiling.  “You shall wear the ruby.  But you must expect me to keep very close to you—­”

“The closer the better.”  She smiled charmingly.  “Have you tried on your costume?”

“I haven’t even looked at it.  Who am I?”

“Caesar Borgia.  You are not much like him yourself, darling, but I thought he was not so very unlike modern American business, as a whole.”

Ruyler laughed.  “Why not Machiavelli?  But as no doubt it is black velvet, much puffed and slashed, I may hope it will be becoming to my nondescript fairness.  You must promise not to wander off for long walks with any of your admirers.  Not that I fear the admirers, but the thieves that are bound to get into that crowd one way or another.  They have a way of unclasping necklaces even of the most circumspect wives in the company of not too absorbing men.”

Her eyes opened and flashed, but he had no time to analyze that fleeting expression before she was promising volubly not to wander from the illuminated spaces.

* * * * *

He interrupted her suddenly.  They were in the library now, and sat down on a little sofa in front of the window.  The moon was high and brilliant and the great expanse of water with the high clusters of lights on the islands, the sharp hard silhouette of the encircling mountains, the green and silver stars so high above, the moving golden dots of an incoming liner from Japan, the long rows of arc lights along the shore, made a landscape of the night that Mrs. Thornton with all her millions hardly could rival.

“Are you not grateful for this?” he asked whimsically and a little wistfully.

“Oh, Price, dear, I am more grateful than you will ever know.  I have not a fault on earth to find with you.  You would be the prince of the fairy tale if you were not so busy.

“But that is the tragedy.  You are busy—­I am not.”

“Well, let us have the personal solution—­one that fits ourselves.  You have time to think it out.  I, alas! have not.”  He took her hand and fondled it, hoping for her confidence.

“I don’t know.”  She had a deep rich voice and she could make it very intense.  “I only know there must—­must—­be a change—­if—­if—­I am to—­Can’t you take me abroad for a year?  That might not be work, but at least I should be learning some thing—­I have traveled almost not at all—­and, at least, I should have you.”

“But later?  Most of your friends have spent a good deal of time in Europe.  I doubt if any state in the Union goes to Europe as often as California!  They are all the more discontented when they come back here to vegetate—­as Mrs. Thornton would express it.

“It would be a blessed interval, but no more.”

“We should have time to think out a new and different life….

“You know—­in the class I come from—­in France—­the women are the partners of their husbands.  Even in the higher bourgeoisie, that is, where they still are in business, not living on great inherited fortunes—­

“My uncle had a small silk house in Rouen, and my aunt kept the books and attended to all the correspondence.  He always said she was the cleverer business man of the two; but French women have a real genius for business.  Some of our great ladies help their husbands manage their estates.

“It is only the few that live for pleasure and glitter in the most glittering city in the world that have furnished the novelists the material to give the world a false impression of France.

“The majority live such sober, useful, busy lives that only the highest genius could make people read about them.

“Of course, young girls dream of something far more brilliant, and wait eagerly for the husband who shall deliver them from their narrow restricted little spheres… perhaps take them to the great world of Paris; but they settle down, even in Paris, and devote themselves to their husbands’ interests, which are their own, and to their children….

“That is it!  They are indispensable—­not as women, but as partners.  I barely know what your business is about—­only that you are in some tremendous wholesale commission thing with tentacles that reach half round the world.

“Only the wives of politicians are any real help to their husbands in this country.  Isabel Gwynne!  What a help she will be—­has been—­to Mr. Gwynne.  But then she was always busy.  When her uncle died he left her that little ranch and scarcely anything else, she took to raising chickens—­not to fuss about and fill in her time, but to keep a roof over her head and have enough to eat and wear.  I doubt if she ever was bored in her life.”

“I can’t take you into the business, sweetheart,” said Ruyler slowly.  “For that would violate the traditions of a very old conservative house.  But I can quite see that something must be done….

“I married you to make you happy and to be happy myself.  I do not intend that our marriage shall be a failure.  It is possible that Harold would consent to come out here and take my place.  The business no longer requires any great amount of initiative, but the most unremitting vigilance.  I have thought—­it has merely passed through my mind—­but you might hate it—­how would you like it if I bought a large fruit ranch, several thousand acres, and put up a canning factory besides?  I would make you a full partner and you would have to give to your share of the work considerably more than six hours of the day—­

“We could build a large, plain, comfortable house, take all our books and pictures, subscribe to all the newspapers, magazines and reviews, keep up with everything that is going on in the world, have house parties once in a while, come to town for a few weeks in summer for the plays.

“We should live practically an out-of-door life—­if you preferred we could buy a cattle ranch in the south.  That would mean the greater part of the day in the saddle—­

“How does it appeal to you?”

He had turned off the electricity, but as he fumbled with his embryonic idea he saw her eyes sparkle and a light of passionate hope dawn on her face.

“Oh, I should love it!  But love it!  Especially the fruit ranch.  That would be like France—­our orchards are as wonderful as yours, even if nothing could be as big as a California ranch—­

“That is, if it would not be a makeshift.  Another form of playing at life.”

“I can assure you that we will have to make it pay or go to the wall.  My father would probably disinherit me, for it would be breaking another tradition, and he compliments me by believing that I am the best business man in the firm at present.

“My only capital would be such of my fortune as is not tied up in the House—­about a hundred thousand dollars in Government bonds.  Of course, in time, if all goes well, and California does not have another setback—­if business improves all over the world—­I shall be able to take the rest of my money out, that I put into this end of the business after the fire; but that may be ten years hence.  I shouldn’t even ask for interest on it—­that would be the only compensation I could offer for deserting the firm.

“Perhaps I had better buy a cattle ranch.  Then, if we fail, I shall at least have had the training of a cowboy and can hire out.”

Hélène laughed and clapped her hands.

“Fail?  You?  But I should help you to make it a success—­I should be really necessary?”

“Indispensable.  Either you or another partner.”

“No!  No!  I shall be the partner—­”

“And you mean that you would be willing to bury your youth, your beauty, on a ranch?  I have heard bitter confidences out here from women forced to waste their youth on a ranch.  You are one of the fine flowers of civilization—­”

“That soon wither in the hothouse atmosphere.  I wish to become a hardy annual.  And when the ranch was running like a clock we could take a month or two in Europe every year or so—­”

“Rather!  And I could show you off—­Bother!  I’ll not answer.”

The telephone bell on the little table in the corner (his own private wire) rang so insistently that Ruyler finally was magnetized reluctantly across the room.  He put the receiver to his ear and asked, “Well?” in his most inhospitable tones.

The answer came in Spaulding’s voice, and in a moment he sat down.

At the end of ten minutes he hung the receiver on the hook and returned to find Hélène standing by the window, all the light gone from her eyes, staring out at the hard brilliant scene with an expression of hopelessness that had relaxed the very muscles of her face.

Ruyler was shocked, and more apprehensive than he had yet been.  “Hélène!” he exclaimed.  “What is the matter?  Surely you may confide in me if you are in trouble.”

“Oh, but I am not,” she replied coldly.  “Did I look odd?  I was just wondering how many really happy people there were behind those lights—­over on Belvedere, at Sausalito—­the lights look so golden and steady and sure—­and glimpses of interiors at night are always so fascinating—­but I suppose most of the people are commonplace and just dully discontented—­”

“Well, I am afraid I have something to tell you that hardly will restore your delightful gayety of a few moments ago.  I am sorry—­but—­well, the fact is I must leave for the north to-morrow morning and hardly shall be able to return before the next night.  I am really distressed.  I wanted so much to take you to-morrow night—­”

“And I can’t wear the ruby?” Her voice was shrill.  Ruyler wondered if his stimulated imagination fancied a note of terror in it.

“I—­I—­am afraid not—­darling—­”

“But that Spaulding man will be there to watch—­”

“Unfortunately—­I forgot to tell you—­he cannot go—­he is on an important case.  Besides—­when I make a promise I usually keep it.”

“But—­but—­” She stammered as if her brain were confused, then turned and pressed her face to the window.  “I suppose nothing matters,” she said dully.  “Perhaps you will let me wear my own little ruby.  After all, that was maman’s, and she gave it to me before I was married.  I should like to wear one jewel.”

“You shall have all your jewels, if you will promise not to give them to Polly Roberts or any one else.”

“I promise.”

He went over and opened the safe, and when he rose with the gold jewel case he saw that she was standing behind him.  Once more it flitted through his mind that she had watched him manipulate the combination several times, but he had little confidence in any but a professional thief’s ability to memorize such an involved assortment of figures as had been invented for this particular safe.  It was only once in a while that he was not obliged to refer to the key that he carried in his pocketbook.

Nor was she looking at the safe, but staring upward at a maharajah, covered with pearls of fantastic size.  She took the box from his hand with a polite word of thanks, offered her cheek to be kissed, and left the room.

Price threw himself into a chair and rehearsed the instructions Spaulding had given him.