Part 13

It was O-liver's lightness which gave him the whip hand in an argument. They were most of them serious men; not serious in a Puritan sense of taking thought of their souls' salvation and the world's redemption, but serious in their pursuit of wealth. They had to be rich. If they weren't they couldn't marry, or if they were married they had to be rich so that their wives could keep up with the wives of the other fellows who were getting rich. They had to have cars and money to spend at big hotels and for travel, money for diamonds and furs, money for everything.

But here was O-liver Lee, who said lightly that money weighed upon him. He didn't want it. He'd be darned if he wanted it. Money brought burdens. As for himself, he'd read and ride Mary Pick.

"Anyhow," said Henry, with his hands folded across his stomach--Henry had grown fat riding in his car--"anyhow, when you get old you'll be sorry."

"I shall never grow old," said O-liver, and stood up. "I shall be young--till I--die."

They laughed at him outwardly, but in their hearts they did not laugh. They could not think of him as old. They felt that in a hundred years he would still be strong and sure, his blond mane untouched by gray, his clear blue eyes unblurred.

Atwood rounding them all up for a drink found that O-liver wouldn't drink.

"Drank too much, once upon a time," he confessed frankly. "But I'll give you a toast."

He gave it, poised on his box like a young god on the edge of the world.

"Here's to poverty! May we learn to love her for the favors she denies!"

"Queer chap," said Atwood to Henry later.

Henry nodded. "He's queer, but he's great company. Always has a crowd round him. But no ambition."

"Pity," said Atwood. "How'd he get that name--O-liver?"

"One of the fellows got gay and called him 'Ollie.' Lee stopped him. 'My name is Oliver Lee. If you want a nickname you can say "O-liver." But I'm not "Ollie" from this time on, understand?' And I'm darned if the fellow didn't back down. There was something about O-liver that would have made anybody back down. He didn't have a gun; it was just something in his voice."

"Say, he's wasted," said Atwood. "A man with his line of talk might be President of the United States."

"Sure he might," Henry agreed. "I've told him a lot of times he's throwing away his chance."

II

The office of the incipient oil king was on the main street of the straggling town. At the back there was a window which gave a view of a hill or two and a mountain beyond. The mountain stuck its nose into the clouds and was whitecapped.

It was this view at the back which O-liver faced when he sat at his machine. When he rested he liked to fix his eyes on that white mountain. O-liver had acquired of late a fashion of looking up. There had been a time when he had kept his eyes on the ground. He did not care to remember that time. The work that he did was intermittent, and between his industrious spasms he read a book. He had a shelf at hand where he kept certain volumes--Walt Whitman, Vanity Fair, Austin Dobson, Landor's Imaginary Conversations, and a rather choice collection of Old Mission literature. He had had it in mind that he might some day write a play with Santa Barbara as a background, but he had stopped after the first act. He had ridden down one night and had reached the mission at dawn. The gold cross had flamed as the sun rose over the mountain. After that it had seemed somehow a desecration to put it in a painted scene. O-liver had rather queer ideas as to the sacredness of certain things.

Tommy Drew, who had a desk in the same office, read Vanity Fair and wanted to talk about it. "Say, I don't like that girl, O-liver."

"What girl?"

"Becky."

"Why not?"

"Well, she's a grafter. And her husband was a poor nut."

"I'm afraid he was," said O-liver.

"He oughta of dragged her round by the hair of her head."

"They don't do it, Tommy," O-liver was thoughtful. "After all a woman's a woman. It's easier to let her go."

An astute observer might have found O-liver cynical about women. If he said nothing against them he certainly never said anything for them. And he kept strictly away from everything feminine in Tinkersfield, in spite of the fact that his good looks won him more than one glance from sparkling eyes.

"He acts afraid of skirts," Henry had said to Tommy on one occasion.

"He?" Tommy was scornful. "He ain't afraid of anything!"

Henry knew it. "Maybe it's because you can't do much with women on fifteen a week."

"Well, I guess that's so," said Tommy, who made twenty and who had a hopeless passion.

His hopeless passion was Jane. Jane lived with her mother in a small rose-bowered bungalow at the edge of the town. She and her mother owned the bungalow, which was fortunate; they hadn't a penny for rent. Jane's father had died of a weak lung and the failure of his oil well. He had left the two women without an income. Jane's mother was delicate and Jane couldn't leave her to go out to work. So Jane dug in the little garden, and they lived largely on vegetables. She sewed for the neighbors, and bought medicine and now and then a bit of meat. She was young and strong and she had wonderful red hair. Tommy thought it was the most beautiful hair in the world. Jane was for him a sort of goddess woman. She was, he felt, infinitely above him. She knew a great deal that he didn't, about books and things--like O-liver. She sewed for his mother, and that was the way he had met her. He would go over and sit on her front steps and talk. He felt that she treated him like a little dog that she wouldn't harm, but wouldn't miss if it went away. He told her of Vanity Fair and of how he felt about Becky.

"If she had been content to earn an honest living," Jane stated severely, "the story would have had a different ending."

"Well, she wanted things," Tommy said.

"Most women do." Jane jabbed her needle into a length of pink gingham which, when finished, would be rompers for a youngster across the street. "I do; and I intend to have them."

"How?" asked the interested Tommy.

"Work for them."

"O-liver says that fifteen dollars a week is enough for anybody to earn."

Jane had heard of O-liver. Tommy sang his constant praises.

"Why fifteen?"

"After that you get soft."

Jane laid down the length of pink gingham and looked at him. She hated to sew on pink; it clashed dreadfully with her hair.

"I should say," she stated with scorn, "that your O-liver's lazy."

"No, he isn't. He only wants enough to eat and enough to smoke and enough to read."

"That sounds all right, but it isn't. What's he going to do when he's old?"

"He ain't ever going to grow old. He said so, and if you'd see him you'd know."

Jane felt within her the stirring of curiosity. But she put it down sternly. She had no time for it.

"Tommy," she said, "I've been thinking. I've got to earn more money, and I want your help."

Tommy's faithful eyes held a look of doglike affection.

"Oh, if I can--" he quavered.

"I've got to get ahead." Jane was breathless. Her eyes shone.

"I've got to get ahead, Tommy. I can't live all my life like this." She held up the pink strip. "Even if I am a woman, there ought to be something more than making rompers for the rest of my days."

"You might," said the infatuated Tommy, "marry."

"Marry? Marry whom?"

Tommy wished that he might shout "Me!" from the housetops. But he knew the futility of it.

"I shall never marry," she said, "until I find somebody different from anything I've ever seen."

Jane's ideas of men were bounded largely by the weakness of her father and the crudeness of men like Henry Bittinger, Atwood Jones and others of their kind. She didn't consider Tommy at all. He was a nice boy and a faithful friend. His mother, too, was a faithful friend. She classed them together.

Her plan, told with much coming and going of lovely color, was this: She had read that the way to make money was to find the thing that a community lacked and supply it. Considering it seriously she had decided that in Tinkersfield there was need of good food.

"There's just one horrid little eating house," she told Tommy, "when the men come in from out of town."

"Nothing fit to eat either," Tommy agreed; "and they make up on booze."

She nodded. "Tommy," she said, and leaned toward him, "I had thought of sandwiches--home-made bread and slices of ham--wrapped in waxed paper; and of taking them down and selling them in front of the post-office on Saturday nights."

Tommy's eyes bulged. "You take them down?"

"Why not? Any work is honorable, Tommy."

Tommy felt that it wouldn't be a goddess role.

"I can't see it." The red crept up into his honest freckled face. "You know the kind of women that's round on Saturday nights."

"I am not that kind of woman." She was suddenly austere.

He found himself stammering. "I didn't mean--"

"Of course you didn't. But it's a good plan, Tommy. Say you think it's a good plan."

He would have said anything to please her. "Well, you might try."

The next day he found himself talking it over with O-liver. "She wants to sell them on Saturday nights."

"Tell her," said O-liver, "to stay at home."

"But she's got to have some money."

"Money," said O-liver, "is the root of evil. You say she has a garden. Let her live on leeks and lettuce."

"Leeks and lettuce?" said poor Tommy, who had never heard of leeks.

"Her complexion will be better," said O-liver, "and her peace of mind great."

"Her complexion is perfect," Tommy told him, "and she isn't the peaceful kind. Her hair is red."

"Red-haired women"--O-liver had his eye on Vanity Fair--"red-haired women always flaunt themselves."

Tommy, softening O-liver's words a bit, gave them in the form of advice to Jane: "He thinks you'd better live on leeks and lettuce than go down-town like that."

Jane gasped. "Leeks and lettuce? Me? He doesn't know what he's talking about! And anyhow, what can you expect of a man like that?"

III

A week later Jane in a white shirt-waist and white apron came down with her white-covered basket into the glare of the town's white lights. The night was warm and she wore no hat. Her red hair was swept back from her forehead with a droop over the ears. She had white skin and strong white teeth. Her eyes were as gray as the sea on stormy days. Tommy came after her with a wooden box, which he set on end, and she placed her basket on it. The principal stores of the small town, the one hotel and the post-office were connected by a covered walk which formed a sort of arcade, so that the men lounging against doorways or tip-tilted in chairs seemed in a sort of gallery from which they surveyed the Saturday-night crowd which paraded the street.

Jane folded up the cloth which covered her basket and displayed her wares. "Don't stick round, Tommy," she said. "I shall do better alone."

But as she raised her head and saw the eyes of the men upon her a rich color surged into her cheeks.

She put out her little sign bravely:

HOME-MADE SANDWICHES--TWENTY CENTS

With a sense of adventure upon them the men flocked down at once. They bought at first because the wares were offered by a pretty girl. They came back to buy because never had there been such sandwiches.

Jane had improved upon her first idea. There were not only ham sandwiches; there were baked beans between brown bread, thin slices of broiled bacon in hot baking-powder biscuit. Henry Bittinger said to Atwood Jones afterward: "The food was so good that if she had been as ugly as sin she'd have got away with it."

"She isn't ugly," said Atwood, and had a fleeting moment of speculation as to whether Jane with her red hair would fit into his plutocratic future.

Jane had made fifty sandwiches. She sold them all, and took ten dollars home with her.

"I shall make a hundred next time," she said to Tommy, whom she picked up on the way back. "And--it wasn't so dreadful, Tommy."

But that night as she lay in bed looking out toward the mountain, silver-tipped in the moonlight, she had a shivering sense of the eyes of some of the men--of Tillotson, who kept the hotel, and of others of his kind.

O-liver had stayed at home that Saturday night to write a certain weekly letter. He had stayed at home also because he didn't approve of Jane.

"But you haven't seen her," Tommy protested.

"I know the type."

On Sunday morning Tommy brought him a baked-bean sandwich. "It isn't as fresh as it might be. But you can see what she's giving us."

There were months of O-liver's life which had been spent with a grandmother in Boston. His grandmother had made brown bread and she had baked beans. And now as he ate his sandwich there was the savor of all the gastronomic memories of a healthy and happy childhood.

"It's delicious," he said, "but she'd better not mix with that crowd."

"She doesn't mix," said Tommy.

"She'll have to." O-liver had in mind a red-haired woman, raw-boned, with come-hither eyes. Her kind was not uncommon. Tommy's infatuation would of course elevate her to a pedestal.

"She's going to make a hundred sandwiches next week," Tommy vouchsafed.

O-liver's mind could scarcely compass one hundred sandwiches. "She'd better stick to her leeks and lettuce."

He rode away the next Saturday night. It was his protest against the interest roused in the community by this Jane who sold sandwiches. He heard of her everywhere. Some of the men were respectful and some were not. It depended largely on the nature of the particular male.

O-liver rode Mary Pick and wore his straw helmet. His way led down into the valley and up again and down, until at last he came to the sea. Then he followed the water's edge, letting Mary Pick dance now and then on the hard beach, with the waves curling up like cream, and beyond the waves a stretch of pale azure to the horizon.

He reached finally a fantastic settlement. Against the sky towered walls which might have inclosed an ancient city--walls built of cloth and wood instead of stone. Beyond these walls were thatched cottages which had no occupants; a quaint church which had no congregation; a Greek temple which had no vestals, no sacred fire, no altar; hedges which had no roots. O-liver weighing the hollowness of it all had thought whimsically of an old nursery rime:

The first sent a goose without a bone; The second sent a cherry without a stone; The third sent a blanket without a thread; The fourth sent a book that no man could read.

At the end of the settlement was a vast studio lighted by a glass roof. Entering, O-liver was transported at once to the dance hall on the Barbary Coast--a great room with a bar at one end, the musicians on a platform at the other, a stairway leading upward. Groups of people waited for a signal to dance, to drink, to act whatever part had been assigned them--people with unearthly pink complexions. The heat was intense.

With her face upturned to the director, who was mounted on a chair, stood a childish creature who was pinker, if possible, than the rest. She had fluffy hair of pale gold. She ran up the stairway presently, and the light was turned on her. It made of her fluffy hair a halo. In the strong glare everything about her was overemphasized, but O-liver knew that when she showed up on the screen she would be entrancing.

He had first seen her on the screen. He had met her afterward at her hotel. She had seemed as ingenuous as the parts she played. Perhaps she was. He could never be quite sure. Perhaps the money she had made afterward had spoiled her. She had jumped from fifty dollars a week to a thousand.

After that O-liver could give her nothing. He had an allowance from his mother of three thousand a year. Fluffy Hair made as much as that in three weeks. Where he had been king of his own domain he became a sort of gentleman footman, carrying her sables and her satchels. But that was not the worst of it. He found that they had not a taste in common. She laughed at his books, at his love of sea and sky. She even laughed at his Mary Pick, whose name suggested a hated rival.

And so he left her--laughing.

A certain sense of responsibility, however, took him to her once a month, and a letter went to her every week. She was his wife. He continued in a sense to watch over her. Yet she resented his watching.

From her stairway she had seen him, and when a rest was granted she came down to him.

"I'll be through presently," she said. "We can go to my hotel."

Her rooms in the hotel overlooked the sea. There was a balcony, and they sat on it in long lazy chairs and had iced things to drink.

O-liver drank lemonade. His wife had something stronger.

"I have not been well," she said; "it's a part of the doctor's prescription."

She had removed the pink from her face, and he saw that she was pale.

"You are working too hard," he told her. "You'd better take a month in the desert, out of doors."

She shivered. She hated the out-of-doors that he raved about. They had spent their honeymoon in a tent. She had been wild to get back to civilization. It had been their first moment of disillusion.

She showed him before he went some of the things she had acquired since his last visit--an ermine coat, a string of pearls.

"I saw them in your last picture," he told her. "You really visit me by proxy. I find your name on the boards, and walk in with a lot of other men and look at you. And not one of them dreams that I've ever seen the woman on the screen."

"Well, they wouldn't of course." She had never taken his name. Her own was too valuable.

When he told her good-bye he asked a question: "Are you happy?"

For a moment her face clouded. "I'm not quite sure. Is anybody? But I like the way I am living, Ollie."

He had a sense of relief. "So do I," he said. "I earn fifteen dollars a week. The papers say that you earn fifteen hundred--and you're not quite twenty."

"There isn't a man in this hotel that makes so much," she told him complacently. "The women try to snub me, but they can't. Money talks."

It seemed to him that in her case it shouted. As he rode back on Mary Pick he thought seriously of his fifteen dollars a week and her fifteen hundred; and of how little either weighed in the balance of happiness.

IV

It was not until the following Saturday that he saw Jane. She had made two hundred sandwiches. She had got Tommy's mother to help her. She had invented new combinations, always holding to the idea of satisfying the substantial appetites of men.

There would be no use, she argued, in offering five-o'clock-tea combinations.

She was very busy and very happy and very hopeful.

"If this keeps up," she told her mother, "I shall rent a little shop and sell them over the counter."

Her mother had an invalid's pessimism. "They may tire of them."

They were not yet tired. They gave Jane and her basket vociferous greeting, crowding round her and buying eagerly. Atwood and Henry having placed orders hung back, content to wait for a later moment when she might have leisure to talk to them.

Tommy helped Jane to hand out sandwiches and make change. He felt like the faithful squire of a great lady. He had read much romantic literature, and he served as well if not as picturesquely as a page in doublet and hose.

So O-liver saw them. He had been riding all the afternoon on Mary Pick. He had gone up into the Cañon of the Honey Pots. No one knew it by that name but O-liver, but at all the houses one could buy honey. Up and down the road were little stands on which were set forth glasses and jars of amber sweet. The bees flashed like motes in the sunlight, the air was heavy with the fragrance of the flowers which yielded their largess to the marauders.

It was dark when he rode down toward the town. It lay before him, all twinkling lights. Above it hung a thin moon and countless stars. It might have been a fairy town under the kindly cover of the night.

But when he reached the central square the illusion ceased. It was what men had made it--sordid, cheap. He stopped Mary Pick under a pepper tree and surveyed the scene.

Jane and her basket were the center of an excited group. She had almost reached the end of her supplies, and some one had suggested auctioning off the remainder. Jane had protested, but her protests had not availed. She had turned to Tommy for help, to Henry, to Atwood. They had done their best. But the man who led the crowd had an object in his leadership. It was Tillotson of the little hotel--red-faced, whisky-soaked.

"Sandwich Jane, Sandwich Jane!" he shouted. "That's the name for her, boys."

And they took it up and shouted "Sandwich Jane!"

It was at this moment that O-liver stopped under the pepper tree. The bright light fell directly on Jane's distressed face. He saw the swept-back brightness of her hair, her clear-cut profile, her white skin, her white teeth. But he saw more than this. "By Jove," he said, "she's a lady!"

If he had been talking to the men he would have said "Gosh!" It was only when he was alone that he permitted himself the indulgence of more formal language.

That Jane was harried he could see. And suddenly he rode forward on Mary Pick.

The crowd made way for him expectantly. There were always interesting developments when O-liver was on the scene.

"Gentlemen," he said, "let the lady speak for herself. I am not sure what you are trying to do, but it is evidently something she doesn't want done."

Jane flashed a grateful glance up at him. He was the unknown knight throwing down the gauntlet in her defense. He was different from the others--his voice was different.

"They want to auction off my sandwiches," she explained, "and they won't listen."

"I'm sure they will listen." O-liver on Mary Pick, with his hat off and his mane tossed back, might have been Henry of the white plumes. "Of course they'll listen."

And they did!

Jane stood on her box and addressed them.