Diverging Roads

There is a peculiar quality in the somnolence of an old town in which little has occurred for many years. It is the unease of relaxation without repose, the unease of one who lies too late in bed, aware that he should be getting up. The men who lounge aimlessly about the street corners cannot be wholly idle. Their hands, at least, must be busy. The scarred posts and notched edges of the board sidewalks show it; the paint on the little stations is sanded shoulder-high to prevent their whittling there. Energy struggles feebly under the weight of the slow, uneventful days; but its pressure is always there, an urge that becomes an irritation in young blood.

Helen Davies, pausing in the doorway of Richardson’s store on a warm spring afternoon, said to herself that she would be glad never to see Masonville again. The familiar sight of its one drowsy street, the rickety wooden awnings over the sidewalks, the boys pitching horseshoes in the shade of the blacksmith-shop, was almost insupportable.

She did not want to stand there looking at it. She did not want to follow the old stale road home to the old farmhouse, which had not changed since she could remember. She felt that she should be doing something, she did not know what.

He came early that Sunday afternoon, but she had been ready, waiting, long before she saw the buggy coming down the road.

She had tried to do her hair in a new way, putting it up in rag curlers the night before, working with it for hours that morning in the stuffy attic bedroom before the wavy mirror, combing it, putting it up, taking it down again, with a nervous fluttering in her wrists. In the end she gave it up. She rolled the long braid into its usual mass at the nape of her neck, and pinned on it a black ribbon bow.

She longed for a new white dress to wear that day. Her pink gingham, whose blue-and-white-plaid pattern had faded to blurred lines of mauve and pale pink, was hideous to her as she contemplated it stretched in all its freshly ironed stiffness on the bed. But it was the best she could do.

While she dressed, the sounds of the warm, lazy, spring morning floated in to her through the half-open window. The whinnying of the long-legged colt in the barnyard, the troubled, answering neigh of his mother from the pasture, the cackling of the hens, blended like the notes of a pastoral orchestra with the rising and falling whirr of steel on the grindstone. Under the stunted live-oak in the side-yard her father was sharpening an ax, while her little sister Mabel turned the crank and poured water on the whirling stone. The murmur of their talk came up to her, Mabel’s shrill, continuous chatter, her father’s occasional monosyllables.

“Cut that out! How long’re you going to think you’re making a damn fool of me?” Mr. Roberts turned on her suddenly a face that terrified her. Words choked in his throat. He caught her wrist, and she felt his whole body shaking. “You⁠—you⁠—damned little⁠—” The rows of glass jars spun around her. She hardly understood the words he flung at her. “Coming here with your big eyes, playing me for all you’re worth, acting innocence! D’you think you’ve fooled me a minute? D’you think I haven’t seen through your little game? How long d’you think I’m going to stand for it⁠—say?”

“Let me go,” she said, panting.

She steadied herself against the end of a rack, where his furious gesture flung her. They faced each other in the close space, breathing hard. “I don’t know⁠—what you mean,” she said. Her world was going to pieces under her feet.

“You know damn well what I mean. Don’t keep on lying to me. You can’t put it over. I know where you were last night.” His face was contorted again. “Yes, and all the other nights, all the time you’ve been kidding yourself you were making a fool of me. I know all about it. Get that? I know what you were before I ever gave you a job. What d’you suppose I gave it to you for? So you could run around on the outside, laughing at me?”

“Wait⁠—oh, please⁠—”

But Louise was not listening. She sat mutinous, her fingers tapping time to the music, her eyes beneath the long lashes searching the room. “I can’t help it. I just got to dance!” she muttered, and suddenly she was gone. Someone met her among the tables, put his arms around her, and whirled her away. Helen, watching for her black hat and happy face to reappear, saw that she was dancing with the man whose telegram had introduced them. Memory finally gave her his name. Gilbert Kennedy.

Louise brought him to the table when the music ceased. There were gay introductions, and Helen wished that she could say something. But momma monopolized him, squeezing in an extra chair for him beside her, and saying how glad she was to meet a friend of her little girl’s.

Helen could only be silent, listening to their incomprehensible gaiety, and feeling an attraction for him as irresistible as an electric current. She did not know what it was, but she thought him the handsomest man she had ever seen, and she felt that he did whatever he wanted to do with invariable success. He was not like the others. He talked their jargon, but he did not seem of them, and she noticed that his hazel eyes, set in a network of tiny wrinkles, were at once avid and weary. Yet he could not be older than twenty-eight or so. He danced with momma, when again the orchestra began a rag, but coming back to the table with the others, he said restlessly:

“Let’s go somewhere else. My car’s outside. How about the beach?”

It was a large building, set high above the ground. Circling it, she saw a man in overalls and undershirt lounging in a wide doorway above her. The roar and bang and whir of machinery behind him drowned her voice, and he stared at her as at an apparition. When he leaped down beside her and understood her demand to see Mr. MacAdams his expression of perplexity changed to a broad grin. MacAdams was in a boiler, he said, and still grinning, he climbed back to the doorstep and drew her up by one arm into a huge room shaking with noise. He led her through crashing confusion and with his pipe-stem pointed out MacAdams.

MacAdams was crouching in a big cylinder of steel. In his hand he held a jerking riveter, and the boiler vibrated with its racket. His ears were stuffed with cotton, his eyes intent on his work. In mute show Helen thanked the man beside her and, going down on her hands and knees, crawled into the boiler. When she touched MacAdams’s shoulder the riveter stopped.

“I beg your pardon,” she said. “I heard you were interested in buying a ranch.”

MacAdams’s astonishment was profound. Mechanically he put a cold pipe in his mouth and took it out again. She saw that his mind was passive under the shock. Sitting back on her heels she opened the wallet and took out the pictures. Her voice sounded thin in her ears.

“There’s lots of good land in California. I wouldn’t try to tell you, Mr. MacAdams, that ours is the only land a man can make money by buying. But what do you think of that alfalfa?”