The Mulberry Bush (5 page)

She read the item three times through, a queer tightening at her temples, her hands dry and cold and unsteady.

It couldn't be—it was someone else—but it had to be, it was so obvious. Someone had recognized Mike—the minister? No, she was certain that to that kind old man she had been only one more vaguely identified bride, Mike one more indefinite, nervous groom. He had had to ask them their names twice.

“But I,” she thought, trying to make things come clear and fall into order in the stunned confusion of her mind, “am certainly red-headed and from the South.”

But who was the newspaper girl who had black hair and a ring? Mike had never talked about his past—she realized that Mike had told her almost nothing. Of his work, of the places he had seen and the dangers he had faced—a little of that passed over lightly. But of Michael Paull, of his personal life, practically nothing at all. Even the little she had learned about his father, his family, had been accidentally disclosed.

“Why,” she was thinking in consternation, “I don't know Mike at all! I didn't ask him—perhaps he thought I wasn't interested. But he didn't ask me either. He doesn't know anything about my family. He wouldn't know my father's name or where to send a message if I died—and neither would I, if something happened to him.”

It was as if she and Mike had begun living when first they met, wiping all the past away, forgetting it entirely. And that was right, that was the way for a marriage to begin. But now here was Mike's past leering horridly from black type, refusing to be forgotten.

It doesn't matter—it's all ended—it doesn't matter—if it had been important, Mike would have told me about it. . . . She struggled with her inner, prickly unease, trying to convince herself that it did not matter, really. Trying to put away thoughts of Mike's casual disregard of other people, of other claims, his bland and blithe dismissal of whatever did not interest him at the moment.

Every demanding and tiresome thing was to Mike another mulberry bush. “Here we go—round and round—and I never did like mulberries!”

“If, he did love her”—she let torment clutch at her heart poignantly for a little—“but—oh, he didn't—he couldn't—he couldn't change, he couldn't love me—and remember her!”

But what if this black-haired girl had loved Mike—loved him as she herself loved him now? A quick pity for this forsaken girl moved her briefly. Agony—to have loved Mike, to love him still perhaps—and then see him go flying away, indifferent, forgetting, ignoring. But Mike was too gentle, too tender, too fine. Mike wouldn't hurt a woman—or, could he?

Teresa's bitter words came back, though Virginia tried to close the ears of her mind against them.

“I've known that young lunatic longer than you have. He wants what he wants—for himself. He never thinks of anyone but Mike Paull.”

It wasn't true. Teresa was a cynical and shrewish woman about love, having put it out of her life long ago, being too ruthless in her pursuit of success to stop to consider it. Teresa believed in no men at all any more, and in very few women. She had no means of understanding Mike. If Mike was the light and reckless wind, Teresa was frowning stone, chilly and good only for grinding and crushing, or for building barrier walls. Nothing Teresa could do or say was going to influence her, Virginia, for an instant.

“This is silly,” she brought herself up sternly, “Teresa said I was adolescent. I must be, to let myself get jittery over a silly piece in the paper about something long past and of no consequence at all.”

She made herself smile and recover her poise as she handed back the paper. The stewardess was passing hot cups of coffee and hot toast, soaked with melted butter.

“We'll be on our way shortly, now,” she said.

“How would you like to get out and stretch your legs?” asked the brown man, when they had finished the coffee. “It was raining when we landed but it seems to have stopped now.”

“Oh, was it raining? I hadn't noticed.”

“Upset you a little—this landing,” he remarked. “I noticed that you were slightly agitated. It might have been pretty nasty if we had been up fifteen thousand feet when that motor went bad. Might not have been funny at all. On your way west?”

“Denver. And other places. I'm with a travel bureau,” she said.

“I'm Bruce Gamble—” he held out his hand, showed his very nice teeth in a quick, friendly smile. “I'm going to Denver, too. No glamour about my job, however, I sell dynamite.”

“Good gracious—I hope you don't carry samples?”

“No. I'm with the Du Ponts. We're manufacturing some new explosives; especially efficient in mining. Just now there's a little flare-up in the gold-mining business up here in the Rockies, so I'm going up to oversee some experiments and incidentally try to drum up some business.” He helped her down the steps, and she saw how isolated their situation was. A small emergency field, one tiny, white building with a red roof, red markers around the field, a tall, spindly tower of steel with lights strung upon it, and nothing else at all.

The silver plane looked small and lonely in the midst of so much space, and on either side, flat plains swept off toward the horizon. The pilot and co-pilot leaned against a wing, smoking cigarettes with the impatient chagrin of young men whose pride is laid low. They explained the breakdown of a pump to Bruce Gamble, rather brusquely at first, then expanding and growing technical when they saw that he understood their language.

“Fly, do you?”

“Yes, I fly,” he answered, “I have my license.”

They talked planes and engines then, and Virginia listened politely, remembering to keep her purse tight under her elbow. “All my worldly goods,” Mike had said. She looked far into the southward sky. “You couldn't be cruel and fickle, Mike,” her heart was saying, “you couldn't.”

“Want to walk a little way?” Bruce Gamble invited, “These boys say it will be an hour, perhaps, before the relief plane gets here. They had to bring it all the way from Chicago.”

The prairie sod was damp and springy with frost, and the wind was fresh and cool. The other passengers, five of them, all men, were huddled in a group, backs to the wind, collars turned up, telling yarns and laughing. The stewardess sat on the step of the plane, clasping her neat, uniformed knees with her arms, her smart little cap tilted over one eye. She looked drowsy and a little pale, and Virginia remembered that the girl had not slept all night; she had heard her light feet going up and down many times in the night. Virginia felt a bit light-headed herself from lack of sleep. She was grateful for the fresh, cold breath of the wind on her face and eyelids.

Bruce Gamble talked well. “They're reopening some very famous old diggings up there in the hills,” he said. “Mines that were abandoned in the eighties are being extended by new processes and new machinery. In a few spots they're taking fortunes out of the gulches—not the millions they dug there fifty years ago, when men went wild, but enough to be profitable. I'd like a chance to show you some of it. Will you be up here long?”

“No longer than necessary to close my contracts. I have seven men to see—all rather widely scattered, from the map, and of course, I know very little about the country and the local transportation.”

“Perhaps, if you are making your headquarters in Denver, I'll see you again?”

“Perhaps,” she was politely indefinite. “I'm Virginia Warfield—of the Harrison Bureau.”

Presently a silver mote appeared against the sky, and then the other plane was down, and half a dozen mechanics with tool kits scrambled out of it.

The baggage and mail were transferred swiftly, and this time Virginia did not wince and clutch at the arms of her seat when the plane lifted and roared into the sky.

“I'll be a flyer yet, Mike,” she said, to the passing clouds. “And then you won't be able to escape from me.”

She had been in her room only an hour when her telephone rang.

“Miss Warfield? This is Bruce Gamble. Would you come down about seven and have dinner with a lonesome traveling salesman?”

She couldn't say, “Oh, I'm sorry—but you see I'm a married woman. My husband might not approve.” That would be absurd anyway, Mike would be the first to laugh at such an idea. So she said, “I think that would be very nice. I'll come on one condition—that my dinner goes on my expense account.”

He did not argue, and she liked his good taste in forbearing.

“At seven then? In the Casanova Room, downstairs.”

She had letters to write, so she spent the next hour at the desk, but only one letter was finished—a long letter to Mike. She told him about flying.

“I suppose some god on a faraway planet looked down and saw two specks floating above this earth, and they were you and me. And now I'm safely down again, and I hope you've landed, too.” She said nothing about Bruce Gamble. After all, she did not know Mike's reactions very well—and things looked so different, so much less casual, set down in black and white. And undoubtedly, there would be lovely ladies in Lima, or Caracas, or other places, whom Mike would have to be gallant to—though the impression lingered in her mind that below the Tropic of Cancer, nice ladies did not go out casually to dine with men. They lived, precious and protected, behind their lattices—or was that all ended, too, along with so many other taboos?

She put on the tweed suit with the soft, gray fur that Mike had insisted on buying for her in New York. She fastened at the throat of her blouse the clip Mike had tossed into her lap that last morning.

“Present for a pretty lady.”

It was an expensive clip with four small diamonds set in an original arrangement of enameled grapes. Securing it firmly, she turned her mind as firmly away from a vagrant thought of that girl in New York who had a ring. A girl with pride, she decided, would have sent a ring back when an affair ended. She refused to let herself consider the fact that for the girl, it might not have been ended—not till the abrupt shock came of learning that Mike had married someone else.

“If she clung, it was her own fault!”

There might be no truth in it anyway; it might be merely the malicious invention of a man whom Mike hated. At any rate, the clip was lovely, and the cool feel of it against her skin was like a caress from Mike. And the little gray hat that completed the outfit looked smart and sophisticated on her bright hair. Bruce Gamble rose from a sofa in the lobby to meet her, admiration evident in his eyes.

Without his hat he looked a little older than she had thought him to be, the strong wave of his hair was definitely graying, and at the temples it was white against the dark tan of his skin. “This is fine,” he said, “I was dreading this long evening. Tomorrow I'll be at work, and the hours move along a little faster when you're working.” He pulled out her chair and arranged her fur, sat down opposite, and smiled at her.

“Nice of you to invite me down,” she said. “Otherwise I'd have had an omelet on a tray, and written a few letters—”

“And then you'd have gone to bed at nine o'clock with a magazine and wondered how in a city of half a million people, one room could be crowded so full of loneliness.”

“You've been traveling a long time, haven't you? I'm very new at it. I wouldn't be here at all, except that my lady employer broke some bones, and very frankly I'm scared to death.”

“I don't go around with an order book—and a collection of barroom stories,” he said. “I'm a sort of liaison man between the laboratories and the customers. Right now, I'm anxious to see these demonstrations of our explosive. It's supposed to eliminate dust and gas and several other dangerous features of other mining explosives. I'm especially interested in this formula because I helped work it out.”

“I,” Virginia said, “sell nice old ladies the idea that their lives will be incomplete until they've seen the sun set behind Pelée. And I convince retired businessmen in Nebraska that they should take their wives to Lake Louise or Bermuda. I collect tired schoolteachers and persuade them that a month in a log lodge at St. Vran will bring romance and glamour into their frustrated lives. And then I sell the hotels and camps the argument that they can take these people at a certain rate, so that our bureau can show a margin of profit. Tomorrow, I'm seeing a hotel-keeper near Pike's Peak and a transportation company, and the next day a dude-ranch owner near the Wyoming border. And the day after that—”

“The day after that is Sunday. Do you also beard tavern-keepers in their lairs on Sunday?”

“I have a very special one saved for Sunday. He keeps tavern in an old mining town that was once very rich and arrogant and wild. Now it's historic only—but we're sending some dilettante university people up there in July.”

“I know the place, I think.” He named it and she nodded. “How about driving up with me on Sunday? The place is historic but it isn't entirely a ghost town any more. There's quite a lot of activity—not so much excitement as when they paved the street with silver bricks for Ulysses Grant's carriage to roll over, but it isn't a place of memories entirely, now.”

“Too bad. Some of our very best literature will have to be rewritten. And it was very effective material too—the lure of the dramatic past. Did you do that, with your dynamite?”

“The man who invented a way to pump water up eight thousand feet did most of it. Most of those high mining projects failed for lack of water, originally. Then the water came, and good roads, and some of them are slowly coming back again. Not to their roaring pasts—but to a comfortable present.”

“How Mike would love all this!” Virginia was thinking. And she made up another letter to him in her mind, a letter that was not written for days, because she had so much to do. But at last Sunday came.