Hot Saturday

Front matter

COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

WHICH THIS BOOK IS SET

Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE

T family car was hers for the morning.

She drove first to the town’s only Beauty Parlour, where she sat regal and impatient while one woman shampooed and waved her hair and another trimmed and polished her fingernails. When the job was done she sat up and looked at herself, long and intently, from all angles, Miss Shane agile behind her with a hand-glass.

Miss Shane, whose reflection stood beside hers in the mirror, was a terrifying advertisement of her own arts at their worst. Her blondined hair was permanently waved into a semblance of moulded brass, her eyebrows were pulled into fine black lines, her face looked enamelled white and pink, her nails were long, pointed and stained bright red, like talons daintily dipped in gore… She certainly would ruin you if you let her, Ruth reflected. You had to know just when to stop her…

“You look lovely, dearie,” Miss Shane purred.

She said that to every customer, but she might have meant it this time, Ruth thought. Hungrily she stared at her own bright young image, drawing from it courage for her great effort.

Her hair was fine, abundant, light red and bobbed. Washed and fluffed it shone in a beam of sunlight, seeming live as flame. Her skin had the same bright freshness save for a spatter of freckles across her nose, and her eyes were bright blue. A shining vividness, suggesting intense, undaunted life, she had at her best. And she was at her best this morning. The fact filled her with a warmth of hope and confidence.

An anxious line between her brows she didn’t like and she tried to relax it and widen her eyes. She knew just the note she wanted— sweet, pure and innocent like Mary Pickford. Movies and magazines gave her abundant standards of dress and manner. She knew always just how she wanted to look and this morning she came somewhere near realizing her vision.

She glanced down at her nails. Polished and perfect, with new-moon tips, but no pink on them because it fought with her hair…

“Two seventy-five.” She fished futilely in her bag, among vanity cases, lip-sticks, handkerchiefs, door keys and small change. She was mildly embarrassed.

“I haven't got it with me, Miss Shane. Will you trust me till Monday?”

“Sure I will, dearie. I know your dad gives you whatever you want.”

Miss Shane always got in something like that—didn’t know her place. But you had to keep your credit good here if nowhere else…

She bared her teeth.

“Thank you so much, Miss Shane!” Her voice was a gentle coo. She was always polite except when she lost her temper.

“Don’t mention it, dearie… Good-bye … and good luck!”

Ruth shot her a quick look, anger just below the surface. What did she mean by good luck? The woman seemed to know everything… Well, who wouldn’t, running a beauty parlour? And a warmth of real friendliness shone in Miss Shane’s eyes. Her irritation died.

“Thank you, Miss Shane.”

She was out on the street again, starting the car, glancing at her wrist-watch. Quarter of eleven. Time for a little ride before lunch.

She always went for a ride alone, if she could get the car, when life seemed impossible, and when, as now, she wanted to think and plan. Riding alone seemed to stimulate her mind and release it. She could never think at home.

She picked her way deftly through the business section, throwing a bright smile at the town’s only traffic cop by way of insurance. Out on the state road she settled low in her seat and stepped on the gas with a sigh of relief. Wind rippled round the windshield and tickled her neck like delicate fingers. The car sent through her body a vaguely voluptuous tremor and the engine sang to her sweetly.

Now what she wanted to do was to think—to plan that day shrewdly, completely. And instead of plans she got only bright visions of triumph. This thing she longed for daringly, hoping against a hundred perils, her imagination insisted on treating as a thing achieved. It leapt across difficulties and preliminaries to the heart of her desire. Briefly she hummed the wedding march and saw herself in a billow of lace and tulle and orange blossom, marching to victory… Then … New York… That was where they would live, she knew, and that was the home of her dream. She had never been there, never been East. In her mind it was vague and glorious as a believer’s conception of heaven. It was all the elements of her ideal of beauty piled together in shining abundance. It was everything she lacked and longed for—money, light, speed, clothes, people—innumerable, astonishing people she had never met before, moving gracefully through an intricate endless round of pleasure. It was acres and mountains of shops in which to roam and buy… Above all, it was music. Whenever she thought of New York she thought of music and especially of opera. Music was the art to which she thrilled—the thing that discovered the rhythms of life to her and lifted her out of its agonies. She was always music-hungry. And music to her meant jazz and opera.

Jazz filled her with the devil, made her want to kick high and show the world what pretty legs she had. Jazz was the music of abandon. But opera appealed to what her mother called her better nature. It made her feel sad and glorious. All the operatic airs that she could get she had played over and over on the phonograph until she knew them by heart—the prison song from El Trovatore, the love duet from Tristan and Isolde, the sextet from Lucia. They always stirred in her a great warm upwelling lump of longing for she didn’t know what. They seemed to pour all through her, like water in a sponge, changing the very texture of being. They were rich voices full of tears and passion calling to her from some home of her soul which she might never find. When she was low and lonely they sometimes made her weep and when her energy was high they drove her to lift up her own powerful but inflexible contralto to the consternation of the neighbours… A few years before, they had sometimes inspired a vision of herself standing in a glare of light before a multitude, moving it with her voice to crashing applause.

The dream of being a singer had faded but the dream of hearing great singers in the flesh was bright in her imagination now. And she was still the centre of the picture, seated in a box at the Metropolitan, wearing a green gown that held the bare beauty of her back and shoulders as the calyx holds a tearose bud. A rope of pearls hung to the cleft in her bosom and her hair was a red-golden radiance constrained by a simple fillet set with diamonds… Darkness swallowed her… Music poured up and through her… A man sat at her elbow—a tall, powerful, rather sinister-looking man with shiny black hair and heavy black eyebrows. At every pause in the music he whispered to her, his voice hoarse and urgent. She could feel his breath on her bare back. She smiled, a little disdainfully…

A strip of red carpet laid across a sidewalk under an awning—that was an item in her every vision of the opulent elegance for which she yearned. Over a strip of red carpet under an awning one walked to glory…

Through crowded metropolitan streets, where coloured lights leapt and shimmered, she drove in a custom-built limousine with a man in plum-coloured livery on the driver’s seat. She could see herself in the lighted coach, wearing a turquoise-blue evening wrap with a great white feather collar, A single white carnation nodded from a cut-glass holder and an orchid peeped from the folds of her cloak… Across the red carpet came a liveried man to open the door of her car. Graceful and exquisite, she descended—entered a great ball-room, lit by chandeliers and filled with men and women in evening dress, who turned to look—people who knew nothing about her except how beautiful she was… A world of new people, strange people… A world of handsome eager men with money…

Palm Beach in winter—all rich people went there… She wore a tunic bathing-suit of blue silk, simple, and very slight. Her arms and legs were tanned a uniform yellow-brown. Behind her was a vague white row of sumptuous bungalows, sitting among tropical shrubbery, palm-trees. Before her the blue ocean endlessly rose and salaamed in white-topped breakers, spreading a lace of foam at her feet…

The speedometer caught her eye, brought her suddenly back to here and now. Forty-five miles an hour, it warned. Without re alizing it, she had been going faster and faster, as though her dream had been a visible thing she chased.

She slowed down, feeling foolish and irritated. What an idiot she was to kid herself that way! Her imagination was always running away with her. She wanted to think about difficulties, not dream about success… Even if she could manage him, there was his family… Good thing his mother had died.

Mothers of men were her natural enemies. They almost never liked her.

A father would be easier. But the worst danger was right here at home—what people would tell him about her. He was such an innocent, he would believe anything and he would be awfully easy to shock… Darling, when you are all mine, you will know… No, you couldn’t talk that way to that kind of a man… Oh, if he only wasn’t such a boob!

And was he really as interested as she thought? What was she building all these hopes upon? She had seen him only twice and never alone except in the car on the street. It was just the way he had looked at her. That was not much, and yet—never had she felt so sure of anyone… Funny how you could nearly always tell the first time a man looked at you…

The eyes of men were her study. She knew the sly inquiring look of wise woman-seeking men, and even better the look of men who are afraid—the look with hatred under it. And she knew the look of the man who has fallen wholly in love—the wide-eyed worshipful baby look of pure illusion, of dream and desire.

It had shone in his eyes that first evening on the front porch when he brought the letter of introduction to her mother. She had prepared for his coming and she knew she was looking her best, all in white with a white silk scarf about her shoulders. It was dusk enough so that her freckles didn’t show.

She didn’t say much. For one thing, she was too surprised. He was too entirely different from what she had expected. A youth of metropolitan elegance, sophisticated, perhaps a little supercilious, she had imagined him. And for no good reason she had thought of him as tall and dark, with heavy black eyebrows—a rather devilish-looking fellow. She had been prepared to find him a little stuck-up and to convince him that small-town people were not always as slow as he thought…

She had not been prepared to meet a great gawky boy, blushing and perspiring with embarrassment, encumbered by his own hands and feet. She knew he was a year older than herself, because Mrs. Calder had written that he had just come into that half million when he was twenty-one, but he seemed younger because he was so shy and had such a childish-looking mouth.

She didn’t know what to say, so she let her mother do the difficult talking and just smiled at him when he looked her way. And he looked her way most of the time after the first few minutes. She seemed to have filled him with a bedazzled amazement, as though he had never seen a girl before. When he left he almost fell off the porch saying good-bye… Her disappointment had given way to a glowing sense of power.

Then he came to Sunday dinner, and that was awful. She remembered it with pain. It was hot as sin and she felt her nose getting shiny and her neck getting red. Heat was just what her looks wouldn’t stand. She always looked too hot anyway, with her red hair and high colour, and she perspired so easily, even on the backs of her hands. She sat there feeling drops of water running down her back, smiling with her teeth when she would have liked to curse and weep. Dad looked like a hick with his purple necktie and told moth-eaten jokes about two travelling men. Annie, the little pest, kept piping up with something about a stomach-ache and finally had to be sent from the table. The chicken was dry because he had been twenty minutes late, and the California strawberries were tasteless and the whipped cream simply lay down and perished in its dish. Juliana, the Mexican maid, had to be coached and scolded… And he must have been used to butlers and wonderful food and everything spiffy. He certainly didn’t act like a man that had ever been anywhere, but with half a million dollars back of him he must have been used to a good deal of swank… There was no doubt about the money, though. Everybody knew the shoe-polish Faddens had it, and he was an only child. They did say the old man had worked up from the bottom, so maybe they were not very tony, after all…

Anyway he didn’t seem to notice anything except her. He sat and stared at her most of the time, just as he had at first. He didn’t eat much, but who could have? And he hardly talked at all. He seemed a perfect dumb-bell. And yet they said he was a shark in something or other—industrial chemistry, she thought. He did try to explain something about alkaloids, and that killed off what little conversation there was, because of course nobody else knew anything about them, and he looked as though he would like to slide under the table and die of embarrassment.

It was awful, but he came through it with that same worshipping look in his eyes. And if he could stand that dinner and the family he could stand a lot.

Afterward they went for a drive and that was better. He perked up and talked a little, and he saw the town and seemed interested. Incidentally the town saw him—with her. Everybody went driving on Sunday afternoon. She had felt proud and elated at the time, but now she wished not so many people knew about him… Well, there was no help for that. They would have to find out sooner or later.

… The main idea was to show him a good time to-day. He was supposed to like outdoor life, and outdoors was where she shone. She was strong and graceful and wasn’t afraid of snakes and didn’t have to be dragged around… Show him a good time and if possible get him alone… That was why she hadn’t invited anyone but Alma and Doc Jaggers. Mother would hold down Annie and the Doc’s lung wouldn’t let him go far and Alma would probably stay with the Doc…

She glanced at her wrist-watch. Quarter of twelve. And she had forgotten to order stuffed olives and she had to go by the Budlongs’ and tell Alma what time they were going to start. She slowed down, went into low and turned.

At the top of Hairpin Hill she stopped a moment, partly to let the engine cool and partly because she always stopped here when she was alone.

The spot was marked scenic on the Chamber of Commerce road maps. On her retina it was a vague, familiar blur of blue and purple mountain, yellowish plain, green valley stitched with silver river. She was not much aware of it as a view, but she liked the sense of lift and isolation the place gave her, and the cooling wind that always blew there. It brought her a moment of peace and self-sufficiency.

She could remember when this place had been a long day’s journey from town over sandy roads in a buck-board. Life was slow in those days before they had cars, and it never got far from home. A hundred miles were no more to her than ten had been to her parents when she was born. Where they had crawled she flew. But she flew nowhere, she merely circled. She came back no less surely to this place that owned her life…

For a few minutes her thought hung suspended, as she was, far above the world she lived in. She was aware only of colour, sunlight and the pleasant relaxation of her healthy young body as she stretched her legs and arms. Then the town reached up and touched her—called her back. Stuffed olives. Alma Budlong. Twelve o’clock. She started the car resolutely, her brows drawing down to a point of concentration and purpose.

With easy confidence she zigzagged down the hill, ignoring signs. “Slow down,” they warned. “Sound your horn.” She knew every inch of the way and she was wholly without physical fear. Every year a few tourists broke their necks here—burned out brake bands and went over the edge at one of the sharp turns. Some people were awful fools. Nothing like that would ever happen to her. That was her feeling about all the physical perils of life. Terrible things happened, but not to her.

Much of the road was blasted out of solid rock and every smooth face of it offered her admonition and information. “Stop at the Interocean Garage.” “Jesus died to save you.” “The Jewett makes this hill in high.” “Battery Bill’s for battery ills.”

Down a long slope she sped toward the valley, making a frightened jack rabbit and flying birds look slow. She was in a hurry now.

Ahead of her a plume of pale grey dust hid a car. She chased it and caught it. Through the dust loomed the rear of an ancient Ford with tremulous fenders and a load that bulged wide on either hand with box and bundle and chicken coop. It was one of those jitneys that passed in an endless procession all summer carrying whole families and their belongings, bound for California. They camped at night and seemed to live on nothing. The town hated them because they brought no money and sometimes stole gas and tires and went broke and had to be taken care of… And why did they want to go to California anyway? “They think they’re gonna find a money-tree out there,” old man Gaynes at the Interocean said, and he was about right.

Meantime, they cluttered up the road horribly. This one was not making more than fifteen miles an hour and he was awfully hard to pass. Leaning forward in urgent irritation, she squawked her horn long and hard. The jitney held the middle of the road. Dust poured into her face. Her hair, freshly and expensively washed, was getting full of it. She pushed within an inch of the car, rage rising red into her cheeks, hand hard on the horn.

Damn the man! He heard her all right. He was just pigheaded like most of these bums.

At a turn she plunged alongside recklessly, still honking, forced the complaining jitney off the road. As she roared by she turned and glared her indignation and contempt. A woman was driving, shakily, with a child in her lap. She wore a blue calico dress and a huge sunbonnet with stringy blond hair leaking out from under it. Her face was young but lean and hollow-cheeked, sunburned. Pale blue eyes, full of impotent envious rage, looked into Ruth’s for an instant and were gone.

Something about the eyes made them stick in her mind. For a moment her sympathy ran back to the woman. Bumping along the road in that rattletrap with a baby in her lap. No man in sight—sick, maybe. Lots of them were lungers. Pity! If anything happened she’d be stuck… Oh, somebody would help her out. Some of them got clear across the continent on lifts. They told about a man that made it in a car without an engine, just waiting for pulls. And another did it by begging gas. He was always just out. You had to be careful. People were such liars.

She hit the paved road in the valley and speeded up with relief. The town ran to meet her with signs stuck on trees and fences, painted on barns. Garages, hotels, restaurants, camp grounds, stores all clamoured for the incoming dollars. A stranger could have compiled a fair business directory of the town before he got within ten miles of it. The biggest sign of all was the one put up by the Chamber of Commerce, saying “Welcome” on one side and “Good-bye, God bless you” on the other. Beneath this on both sides was the boast and prophecy—fifty thousand people by 1928.

They would never make it, she knew. That line was Barney Gobel’s idea. He claimed they had thirty thousand now, but the census only gave them twenty. The rest, he said, was outside the city limits.

The place was growing though. She felt pride in the fact that she could remember when there wasn’t a house out here. What had been old man Greenleaf’s cow-pasture five years ago was Cottonwood Grove Edition now, laid off in streets with tiny trees planted and fragile wooden houses springing up like mushrooms after rain. You could buy a lot there for ten dollars down and a dollar a week for life, or something like that. Otto Schenk would make a fortune out of it, they said. And his father was a bar-tender in the old days, and bought the Greenleaf ranch for next to nothing. Old man Greenleaf once owned half the land the town now stood on, and he died without a nickel. Nearly all the old-timers got left…

A horn sounded behind her and a car hummed by, with the sweet even voice of effortless speed. It was a huge limousine with balloon tires and a liveried man on the driver’s seat. She glimpsed men and women smartly dressed, motor caps and veils—swell people from the East on their way to the coast in their own car. She could see the New York licence plate. Suddenly she felt small, inferior and resentful bumping along in the old Buick. She glared at the rear of the passing car, stepped on the gas and tried to catch it. No use. It was too fast for her. It looked like a foreign make and was doing better than fifty without seeming to try.

… Have a car like that maybe. She pictured herself rolling into town in it, dressed in a grey English homespun travelling-suit, grey suède shoes and a fine abundant grey veil a floating cloud about her head. They would stay just a few days, give a tea and invite everybody. Then on to the coast, three hundred miles a day, stopping every night at big resort hotels, full of smart people and music… San Francisco, Los Angeles, Yosemite, Santa Catalina, Tia Juana. The words sang a comforting melody in her mind.

She turned down Seventh Street, grateful for the shade of old far-reaching cottonwoods that filled the air with their gossamer-winged seed and piled them in filmy drifts along the curb. This was the oldest and most respectable residence street in the town. Here the aristocracy of business men and lawyers who came in with the railroad had built their houses almost half a century before. It had acquired a mellowness of deep shade, well-established lawns, old brick walls banked with ivy and porches ambushed behind clematis and honeysuckle.

The Budlong place was one of the oldest and made no shift to hide the fact. It was a tall square frame, unmistakably of the eighties, with dormer windows thrusting through an old slate roof, and a wide pillared porch, shedding in flakes the last of many coats of blue paint. Its sagging corner and failing picket fence, its ancient woody lilac-bushes and dying apple-trees told the world that something in this town had been dignified and respectable long enough to get rotten.

Dimly through a screen of vine she could see old Judge Budlong on the porch in a rocker with a newspaper in his lap. He looked to be asleep, she thought, as she crossed the yard, but her foot on the step brought forth a deep rich boom of welcome.

“Howdeedoo, Miss Ruth … Alma ought to be here any time now. Sit down, my girl!”

“Don’t get up, Judge, and don’t let me disturb you. I’ll just look at this paper.”

“You look mighty charming to-day, Miss Ruth. You’re a good sight for old eyes.”

“Thank you, Judge.”

She gave him a shining smile. His eyes, brightening, travelled her eagerly from ankle up.

The old devil! But they said he was a terror in the early days when he was young and the town was wide open. It was hard to imagine, looking at him now, and especially hard for her because she could not remember him except as an old man.

He had closed his eyes again. He looked weary—yellow and shrivelled—good as dead, everything but his voice. He could still boom.

That voice had boomed at intervals in her life as long as she could remember. On Fourths of July it had boomed about the con- stitution and the fall of Rome and the founding fathers. At commencement exercises it had boomed about glorious futures and the promise of youth and all these happy young faces. At packed mass meetings in the armoury it had boomed about pure womanhood and the menace to our homes. When William Jennings Bryan came to town it boomed eloquent introduction. It had boomed through every political campaign, always drawing crowds but seldom votes. The old Judge had been a candidate for almost everything, but he hardly ever got elected. He didn’t have a dollar now, they said. Alma kept him going on her salary as librarian. It was lucky for him she hadn’t married…

His hands caught and held her eyes. Dangling, yellow, all vein and tendon, they were like dead limbs on a dying tree, those hands that once had clutched at love and power. She looked at her own hands and bare arms, round and luscious as ripe fruit, with a faint sprinkling of golden-silky hairs. Like a cold draught in the dark it struck her that her flesh must fade and shrivel too, must lose its power and beauty… O God, it wouldn’t be so bad if only anything would ever happen… She would make things happen! … Whatever she did, she wouldn’t sit and dry up like Alma…

She heard Alma come in the back way and went to meet her, quietly, so as not to disturb the Judge. Arms about each other, they went out to the back yard, where a hammock swung and an old porch rocker stood under a catalpa-tree.

“I just came to tell you we’re going to start about four this afternoon,” Ruth said. “We’re going to drive to the end of the Canyon road and have lunch there and maybe climb to the top if everybody isn’t too lazy. Then I thought maybe we could stop on the way back at Willow Springs and dance awhile…”

“You want to do too much, child. You’ll be dead tired.”

“I’m never tired. You know that, Alma. Please don’t go back on me to-day. I haven’t danced in a coon’s age.”

“All right, dear, I’m awfully weary now, but I’ll have time for a nap before that. Who’s going?”

“Just you and Doc Jaggers and mother and Annie and that Mr. Fadden I told you about. I wanted to get up more of a bunch but I just couldn’t. Men are so scarce in this town and there’s no use making a hen party out of it.”

Alma brought her eyes down from the sky to look at Ruth quizzically.

“Why didn’t you invite John Romer? You and he seemed awfully interested in each other.”

Ruth lifted a hand and made a mouth.

“The family is thumbs down on him. You might know that.”

“Yes, I suppose so. Well, what’s the new one like—that Mr. Fadden? I think you might have brought him around to tea or something.”

“I haven’t had a chance. He’s not at all like what you would expect.”

Alma laughed, patronizingly, as thirty-three is apt to laugh at twenty.

“Nobody ever is,” she observed.

“No—o… But the Faddens have such a lot of money and he’s lived in New York and went to Yale and everything. You’d expect something pretty classy. But he’s just a big shy awkward kid. He’s a year older than I am but he seems about fourteen. Of course, he’s supposed to be sick, but he doesn’t look it.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“Well, his mother died last spring, so Mrs. Calder wrote, and he took it awfully hard and had flu and was threatened with pneumonia. They were afraid of T.B., I suppose. Anyway, they sent him out here to get well. He needs a high altitude, Mrs. Calder wrote… He needs something, that’s certain!” she added in a burst of irritation that surprised herself. “I never saw such a stick!”