“Are you busy?”
“It’s all right.” He stared into the mouthpiece for a moment. “Well, good-by,” he muttered abruptly and hung up the receiver. He turned to Kay: “Good morning.”
“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” she said distantly.
“You didn’t disturb me.” He hesitated. “That was Helen Avery.”
“It doesn’t concern me who it was. I came to ask you if we’re going to the Coconut Grove tonight.”
“Sit down, Kay?”
“I don’t want to talk.”
“Sit down a minute,” he said impatiently. She sat down. “How long are you going to keep this up?” he demanded.
“I’m not keeping up anything. We’re simply through, George, and you know it as well as I do.”
“That’s absurd,” he said. “Why, a week ago——”
“It doesn’t matter. We’ve been getting nearer to this for months, and now it’s over.”
“You mean you don’t love me?” He was not particularly alarmed. They had been through scenes like this before.
“I don’t know. I suppose I’ll always love you in a way.” Suddenly she began to sob. “Oh, it’s all so sad. He’s cared for me so long.”
George stared at her. Face to face with what was apparently a real emotion, he had no words of any kind. She was not angry, not threatening or pretending, not thinking about him at all, but concerned entirely with her emotions toward another man.
“What is it?” he cried. “Are you trying to tell me you’re in love with this man ?”
“I don’t know,” she said helplessly.
He took a step toward her, then went to the bed and lay down on it, staring in misery at the ceiling. After a while a maid knocked to say that Mr. Busch and Mr. Castle, George’s lawyer, were below. The fact carried no meaning to him. Kay went into her room and he got up and followed her.
“Let’s send word we’re out,” he said. “We can go away somewhere and talk this over.”
“I don’t want to go away.”
She was already away, growing more mysterious and remote with every minute. The things on her dressing table were the property of a stranger.
He began to speak in a dry, hurried voice. “If you’re still thinking about Helen Avery. it’s nonsense. I’ve never given a damn for anybody but you.”
They went downstairs and into the living room. It was nearly noon—another bright emotionless California day. George saw that Arthur Busch’s ugly face in the sunshine was wan and white; he took a step toward George and then stopped, as if he were waiting for something—a challenge, a reproach, a blow.
In a flash the scene that would presently take place ran itself off in George’s mind. He saw himself moving through the scene, saw his part, an infinite choice of parts, but in every one of them Kay would be against him and with Arthur Busch. And suddenly he rejected them all.
“I hope you’ll excuse me,” he said quickly to Mr. Castle. “I called you up because a script girl named Margaret Donovan wants fifty thousand dollars for some letters she claims I wrote her. Of course the whole thing is——” He broke off. It didn’t matter, “I’ll come to see you tomorrow.” He walked up to Kay and Arthur, so that only they could hear.
“I don’t know about you two—what you want to do. But leave me out of it; you haven’t any right to inflict any of it on me, for after all it’s not my fault. I’m not going to be mixed up in your emotions.”
He turned and went out. His car was before the door and he said “Go to Santa Monica” because it was the first name that popped into his head. The car drove off into the everlasting hazeless sunlight.
He rode for three hours, past Santa Monica and then along toward Long Beach by another road. As if it were something he saw out of the corner of his eye and with but a fragment of his attention, he imagined Kay and Arthur Busch progressing through the afternoon. Kay would cry a great deal and the situation would seem harsh and unexpected to them at first, but the tender closing of the day would draw them together. They would turn inevitably toward each other and he would slip more and more into the position of the enemy outside.
Kay had wanted him to get down in the dirt and dust of a scene and scramble for her. Not he; he hated scenes. Once he stooped to compete with Arthur Busch in pulling at Kay’s heart, he would never be the same to himself. He would always be a little like Arthur Busch; they would always have that in common, like a shameful secret. There was little of the theater about George; the millions before whose eyes the moods and changes of his face had flickered during ten years had not been deceived about that. From the moment when, as a boy of twenty, his handsome eyes had gazed off into the imaginary distance of a Griffith Western, his audience had been really watching the progress of a straightforward, slow-thinking, romantic man through an accidentally glamorous life.
His fault was that he had felt safe too soon. He realized suddenly that the two Fairbankses, in sitting side by side at table, were not keeping up a pose. They were giving hostages to fate. This was perhaps the most bizarre community in the rich, wild, bored empire, and for a marriage to succeed here, you must expect nothing or you must be always together. For a moment his glance had wavered from Kay and he stumbled blindly into disaster.
As he was thinking this and wondering where he would go and what he should do, he passed an apartment house that jolted his memory. It was on the outskirts of town, a pink horror built to represent something, somewhere, so cheaply and sketchily that whatever it copied the architect must have long since forgotten. And suddenly George remembered that he had once called for Margaret Donovan here the night of a Mayfair dance.
“Stop at this apartment!” he called through the speaking tube.
He went in. The negro elevator boy stared open-mouthed at him as they rose in the cage. Margaret Donovan herself opened the door.
When she saw him she shrank away with a little cry. As he entered and closed the door she retreated before him into the front room. George followed.
It was twilight outside and the apartment was dusky and sad. The last light fell softly on the standardized furniture and the great gallery of signed photographs of moving-picture people that covered one wall. Her face was white, and as she stared at him she began nervously wringing her hands.
“What’s this nonsense, Margaret?” George said, trying to keep any reproach out of his voice. “Do you need money that bad ?”
She shook her head vaguely. Her eyes were still fixed on him with a sort of terror; George looked at the floor.
“I suppose this was your brother’s idea. At least I can’t believe you’d be so stupid.” He looked up, trying to preserve the brusque masterly attitude of one talking to a naughty child, but at the sight of her face every emotion except pity left him. “I’m a little tired. Do you mind if I sit down ?”
“No.”
“I’m a little confused today,” said George after a minute. “People seem to have it in for me today.”
“Why, I thought”—her voice became ironic in midsentence—“I thought everybody loved you, George.”
“They don’t.”
“Only me?”
“Yes,” he said abstractedly.
“I wish it had been only me. But then, of course, you wouldn’t have been you.”
Suddenly he realized that she meant what she was saying.
“That’s just nonsense.”
“At least you’re here,” Margaret went on. “I suppose I ought to be glad of that. And I am. I most decidedly am. I’ve often thought of you sitting in that chair, just at this time when it was almost dark. I used to make up little one-act plays about what would happen then. Would you like to hear one of them? I’ll have to begin by coming over and sitting on the floor at your feet.”
Annoyed and yet spellbound, George kept trying desperately to seize upon a word or mood that would turn the subject.
“I’ve seen you sitting there so often that you don’t look a bit more real than your ghost. Except that your hat has squashed your beautiful hair down on one side and you’ve got dark circles or dirt under your eyes. You look white, too, George. Probably you were on a party last night.”
“I was. And I found your brother waiting for me when I got home.”
“He’s a good waiter, George. He’s just out of San Quentin prison, where he’s been waiting the last six years.”
“Then it was his idea ?”
“We cooked it up together. I was going to China on my share.”
“Why was I the victim ?”
“That seemed to make it realer. Once I thought you were going to fall in love with me five years ago.”
The bravado suddenly melted out of her voice and it was still light enough to see that her mouth was quivering.
“I’ve loved you for years,” she said—“since the first day you came West and walked into the old Realart Studio. You were so brave about people, George. Whoever it was, you walked right up to them and tore something aside as if it was in your way and began to know them. I tried to make love to you, just like the rest, but it was difficult. You drew people right up close to you and held them there, not able to move either way.”
“This
