Temple Bailey - The Gay Cockade

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"I'm a fool," he said to the flames, shortly, and went to bed, to lie
awake, wondering whether Mazie Wetherell had reached that chapter of his
book where he had written of love, deeply, reverently, with a
foreknowledge of what it might mean to him some day. It was that chapter
which had assured the success of his novel. Would it move her, as it had
moved him when he reread it? That was what love ought to be--a thing
fine, tender, touching the stars! That was what love might be to him, to
Mazie Wetherell, what it could never be to Otto Brand.

At breakfast the next morning he found Mrs. Brand worrying about her
waitress.

"I guess she couldn't get back, and I've got a big day's work."

"I'll go and look her up," Van Alen offered; but he found that he was
not to go alone, for Otto was waiting for him at the gate.

"I ain't got nothin' else to do," the boy said; "everything is held up
by the rain."

It was when they came to the little stream that Van Alen had forded the
night before that they saw Mazie Wetherell.

"I can't get across," she called from the other side.

The bridge, which had been covered when Van Alen passed, was now washed
away, and the foaming brown waters overflowed the banks.

"I'll carry you over," Otto called, and straightway he waded through the
stream, and the water came above his high boots to his hips.

He lifted her in his strong arms and brought her back, with her bright
hair fluttering against his lips, and Van Alen, raging impotently, stood
and watched him.

It seemed to him that Otto's air was almost insultingly triumphant as he
set the girl on her feet and smiled down at her. And as she smiled back,
Van Alen turned on his heel and left them.

Presently he heard her running after him lightly over the sodden ground.

And when she reached his side she said: "Your book was wonderful."

"But he carried you over the stream."

Her eyes flashed a question, then blazed. "There, you've come back to
it," she said. "What makes you?"

"Because I wanted to carry you myself."

"Silly," she said; "any man could carry me across the stream--but only
you could write that chapter in the middle of the book."

"You liked it?" he cried, radiantly.

"Like it?" she asked. "I read it once, and then I read it again--on my
knees."

Her voice seemed to drop away breathless. Behind them Otto Brand
tramped, whistling; but he might have been a tree, or the sky, or the
distant hills, for all the thought they took of him.

"I wanted to beg your pardon," the girl went on, "for what I said the
other day--it is a great thing to write a book like that--greater than
fighting a battle or saving a life, for it saves people's ideals;
perhaps in that way it saves their souls."

"Then I may sleep in the canopy bed?" His voice was calm, but inwardly
he was much shaken by her emotion.

Her eyes, as she turned to him, had in them the dawn of that for which
he had hoped.

"Why not?" she said, quickly. "You are greater than your
grandfather--you are--" She stopped and laughed a little, and, in this
moment of her surrender, her beauty shone like a star.

"Oh, little great man," she said, tremulously, "your head touches the
skies!"

SANDWICH JANE

I

"No man," said O-liver Lee, "should earn more than fifteen dollars a
week. After that he gets--soft."

"Soft nothing!"

O-liver sat on a box in front of the post-office. He was lean and young
and without a hat. His bare head was one of the things that made him
unique. The other men within doors and without wore hats--broad hats
that shielded them from the California sun; or, as in the case of Atwood
Jones, who came from the city, a Panama of an up-to-the-minute model.

But O-liver's blond mane waved in every passing breeze. It was only when
he rode forth on his mysterious journeys that he crowned himself with a
Chinese straw helmet.

Because he wore no hat his skin was tanned. He had blue eyes that
twinkled and, as I have said, a blond mane.

"Fifteen dollars a week," he reaffirmed, "is enough."

Fifteen dollars was all that O-liver earned. He was secretary to an
incipient oil king. As the oil king's monarchy was largely on paper he
found it hard at times to compass even the fifteen dollars that went to
his secretary.

The other men scorned O-liver's point of view and told him so. They were
a rather prosperous bunch, all except Tommy Drew, who dealt in a
dilettante fashion in insurance, and who sat at O-liver's feet and
worshiped him.

It was Saturday and some of the men had drifted in from the surrounding
ranches; others from the cities, from the mountains, from the valleys,
from the desert, from the sea. Tinkersfield had assumed a sudden
importance as an oil town. All of the men had business connected in some
way with Tinkersfield. And all of them earned more than fifteen dollars
a week.

Therefore they disputed O-liver's statement. "If you had a wife--" said
one.

"Ah," said O-liver, "if I had--"

"Ain't you got any ambition?" Henry Bittinger demanded. Henry was
pumping out oil in prodigious quantities. He had bought a motor car and
a fur coat. It was too hot most of the time for the coat, but the car
stood now at rest across the road--long and lovely--much more of an
aristocrat than the man who owned it.

"Ambition for what?" O-liver demanded.

Henry's eyes went to the pride of his heart.

"Well, I should think you'd want a car."

"I'd give," said O-liver, "my kingdom for a horse, but not for a car."

O-liver's little mare stood quite happily in the shade; she was slim as
to leg, shining as to coat, and with the eyes of a loving woman.

"I should think you'd want to get ahead," said Atwood Jones, who sold
shoes up and down the coast. He was a junior member of the firm, but
still liked to go on the road. He liked to lounge like this in front of
the post-office and smoke in the golden air with a lot of men sitting
round. Atwood had been raised on a ranch. He had listened to the call of
the city, but he was still a small-town man.

"Ahead of what?" asked O-liver.

Atwood was vague. He felt himself a rising citizen. Some day he expected
to marry and set his wife up in a mansion in San Francisco, with
seasons of rest and recreation at Del Monte and Coronado and the East.
If the shoe business kept to the present rate of prosperity he would
probably have millions to squander in his old age.

He tried to say something of this to O-liver.

"Well, will you be any happier?" asked the young man with the bare head.
"I'll wager my horse against your car that when you're drunk with
dollars you'll look back to a day like this and envy yourself. It's
happiness I'm talking about."

"Well, are you happy?" Atwood challenged.

"Why not?" asked the young man lightly. "I have enough to eat, money for
tobacco, a book or two--an audience." He waved his hand to include the
listening group and smiled.

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.

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