Once, when they were out on location, and had had a hard day, ending by getting thoroughly soaked in a sudden rain, he had followed her to her room in the little mountain inn where they were stopping.
“You’re cold and wet and tired,” he said. “I want to give you something that will brace you up.”
He entered the room and closed the door behind him. Then he took from his pocket a small piece of paper folded into a package about an inch and three- quarters long by half an inch wide, with one end tucked ingeniously inside the fold to form a fastening. Opening it, he revealed a white powder, the minute crystals of which glistened beneath the light from the electric bulbs.
“It looks just like snow,” she said.
“Sure!” he replied, with a faint smile. “It is snow. Look, I’ll show you how to take it.”
He divided the powder into halves, took one in the palm of his hand, and snuffed it into his nostrils.
“There!” he exclaimed. “That’s the way — it will make you feel like a new woman.”
“But what is — it?” she asked. “Won’t it hurt me?”
“It’ll make you feel bully. Try it.”
So she tried it, and it made her “feel bully”. She was no longer tired, but deliciously exhilarated.
“Whenever you want any, let me know,” he said, as he was leaving the room. “I usually have some handy.”
“But I’d like to know what it is,” she insisted.
“Aspirin,” he replied. “It makes you feel that way when you snuff it up your nose.”
After he left, she recovered the little piece of paper from the waste basket where he had thrown it, her curiosity aroused. She found it a rather soiled bit of writing paper with a “C” written in lead pencil upon it.
“‘C’ “ she mused. “Why aspirin with a C?”
She thought she would question Wilson about it.
The next day she felt out of sorts and tired, and at noon she asked him if he had any aspirin with him. He had, and again she felt fine and full of life. That evening she wanted some more, and Crumb gave it to her. The next day she wanted it oftener, and by the time they returned to Hollywood from location she was taking it five or six times a day. It was then that Crumb asked her to come and live with him at the Vista del Paso bungalow; but he did not mention marriage.
He was standing with a little paper of the white powder in his hand, separating half of it for her, and she was waiting impatiently for it.
“Well?” he asked.
“Well, what?”
“Are you coming over to live with me?” he demanded.
“Without being married!” she asked.
She was surprised that the idea no longer seemed horrible. Her eyes and her mind were on the little white powder that the man held in his hand.
Crumb laughed. “Quit your kidding,” he said. “You know perfectly well that I can’t marry you yet. I have a wife in San Francisco.”
She did not know it perfectly well — she did not know it at all; yet it did not seem to matter so very much. A month ago she would have caressed a rattlesnake as willingly as she would have permitted a married man to make love to her; but now she could listen to a plea from one who wished her to come and live with him, without experiencing any numbing sense of outraged decency.
Of course, she had no intention of doing what he asked; but really the matter was of negligible import — the thing in which she was most concerned was the little white powder. She held out her hand for it, but he drew it away.
“Answer me first,” he said. “Are you going to be sensible or not?”
“You mean that you won’t give it to me if I won’t come?” she asked.
“That’s precisely what I mean,” he replied. “What do you think I am, anyway? Do you know what this bundle of ‘C’ stands me? Two fifty, and you’ve been snuffing about three of ’em a day. What kind of a sucker do you think I am?”
Her eyes, still upon the white powder, narrowed.
“I’ll come,” she whispered. “Give it to me!”
She went to the bungalow with him that day, and she learned where he kept the little white powders, hidden in the bathroom. After dinner she put on her hat and her fur, and took up her vanity case, while Crumb was busy in another room. Then, opening the front door, she called:
“Goodbye!”
“Where are you going?” he demanded.
“Home,” she replied.
“No, you’re not!” he cried. “You promised to stay here.”
“I promised to come,” she corrected him. “I never promised to stay, and I never shall until you are divorced and we are married.”
“You’ll come back,” he sneered. “when you want another shot of snow!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she replied. “I guess I can buy aspirin at any drug store as well as you.”
Crumb laughed aloud.
“You little fool, you!” he cried derisively. “Aspirin! Why, it’s cocaine you’re snuffing, and you’re snuffing about three grains of it a day!”
For an instant a look of horror filled her widened eyes.
“You beast!” she cried. “You unspeakable beast!”
Slamming the door behind her, she almost ran down the narrow walk and disappeared in the shadows of the palm trees that bordered the ill lighted street.
The man did not follow her. He only stood there laughing, for he knew that she would come back. Craftily he had enmeshed her. It had taken months, and never had quarry been more wary or difficult to trap. A single false step earlier in the game would have frightened her away forever; but he had made no false step. He was very proud of himself, was Wilson Crumb, for he was convinced that he had done a very clever bit of work.
Rubbing his hands together, he walked toward the bathroom — he would take a shot of snow; but when he opened the receptacle, he found it empty.
“The little devil!” he ejaculated.
Frantically he rummaged through the medicine cabinet, but in vain. Then he hastened into the living room, seized his hat, and bolted for the street.
Almost immediately he realized the futility of search. He did not know where the girl lived. She had never told him. He did not know it, but she had never told any one. The studio had a post office box number to which it could address communications to Gaza de Lure; the mother addressed the girl by her own name at the house where she had roomed since coming to Hollywood. The woman who rented her the room did not know her screen name. All she knew about her was that she seemed a quiet, refined girl who paid her room rent promptly in advance every week, and who was always home at night, except when on location.
Crumb returned to the bungalow, searched the bathroom twice more, and went to bed. For hours he lay awake, tossing restlessly.
“The little devil!” he muttered, over and over. “Fifty dollars’ worth of cocaine — the little devil!”
The next day Gaza was at the studio, ready for work, when Crumb put in a belated appearance. He was nervous and irritable. Almost immediately he called her aside and demanded an accounting; but when they were face to face, and she told him that she was through with him, he realized that her hold upon him was stronger than he has supposed. He could not give her up. He was ready to promise anything, and he would demand nothing in return, only that she would be with him as much as possible. Her nights should be her own — she could go home then. And so the arrangement was consummated, and Gaza de Lure spent the days when she was not working at the bungalow on the Vista del Paso.
Crumb saw that she was cast for small parts that required but little of her time at the studio, yet raised no question at the office as to her salary of fifty dollars a week. Twice the girl asked why he did not star her, and both times he told her that he would — for a price; but the price was one that she would not pay.
As the months passed, Crumb’s relations with the source of the supply of their narcotic became so familiar that he could obtain considerable quantities at a reduced rate, and the p
lan of peddling the drug occurred to him. Gaza was induced to do her share, and so it came about that the better class “hypes” of Hollywood found it both safe and easy to obtain their supplies from the bungalow on the Vista del Paso. Cocaine, heroin, and morphine passed continually through the girl’s hands, and she came to know many of the addicts, though she seldom had further intercourse with them than was necessary to the transaction of the business that brought them to the bungalow.
One evening Crumb brought home with him a stranger whom he had known in San Francisco — a man whom he introduced as Allen. From that evening the fortunes of Gaza de Lure improved. Allen had just returned from the Orient as a member of the crew of a freighter, and he had succeeded in smuggling in a considerable quantity of opium. In his efforts to dispose of it he had made the acquaintance of others in the same line of business, and had joined forces with them. His partners could command a more or less steady supply of morphine, and cocaine from Mexico, while Allen undertook to keep up their stock of opium, and to arrange a market for their drugs in Los Angeles.
If Crumb could handle it all, Allen agreed to furnish morphine at fifty dollars an ounce — Gaza to do the actual peddling. The girl agreed on one condition — that half the profits should be hers. After that she had been able to send home more money than ever before, and at the same time to have all the morphine she wanted at a low price. She began to put money in the bank, made a first payment on a small orchard about a hundred miles from Los Angeles, and sent for her mother.
The day before you called on her in the “art” bungalow at 1421 Vista del Paso she had put her mother on a train bound for her new home, with the promise that the daughter would visit her “as soon as we finish this picture.” It had required all the girl’s remaining will power to hide her shame from those eager mother eyes; but she had managed to do it, though it had left her almost a wreck by the time the train pulled out of the station.
To Crumb she had said nothing about her mother. This was a part of her life that was too sacred to be revealed to the man whom she now loathed even as she loathed the filthy habit he had tricked her into; but she could no more give up the one than the other.
CHAPTER 6
It was May. The rainy season was definitely over. A few April showers had concluded it. The Ganado hills showed their most brilliant greens. The March pigs were almost ready to wean. White-faced calves and black colts and gray colts surveyed this beautiful world through soft, dark eyes, and were filled with the joy of living as they ran beside their gentle mothers. A stallion neighed from the stable corral, and from the ridge behind Jackknife Canyon the Emperor of Ganado answered him.
A girl and a man sat in the soft grass beneath the shade of alive oak upon the edge of a low bluff in the pasture where the brood mares grazed with their colts. Their horses were tied to another tree near by. The girl held a bunch of yellow violets in her hand, and gazed dreamily down the broad canyon toward the valley. The man sat a little behind her and gazed at the girl. For a long time neither spoke.
“You cannot be persuaded to give it up, Grace?” he asked at last. She shook her head.
“I shall never be happy until I had tried it,” she replied.
“Of course,” he said, “I know how you feel about it. I feel the same way. I want to get away — away from the deadly stagnation and sameness of this life; but I am going to try to stick it out for father’s sake, and I wish that you loved me enough to stick it out for mine. I believe that together we could get enough happiness out of life here to make up for what we are denied of real living, such as only a big city can offer. Then, when father is gone, we could go and live in the city — in any city that we wanted to live in - Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, London, Paris — anywhere.”
“I know,” she said, and they were silent again for a time. “You are a good son, Custer,” she said presently. “I wouldn’t have you any different. I am not so good a daughter. Mother does not want me to go. It is going to make her very unhappy, and yet I am going. The man who loves me does not want me to go. It is going to make him very unhappy, and yet I am going. It seems very selfish; but oh, Custer, I cannot help but feel I am right! It seems to me that I have a duty to perform, and that this is the only way I can perform it. Perhaps I am not only silly, but sometimes I feel that I am called by a higher power to give myself for a little time to the world, that the world may be happier and, I hope, a little better. You know I have always felt that the stage was one of the greatest powers for good in all the world, and now I believe that some day the screen will be an even greater power for good. It is with the conviction that I may help toward this end that I am so eager to go. You will be very glad and very happy when I come back, that I did not listen to your arguments.”
“I hope you are right, Grace.” Custer Pennington said.
On a rustic seat beneath the new leaves of an umbrella tree a girl and a boy sat beside the upper lily pond on the south side of the hill below the ranch house. The girl held a spray of Japanese quince blossoms in her hand, and gazed dreamily at the water splashing lazily over the rocks into the pond. The boy sat beside her and gazed at the girl. For a long time neither spoke.
“Won’t you please say yes?” whispered the boy presently.
“How perfectly, terribly silly you are!” she replied.
“I am not silly,” he said. “I am twenty, and you are almost eighteen. It’s time that we were marrying and settling down.”
“On what?” she demanded.
“Well, we won’t need much at first. We can live at home with mother,” he explained, “until I sell a few stories.”
“How perfectly gorgeristic!” she cried.
“Don’t make fun of me! You wouldn’t if you loved me,” he pouted.
“I do love you silly! But whatever in the world put the dapper little idea into your head that I wanted to be supported by my mother-in-law?”
“Aw, come, now, you needn’t get mad at me. I was only fooling; but wouldn’t it be great, Ev? We could always be together then, and I could write and you could — could—”
“Wash dishes,” she suggested. The light died from his eyes.
“I’m sorry I’m poor,” he said. “I didn’t think you cared about that, though.”
She laid a brown hand gently over his.
“You know I don’t care,” she said. “I am a catty old thing. I’d just love it if we had a little place all our very own just a teeny, weeny bungalow. I’d help you with your work, and keep hens, and have a little garden with onions and radishes and everything, and we wouldn’t have to buy anything from the grocery store, and a bank account, and one sow; and when we drove into the city people would say, ‘There goes Guy Thackeray Evans, the famous author, but I wonder where his wife got that hat!’”
“Oh Ev!” he cried laughing. “You never can be serious more than two seconds can you?”
“Why should I be?” she inquired. “And anyway, I was. It really would be elegantiferous if we had a little place of our own; but my husband has got to be able to support me, Guy. He’d lose his self-respect if he didn’t; and then, if he lost his, how could I respect him? You’ve got to have respect on both sides, or you can’t have love and happiness.”
His face grew stern with determination.
“I’ll get the money,” he said; but he did not look at her. “But now that Grace is going away, mother will be all alone if I leave, too. Couldn’t we live with her for a while?”
“Papa and mama have always said that it was the worst thing a young married couple could do,” she replied. “We could live near her, and see her every day; but I don’t think we should all live together. Really though, do you think Grace is going? It seems just too awful.”
“I am afraid she is,” he replied sadly. “Mother is all broken up about it; but she tries not to let Grace know.”
“I can’t understand it,” said the girl. “It seems to me a selfish thing to do, and yet Grace has always been so sweet and generous.
No matter how much I wanted to go, I don’t believe I could bring myself to do it, knowing how terribly it would hurt papa. Just think, Guy — it is the first break, except for the short time we were away at school, since we have been born. We have all lived here always, it seems, your family and mine, like one big family; but after Grace goes it will be the beginning of the end. It will never be the same again.”
There was a note of seriousness and sadness in her voice that sounded not at all like Eva Pennington. The boy shook his head.
“It is too bad,” he said; “but Grace is so sure she is right — so positive that she has a great future before her, and that we shall all be so proud of her — that sometimes I am convinced myself.”
The girl rose.
“Come on!” she said. “Let’s have a look at the pools — it isn’t a perfect day unless I’ve seen fish in every pool. Do you remember how we used to watch and watch and watch for the fish in the lower pools, and run as fast as we could to be the first up to the house to tell if we saw them, and how many?”
They walked on in silence along the winding pathways among the flower- bordered pools, to stop at last beside the lower one. This had originally been a shallow wading pool for the children when they were small, but it was now given over to water hyacinth and brilliant fantails.
“There!” said the girl, presently. “I have seen fish in each pool.”
“And you can go to bed with a clear conscience tonight,” he laughed.
To the west of the lower pool there were no trees to obstruct their view of the hills that rolled down from the mountains to form the western wall of the canyon in which the ranch buildings and cultivated fields lay. As the two stood there, hand in hand, the boy’s eyes wandered lovingly over the soft, undulating lines of these lower hills, with their parklike beauty of greensward dotted with wild walnut trees. As he looked he saw, for a brief moment, the figure of a man on horseback passing over the hollow of a saddle before disappearing upon the southern side.
Delphi Collected Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Illustrated) (Series Four Book 26) Page 749
