Mrs. Alan Hosack, bearing a more than ever remarkable resemblance to those ship's figureheads that are still to be seen in the corners of old lumber yards, led the way out to the sun porch. Her lavish charms, her beaming manner, her clear blue eye, milky complexion, reddish hair, and the large bobbles and beads with which she insisted upon decorating herself made Howard Cannon's nickname of Cornucopia exquisitely right. She was followed by Mrs. Cooper Jekyll and a man servant, whose arms were full of dogs and books and newspapers.
"The dogs on the ground, Barrett," she said, "the books and papers on the table there, my chair on the right-hand side of it and bring that chair forward for Mrs. Jekyll. We will have the lemonade at once. Tell Lestocq that I shall not want the car before lunch, ask Miss Disberry to telephone to Mrs. John Ward Harrison and say that I will have tea with her this afternoon with pleasure, and when those two good little Sisters of Mercy finally arrive,—I could see them, all sandy, struggling along the road from my room, Augusta; dear me, what a life,—they are to be given luncheon as usual and the envelope that is on the hall table. That will do, I think."
The man servant was entirely convinced that it would.
"And now, make yourself comfortable, dear Augusta, and tell me everything. So very kind of you to drive over like this on such a sunny morning. Yes, that's right. Take off that lugubrious Harem veil,—the mark of a Southampton woman,—and let me see your beautiful face. Before I try to give you a chance to speak I must tell you, and I'm sure you won't mind with your keen sense of humor, how that nice boy, Harry Oldershaw, describes those things. No, after all, perhaps I don't think I'd better. For one reason, it was a little bit undergraduate, and for another, I forget." She chuckled and sat down, wabbling for a moment like an opulent blancmange.
Minus the strange dark blue thing which had hidden her ears and nose and mouth and which suggested nothing but leprosy, Mrs. Jekyll became human, recognizable and extremely good to look at. She wore her tight-fitting suit of white flannel like a girl and even in that clear detective light she did not look a day over thirty. She painted with all the delicacy of an artist. She was there, as a close friend of Alice Palgrave, to discover why Gilbert had not gone with her to the Maine coast.
"I haven't heard from you since we left town," she said, beating about the bush, "and being in the neighborhood I thought it would be delightful to catch a glimpse of you and hear your news. I have none, except that I have just lost the butler who has been with me for so long, and Edmond is having his portrait painted again for some club or institution. It's the ninth time, I believe. He likes it. It's a sort of rest cure."
"And how did you lose that very admirable butler? Illness or indiscretion?"
"Neither. Commerce, I suppose one might call it. It appears that one of these get-rich-quick munition men offered him double his wages to leave me, and Derbyshire couldn't resist it. He came to me with tears in his eyes and told me that he had to make the sacrifice owing to the increased cost of living. He has a family, you know. He said that the comic atmosphere of his new place might bring on neuritis, but he must educate his three boys. Really, there is a great deal of unsung heroism in the world, isn't there? In the meantime, I am trying to get accustomed to a Swiss, who's probably a German spy and who will set up a wireless installation on the roof." Then she dropped her baited hook. "You have a large house party, I suppose."
"Yes," said Mrs. Hosack, swinging her foot to keep the flies away. The wind was off the land.
"Primrose is so depressed if the house isn't full. And so the d'Oylys are here,—Nina more Junoesque than ever and really quite like an Amazon in bathing clothes; Enid Ouchterlony, a little bitter, I'm afraid, at not being engaged to any one yet,—men are horribly scared of an intelligent girl and, after all, they don't marry for intelligence, do they?—Harry Oldershaw, Frank Milwood and Courtney Millet, all nice boys, and I almost forgot to add, Joan Gray, that charming girl. My good man is following at her heels like a bob-tailed sheep dog. Poor old dear! He's arrived at that pathetic period of a man's life when almost any really blond girl still in her teens switches him into a second state of adolescence and makes him a most ridiculous object—what the novelists call the 'Forty-nine feeling,' I believe."
Bennett brought the lemonade and hurried away before his memory could be put to a further strain. "Tell me about Joan Gray," said Mrs. Jekyll, letting out her line. "There's probably no truth in it, but I hear that she and Martin have agreed to differ. How quickly these romantic love matches burn themselves out. I always say that a marriage made in Heaven breaks up far sooner than one made on earth. It has so much farther to fall. Whose fault is it, hers or his?"
Mrs. Hosack bent forward and endeavored to lower her voice. She was a kind-hearted woman who delighted to see every one happy and normal. "I'm very worried about those two, my dear," she answered. "There are all sorts of stories afloat,—one to the effect that Martin has gone off with a chorus girl, another that Joan only married him to get away from her grandparents and a third that they quarreled violently on the way home from church and have not been on speaking terms since. I daresay there are many others, but whatever did happen, and something evidently did, Joan is happy enough, and every man in the house is sentimental about her. Look out there, for instance."
Mrs. Jekyll followed her glance and saw a girl in bathing clothes sitting on the beach under a red and blue striped umbrella encircled by the outstretched forms of half a dozen men. Beyond, on the fringe of a sea alive with bursting breakers, several girls were bathing alone.
"H'm," said Mrs. Jekyll. "I should think that the second story is the true one. A tip-tilted nose, chestnut hair and brown eyes are better to flirt with than marry. Well, I must run away if I'm to be back to lunch. I wish I could stay, but Edmond and his artist may kill my new butler unless I intervene. They are both hotly pro-Ally. By the way, I hear that Alice Palgrave has gone to the Maine coast with her mother, who is ill again; I wonder where Gilbert is going?"
"Well, I had a very charming letter from him two days ago, asking me if he could come and stay with us. He loves this house and the beach, and I always cheer him up, he said, and he is very lonely without Alice. Of course I said yes, and he will be here this afternoon."
Whereupon, having landed her fish, Mrs. Jekyll rose to go. Gilbert Palgrave and Joan Gray,—there was truth in that story, as she had thought. She had heard of his having been seen everywhere with Joan night after night, and her sister-in-law, who lived opposite to the little house in East Sixty-seventh Street, had seen him leaving in the early hours of the morning more than once. A lucky strike, indeed. Intuition was a wonderful gift. She was highly pleased with herself.
"Good-by, my dear," she said. "I will drive over again one day this week and see how you are all getting on in this beautiful corner of the world. My love to Prim, please, and do remember me to the little siren."
And away she went, leaving Mrs. Hosack to wonder what was the meaning of her rather curious smile. Only a hidebound prejudice on the part of the Ministries of all the nations has precluded women from the Diplomatic Service.
"Ah, here you are," said Hosack, scrambling a little stiffly out of a hammock. "Well, have you had a good ride?"
Joan came up the steps with Harry Oldershaw, the nice boy. She was in white linen riding kit, with breeches and brown top boots. A man's straw hat sat squarely on her little head and there was a brown and white spotted tie under her white silk collar. Color danced on her cheeks, health sparkled in her eyes and there was a laugh of sheer high spirits floating behind her like the blown petals of a daisy.
"Perfectly wonderful," she said. "I love the country about here, with the little oaks and sturdy ferns. It's so springy. And aren't the chestnut trees in the village a sight for the blind? I don't wonder you built a house in Easthampton, Mr. Hosack. Are we too late for tea?"
Hosack ran his eyes over her and blinked a little as though he had looked at the sun. "Too late by an hour," he said, with a sulky glance at young Oldershaw. "I thought you were never coming back." His resentment of middle age and jealousy of the towering youth of the sun-tanned lad who had been Joan's companion were a little pitiful.
Harry caught his look and laughed with the sublime audacity of one who believes that he ranks among the Immortals. To him forty-nine seemed to be a colossal sum of years, almost beyond belief. It was pathetic of this old fellow to imagine that he had any right to the company of a girl so springlike as Joan. "If we hadn't worn the horses to a frazzle," he said, "we shouldn't have been back till dark. Have a drink, Joan?"
"Yes, water. Buckets of it. Hurry up, Harry."
The boy, triumphant at being in favor, swung away, and Joan flung her crop on to a cane sofa. "Where's everybody?" she asked.
"What's it matter," said Hosack. "Sit here and talk to me for a change. I've hardly had a word with you all day." He caught her hand and drew her into the swinging hammock. "What a pretty thing you are," he added, with a catch in his breath. "I know," said Joan. "Otherwise, probably, I shouldn't be here, should I?" She forgot all about him, and an irresistible desire to tease, at the sight of the sea which, a stone's throw from the house, pounded on the yellow sweep of sand and swooped up in large half circles of glistening water. "I've a jolly good mind to have another dip before changing. What do you say?"
"No, don't," said Hosack, a martyr to the Forty-nine-feeling. "Concentrate on me for ten minutes, if only because, damn it, I'm your host."
Joan pushed his hand away. "I've given up concentrating," she said. "I gave it a turn a little while ago, but it led nowhere, so why worry? I'm on the good old Merry-go-round again, and if it doesn't whack up to the limit of its speed I'll know the reason why. There's a dance at the Club to-night, isn't there?"
"Yes, but we don't go."
She was incredulous. "Don't go,—to a dance? Why?"
"It's rather a mixed business," he said. "The hotel pours its crowd out. It isn't amusing. We can dance here if you want to."
But her attention was caught by young Oldershaw who came out carrying a glass and a jug of iced water. She sprang up and went to meet him, the dance forgotten, Hosack forgotten. Her mood was that of a bird, irresponsible, restless. "Good for you," she said, and drank like a thirsty plant. "Nothing like water, is there?" She smiled up at him.
He was as pleased with himself as though he owned the reservoir. "Have another?"
"I should think so." And she drank again, put the glass down on the first place that came to hand, relieved him of the jug, put it next to the glass, caught hold of his muscular arm, ran him down the steps, and along the board path to the beach. "I'll race you to the sea," she cried, and was off like a mountain goat. He was too young to let her beat him and waited for her with the foam frothing round his ankles and a broad grin on his attractive face.
He was about to cheek her when she held up a finger and with a little exclamation of delight pointed to the sky behind the house. The sun was setting among a mass of royal clouds. A golden wand had touched the dunes and the tips of the scrub and all over the green of the golf course, still dotted with scattered figures, waves of reflected lusters played. To the left of the great red ball one clear star sparkled like an eye. Just for a moment her lips trembled and her young breasts rose and fell, and then she threw her head up and wheeled round and went off at a run. Not for her to think back, or remember similar sights behind the woods near Marty's place. Life was too short for pain. "Who Cares?" was her motto once more, and this time joy-riding must live up to its name.
Harry Oldershaw followed, much puzzled at Joan's many quick changes of mood. Several times during their irresponsible chatter on the beach between dips her laughter had fallen suddenly, like a dead bird, and she had sat for several minutes as far away from himself and the other men as though they were cut off by a thick wall. Yesterday, in the evening after dinner, during which her high spirits had infected the whole table, he had walked up and down the board path with her under the vivid white light of a full moon, and she had whipped out one or two such savage things about life that he had been startled. During their ride that afternoon, too, her bubbling chatter of light stuff about people and things had several times shifted into comments as to the conventions that were so careless as to make him ask himself whether they could really have come from lips so fresh and young. And why had that queer look of almost childlike grief come into her eyes a moment ago at the sight of ah everyday sunset? He was mightily intrigued. She was a queer kid, he told himself, as changeable and difficult to follow as some of the music by men with such weird names as Rachmaninoff and Tschaikowsky that his sister was so precious fond of playing. But she was unattached and frightfully pretty and always ready for any fun that was going, and she liked him more than the others, and he liked being liked, and although not hopelessly in love was ready and willing and even anxious to be walked on if she would acknowledge his existence in no other way. It was none of his business, he told himself, to speculate as to what she was trying to hide away in the back of her mind, from herself as well as from everybody else. This was his last vacation as a Yale man, and he was all out to make the most of it.
As soon as he was at her side she ran her hand through his arm and fell into step. The shadow had passed, and her eyes were dancing again. "It appears that the Hosacks turn up their exclusive noses at the club dances," she said. "What are we going to do about it?"
"There's one to-night, isn't there? Do you want to go?"
"Of course I do. I haven't danced since away back before the great wind. Let's sneak off after dinner for an hour without a word to a soul and get our fill of it. There's to be a special Jazz band to-night, I hear, and I simply can't keep away. Are you game, Harry?"
"All the way," said young Oldershaw, "and it will be the first time in the history of the Hosacks that any members of their house parties have put in an appearance at the club at night. No wonder Easthampton has nicknamed the place St. James's Palace, eh?"
Joan shrugged her shoulders. "Oh, my dear boy," she said, "life's too short for all that stuff, and there's no hobby so painful as cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. And, after all, what's the matter with Easthampton people? I'd go to a chauffeurs' ball if the band was the right thing. Wouldn't you?"
"With you," said Harry. "Democracy forever!"
"Oh, I'm not worrying about democracy. I'm out for a good time under any conditions. That's the only thing that matters. Now let's go back and change. It's too late to bathe. I'll wear a new frock to-night, made for fox-trotting, and if Mrs. Hosack wants to know where we've been when we come back as innocent as spring lambs, leave it to me. Men can't lie as well as women can."
"It won't be Mrs. Hosack who'll ask," said Harry. "Bridge will do its best to rivet her ubiquitous mind. It's the old man who'll be peeved. He's crazy about you, you know."
Joan laughed. "He's very nice and means awfully well and all that," she said, "but of course he isn't to be taken seriously. No men of middle age ought to be. They all say the same things with the same expressions as though they got them from the same books, and their gambolling makes their joints creak. It's all like playing with a fire of damp logs. I like something that can blaze and scorch. The game counts then."
"Then you ought to like me," said Harry, doing his best to look the very devil of a fellow. Even he had to join in Joan's huge burst of merriment. He had humor as well as a sense of the ridiculous, and the first made it possible for him to laugh at himself,—a rare and disconcerting gift which would utterly prevent his ever entering the Senate.
"You might grow a moustache and wax the tips, Harry," she said, when she had recovered sufficiently well to be able to speak. "Curl your hair with tongs and take dancing lessons from a tango lizard or go in for a course of sotto voce sayings from a French portrait painter, but you'd still remain the Nice Boy. That's why I like you. You're as refreshing and innocuous as a lettuce salad, and you may glare as much as you like. I hope you'll never be spoilt. Come on. We shall be late for dinner." And she made him quicken his step through the dry sand.
Being very young he was not quite sure that he appreciated that type of approval. He had liked to imagine that he was distinctly one of the bold bad boys, a regular dog and all that. He had often talked that sort of thing in the rooms of his best chums whose mantelpieces were covered with the photographs of little ladies, and he hoarded in his memory two episodes at least of jealous looks from engaged men. But, after all, with Joan, who was married, although it was difficult to believe it, it wouldn't be wise to exert the whole force of the danger that was in him. He would let her down lightly, he told himself, and grinned as he said it. She was right. He was only a nice boy, and that was because he had had the inestimable luck to possess a mother who was one in a million.
The rather pretentious but extremely civilized house that stood alone in all its glory between the sea and the sixth hole was blazing with lights as they returned to it. The color had gone out of the sky and other twinkling eyes had appeared, and the breeze, now off the sea, had a sting to it. Toad soloists were trying their voices for their evening concert in near-by water and crickets were at work with all their well-known enthusiasm. Bennett, with a sunburned nose, was tidying up the veranda, and some one with a nice light touch was playing the rhythmic jingles of Jerome Kern on the piano in the drawing-room.
Still with her hand on Harry Oldershaw's arm, Joan made her way across the lofty hall, caught sight of Gilbert Palgrave coming eagerly to meet her, and waved her hand.
"Oh, hello, Gilbert," she cried out. "Welcome to Easthampton," and ran upstairs.
With a strange contraction of the heart, Palgrave watched her out of sight. She was his dream come to life. All that he was and hoped to be he had placed forever at her feet. Dignity, individualism, egoism,—all had fallen before this young thing. She was water in the desert, the north star to a man without a compass. He had seen her and come into being.
Good God, it was wonderful and awful!
But who was that cursed boy?
Six weeks had dropped off the calendar since the night at Martin's house.
Facing Grandmother Ludlow in the morning with her last handful of courage Joan had told her that she had been called back to town. She had left immediately after breakfast in spite of the protests and entreaties of every one, including her grandfather, down whose wrinkled cheeks the tears had fallen unashamed. With a high head and her best wilful manner she had presented to them all in that old house the bluff of easy-mindedness only to burst like a bubble as soon as the car had turned the corner into the main road. She had gone to the little house in New York, and with a numbed heart and a constant pain in her soul, had packed some warm-weather clothes and, leaving her maid behind, hidden herself away in the cottage, on the outskirts of Greenwich, of an old woman who had been in the service of her school. As a long-legged girl of twelve she had stayed there once with her mother for several days before going home for the holidays. She felt like a wounded animal, and her one desire was to drag herself into a quiet place to die.
It seemed to her then, under the first stupendous shock of finding that Marty was with that girl, that death was the next certain thing. Day after day and night after night, cut to the quick, she waited for it to lay its cold hand upon her and snuff her out like a tired candle, whose little light was meaningless in a brutal world. Marty, even Marty, was no longer a knight, and she had put him into broadcloth.
Not in the sun, but in the shadow of a chestnut all big with bloom, her days had passed in lonely suffering. Death was in the village, that was certain. She had seen a little procession winding along the road to the cemetery the morning after her arrival. She was ready. Nothing mattered now that Marty, even Marty, had done this thing while she had been waiting for him to come and take her across the bridge, anxious to play the game to the very full, eager to prove to him that she was no longer the kid that he thought her who had coolly shown him her door. "I am here, Death," she whispered, "and I want you. Come for me."
All her first feelings were that she ought to die, that she had failed and that her disillusion as to Marty had been directly brought about by herself. She saw it all honestly and made no attempt to hedge. By day, she sat quietly, big-eyed, amazingly childlike, waiting for her punishment, watched by the practical old woman, every moment of whose time was filled, with growing uneasiness and amazement. By night she lay awake as long as she could, listening for the soft footstep of the one who would take her away. At meals, the old woman bullied for she was of the school that hold firmly to the belief that unless the people who partake of food do not do so to utter repletion a personal insult is intended. At other times she went out into the orchard and sat with Joan and, burning with a desire to cheer her up, gave her, in the greatest detail, the story of all the deaths, diseases and quarrels that had ever been known to the village. And every day the good sun warmed and encouraged the earth, drew forth the timid heads of plants and flowers, gave beauty even to the odd corners once more and did his allotted task with a generosity difficult to praise too highly. And Death paid visits here and there but passed the cottage by. At the beginning of the second week, Nature, who has no patience with any attempt to refute her laws, especially on the part of those who are young and vigorous, took Joan in hand. "What is all this, my girl?" she said, "sitting here with your hands in your lap while everybody and everything is working and making and preparing. Stir yourself, bustle up, get busy, there's lots to be done in the springtime if the autumn is to bear fruit. You're sound and whole for all that you've been hurt. If you were not, Death would be here without your calling him. Up you get, now." And, with good-natured roughness, she laid her hand under Joan's elbow, gave a hoist and put her on her feet.
Whereupon, in the natural order of things, Joan turned from self-blame to find a victim who should be held responsible for the pain that she had suffered, and found the girl with the red lips and the white face and the hair that came out of a bottle. Ah, yes! It was she who had caught Marty when he was hurt and disappointed. It was she who had taken advantage of his loneliness and dragged him clown to her own level, this girl whom she had called Fairy and who had had the effrontery to go up to the place on the edge of the woods that was the special property of Marty and herself. And for the rest of the week, with the sap running eagerly in her veins once more, she moved restlessly about the orchard and the garden, heaping coals of fire on to the all too golden head of Tootles.
Then came the feeling of wounded pride, the last step towards convalescence. Marty had chosen between herself and this girl. Without giving her a real chance to put things right he had slipped away silently and taken Tootles with him. Not she, but the girl with the red lips and the pale face and the hair that came out of a bottle had stripped Marty of his armor, and the truth of it was that Marty, yes, even Marty, was not really a knight but a very ordinary man.
Out of the orchard and the garden she went, once she had arrived at this stage, and tramped the countryside with her ears tuned to catch the alluring strains of the mechanical music of the Round-about. She had not only been making a fool of herself but had been made to look a fool, she thought. Her pain and suffering and disillusion had been wasted. All these dull and lonely days had been wasted and thrown away. Death must have laughed to see her sitting in the shadow of the apple trees waiting for a visit that was undeserved. Marty could live and enjoy himself without her. That was evident. Very well, then, she could live and enjoy herself without Marty. The earth was large enough for them both, and if he could find love in the person of that small girl she could surely find it in one or other of the men who had whispered in her ear. Also there was Gilbert Palgrave, who had gone down upon his knees.
And that was the end of her isolation, her voluntary retirement. Back she went to the City of Dreadful Nonsense, bought clothes and shoes and hats, found an invitation to join a house party at Southampton, made no effort to see or hear from Marty, and sprang back into her seat in the Merry-go-round. "Who Cares?" she cried again. "Nobody," she answered. "What I do with my life matters to no one but myself. Set the pace, my dear, laugh and flirt and play with fire and have a good time. A short life and a merry one."
And then she joined the Hosacks, drank deep of the wine of adulation, and when, at odd times, the sound of Marty's voice echoed in her memory, she forced it out and laughed it away. "Who Cares?" was his motto too,—red lips and white face and hair that came out of a bottle!
And now here was Gilbert Palgrave with the fire of love in his eyes.
When Mrs. Hosack rose from the dinner table and sailed Olympically into the drawing-room, surrounded by graceful light craft in the persons of Primrose and her girl friends, the men, as usual, followed immediately. The house was bridge mad, and the tables called every one except Joan, the nice boy, and Gilbert Palgrave.
During the preliminaries of an evening which would inevitably run into the small hours, Joan went over to the piano and, with what was a quite unconscious touch of irony, played one of Heller's inimitable "Sleepless Nights," with the soft pedal down. The large imposing room, a chaotic mixture of French and Italian furniture with Flemish tapestries and Persian rugs, which accurately typified the ubiquitous mind of the hostess, was discreetly lighted. The numerous screened windows were open and the soft warm air came in tinged with the salt of the sea.
Palgrave, refusing to cut in, stood about like a disembodied spirit, with his eyes on Joan, from whom, since his arrival, he had received only a few fleeting glances. He watched the cursed boy, as he had labelled him, slip over to her, lean across the piano and talk eagerly. He went nearer and caught, "the car in half an hour," and "not a word to a soul." After which, with jealousy gnawing at his vitals, he saw Harry Oldershaw moon about for a few minutes and then make a fishlike dart out of the room. He had been prepared to find Joan amorously surrounded by the men of the party but not on terms of sentimental intimacy with a smooth-faced lad. In town she had shown preference for sophistication. He went across to the piano and waited impatiently for Joan to finish the piece which somehow fitted into his mood. "Come out," he said, then, "I want to speak to you."
But Joan let her fingers wander into a waltz and raised her eyebrows. "Do I look so much like Alice that you can order me about?" she asked.
He turned on his heel with the look of a dog at which a stone had been flung by a friend, and disappeared.
Two minutes later there was a light touch on his arm, and Joan stood at his side on the veranda. "Well, Gilbert," she said, "it's good to see you again."
"So good that I might be a man touting for an encyclopedia," he answered angrily.
She sat upon the rough stone wall and crossed her little feet. Her new frock was white and soft and very perfectly simple. It demanded the young body of a nymph,—and was satisfied. The magic of the moon was on her. She might have been Spring resting after a dancing day.
"If you were," she said, taking a delight in unspoiling this immaculate man, "I'm afraid you'd never get an order from me. Of all things the encyclopedia must be accompanied by a winning smile and irresistible manners. I suppose you've done lots of amusing things since I saw you last."
He went nearer so that her knees almost touched him. "No," he said. "Only one, and that was far from amusing. It has marked me like a blow. I've been waiting for you. Where have you been, and why haven't you taken the trouble to write me a single letter?"
"I've been ill," she said. "Yes, I have. Quite ill. I deliberately set out to hurt myself and succeeded. It was an experiment that I sha'n't repeat. I don't regret it. It taught me something that I shall never forget. Never too young to learn, eh? Isn't it lovely here? Just smell the sea, and look at those lights bobbing up and down out there. I never feel any interest in ships in the daytime, but at night, when they lie at anchor, and I can see nothing but their lonely eyes, I would give anything to be able to fly round them like a gull and peep into their cabins. Do they affect you like that?"
Palgrave wasn't listening to her. It was enough to look at her and refresh his memory. She had been more than ever in his blood all these weeks. She was like water in a desert or sunlight to a man who comes up from a mine. He had found her again and he thanked whatever god he recognized for that, but he was forced to realize from her imperturbable coolness and unaffected ease that she was farther away from him than ever. To one of his temperament and schooling this was hard to bear with any sort of self-control. The fact that he wanted her of all the creatures on earth, that she, alone among women, had touched the fuse of his desire, and that, knowing this, she could sit there a few inches from his lips and put a hundred miles between them, maddened him, from whom nothing hitherto had been impossible.
"Have I got to begin all over again?" he asked, with a sort of petulance.
"Begin what, Gilbert?" There was great satisfaction in playing with one who thought that he had only to touch a bell to bring the moon and the sun and the stars to his bidding.
"Good God," he cried out. "You're like wet sand on which a man expects to find yesterday's footmarks. Hasn't anything of me and the things I've said to you remained in your memory?"
"Of course," she said. "I shall never forget the night you took me to the Brevoort, for instance, and supplied the key to all the people with unkempt hair and comic ties."
Some one on the beach below shot out a low whistle.
A little thrill ran through Joan. In ten minutes, perhaps less, she would be dancing once more to the lunatic medley of a Jazz band, dancing with a boy who gave her all that she needed of him and asked absolutely nothing of her; dancing among people who were less than the dust in the scheme of things, so far as she was concerned, except to give movement and animation to the room and to be steered through. That was the right attitude towards life and its millions, she told herself. As salt was to an egg so was the element of false romance to this Golf Club dance. In a minute she would get rid of Palgrave, yes, even the fastidious Gilbert Palgrave, who had never been able quite to disguise the fact that his love for her was something of a condescension; she would fly in the face of the unwritten law of the pompous house on the dunes and mingle with what Hosack had called the crowd from the hotel. It was all laughable and petty, but it was what she wanted to do. It was all in the spirit of "Who Cares?" that she had caught at again. Why worry as to what Mrs. Hosack might say or Palgrave might feel? Wasn't she as free as the air to follow her whims without a soul to make a claim upon her or to hold out a hand to stop?
Through these racing thoughts she heard Palgrave talking and crickets rasping and frogs croaking and a sudden burst of laughter and talk in the drawing-room,—and the whistle come again.
"Yes," she said, because yes was as good as any other word. "Well, Gilbert, dear, if you're not an early bird you will see me again later,"—and jumped down from the wall.
"Where are you going?"
"Does that matter?"
"Yes, it does. I want you here. I've been waiting all these weeks."
She laughed. "It's a free country," she said, "and you have the right to indulge in any hobby that amuses you. Au revoir, old thing." And she spread out her arms like wings and flew to the steps and down to the beach and away with some one who had sent out a signal.
"That boy," said Palgrave. "I'm to be turned down for a cursed boy! By God, we'll know about that."
And he followed, seeing red.
He saw them get into a low-lying two-seater built on racing lines, heard a laugh flutter into the air, watched the tail light sweep round the drive and become smaller and smaller along the road.
So that was it, was it? He had been relegated to the hangers-on, reduced to the ranks, put into the position of any one of the number of extraneous men who hung round this girl-child for a smile and a word! That was the way he was to be treated, he, Gilbert Palgrave, the connoisseur, the decorative and hitherto indifferent man who had refused to be subjected to any form of discipline, who had never, until Joan had come into his life, allowed any one to put him a single inch out of his way, who had been triumphantly one-eyed and selfish,—that was the way he was to be treated by the very girl who had fulfilled his once wistful hope of making him stand, eager and startled and love-sick among the chaos of individualism and indolence, who had shaken him into the Great Emotion! Yes, by God, he'd know about that.
Bare-headed and surging with untranslatable anger he started walking. He was in no mood to go into the drawing-room and cut into a game of bridge and show his teeth and talk the pleasant inanities of polite society. All the stucco of civilization fell about him in slabs as he made his way with long strides out of the Hosacks' place, across the sandy road and on to the springy turf of the golf links. It didn't matter where he went so long as he got elbow room for his indignation, breathing space for his rage and a wide loneliness for his blasphemy....
He had stood humble and patient before this virginal girl. He had confessed himself to her with the tremendous honesty of a man made simple by an overwhelming love. She was married. So was he. But what did that matter to either of them whose only laws were self-made? The man to whom she was not even tied meant as little to her as the girl he had foolishly married meant or would ever mean to him. He had placed himself at her beck and call. In order to give her amusement he had taken her to places in which he wouldn't have been seen dead, had danced his good hours of sleep away for the pleasure of seeing her pleased, had revolutionized his methods with women and paid her tribute by the most scrupulous behavior and, finally, instead of setting out to turn her head with pearls and diamonds and carry her by storm while she was under the hypnotic influence of priceless glittering things for bodily adornment, which render so many women easy to take, he had recognized her as intelligent and paid her the compliment of treating her as such, had stated his case and waited for the time when the blaze of love would set her alight and bring her to his arms.
There was something more than mere egotism in all this,—the natural egotism of a man of great wealth and good looks, who had walked through life on a metaphorical red carpet pelted with flowers by adoring women to whom even virtue was well lost in return for his attention. Joan, like the spirit of spring, had come upon Palgrave at that time of his life when youth had left him and he had stood at the great crossroads, one leading down through a morass of self-indulgence to a hideous senility, the other leading up over the stones of sacrifice and service to a dignified usefulness. Her fresh young beauty and enthusiasm, her golden virginity and unself-consciousness, her unaffected joy in being alive, her superb health and vitality had shattered his conceit and self-obsession, broken down his aloofness and lack of scruple and filled the empty frame that he had hung in his best thoughts with her face and form.
There was something of the great lover about Palgrave in his new and changed condition. He had laid everything unconditionally at the feet of this young thing. He had shown a certain touch of bigness, of nobility, he of all men, when, after his outburst in the little drawing-room that night, he had stood back to wait until Joan had grown up. He had waited for six weeks, going through tortures of Joan-sickness that were agonizing. He had asked her to do what she could for him in the way of a little kindness, but had not received one single line. He was prepared to continue to wait because he knew his love to be so great that it must eventually catch hold of her like the licking flame of a prairie fire. It staggered him to arrive at the Hosacks' place and find her fooling with a smooth-faced lad. It outraged him to be left cold, as though he were a mere member of the house party and watch her to whom he had thrown open his soul go joy-riding with a cursed boy. It was, in a sort of way, heresy. It proved an almost unbelievable inability to realize the great thing that this was. Such love as his was not an everyday affair, to be treated lightly and carelessly. It was, on the contrary, rare and wonderful and as such to be, at any rate, respected. That's how it seemed to him, and by God he would see about it.
He drew up short, at last, on his strange walk across the undulating course. The light from the Country Club streamed across his feet, and the jangle of the Jazz band broke into his thoughts. From where he stood, surprised to find himself in civilization, he could see the crowd of dancers through the open windows of what resembled a huge bungalow, at one side of which a hundred motor cars were parked. He went nearer, drawn forward against his will. He was in no mood to watch a summer dance of the younger set. He made his way to the wide veranda and stood behind the rocking chairs of parents and friends. But not for more than fifty seconds. There was Joan, with her lovely laughing face alight with the joy of movement, held in the arms of the cursed boy. Between two chairs he went, into and across the room in which he was a trespasser, tapped young Oldershaw sharply on the arm, cut into the dance, and before the boy could recover from his surprise, was out of reach with Joan against his heart.
"Oh, well done, Gilbert," said Joan, a little breathlessly. "When Marty did that to you at the Crystal Room..."
She stopped, and a shadow fell on her face and a little tremble ran across her lips.
Smoking a cigarette on the veranda young Oldershaw waited for the dance to end. It was encored several times but being a sportsman and having achieved a monopoly of Joan during all the previous dances, he let this man enjoy his turn. He was a great friend of hers, she had said on the way to the club, and was, without doubt, a very perfect person with his wide-set eyes and well-groomed head, his smooth moustache and the cleft on his chin. He didn't like him. He had decided that at a first glance. He was too supercilious and self-assured and had a way of looking clean through men's heads. He conveyed the impression of having bought the earth,—and Joan. A pity he was too old for a year or two of Yale. That would make him a bit more of a man.
When presently the Jazzers paused in order to recuperate,—every one of them deserving first aid for the wounded,—and Joan came out for a little air with Palgrave, Harry strolled up. This was his evening, and in a perfectly nice way he conveyed that impression by his manner. He was, moreover, quite determined to give nothing more away. He conveyed that, also.
"Shall we sit on the other side?" he asked. "The breeze off the sea keeps the mosquitoes away a bit."
Refusing to acknowledge his existence Palgrave guided Joan towards a vacant chair. He went on with what he had been saying and swung the chair round.
Joan was smiling again.
Oldershaw squared his jaw. "I advise against this side, Joan," he said. "Let me take you round."
He earned a quick amused look and a half shrug of white shoulders from Joan. Palgrave continued to talk in a low confidential voice. He regarded Oldershaw's remarks as no more of an interruption than the chorus of the frogs. Oldershaw's blood began to boil, and he had a queer prickly sensation at the back of his neck. Whoo, but there'd have to be a pretty good shine in a minute, he said to himself. This man Palgrave must be taught.
He marched up to Joan and held out his arm. "We may as well get back," he said. "The band's going to begin again."
But Joan sat down, looking from one man to the other. All the woman in her revelled in this rivalry,—all that made her long-dead sisters crowd to the arenas, wave to armored knights in deadly combat, lean forward in grand stands to watch the Titanic struggles of Army and Navy, Yale and Harvard on the football field. Her eyes danced, her lips were parted a little, her young bosom rose and fell.
"And so you see," said Palgrave, putting his hand on the back of her chair, "I can stay as long as the Hosacks will have me, and one day I'll drive you over to my bachelor cottage on the dune. It will interest you."
"The only thing that has any interest at the moment is dancing," said Oldershaw loudly. "By the way, you don't happen to be a member of the club, do you, Mr. Palgrave?"
With consummate impudence Palgrave caught his eye and made a sort of policeman gesture. "Run away, my lad," he said, "run away and amuse yourself." He almost asked for death.
With a thick mutter that sounded like "My God," Oldershaw balanced himself to hit, his face the color of a beet-root,—and instantly Joan was on her feet between them with a hand on the boy's chest.
"No murder here," she said, "please!"
"Murder!" echoed Palgrave, scoffing.
"Yes, murder. Can't you see that this boy could take you and break you like a dry twig? Let's go back, all three of us. We don't want to become the center of a sight-seeing crowd." And she took an arm of each shaking man and went across the drive to where the car was parked.
And so the danger moment was evaded,—young Oldershaw warm with pride, Palgrave sullen and angry. They made a trio which had its prototypes all the way back to the beginning of the world.
It did Palgrave no good to crouch ignominiously on the step of the car which Oldershaw drove back hell for leather.
The bridge tables were still occupied. The white lane was still across the sea. Frogs and crickets still continued their noisy rivalry, but it was a different climate out there on the dunes from that of the village with its cloying warmth.
Palgrave went into the house at once with a brief "Thank you." Joan waited while Harry put the car into a garage. Bed made no appeal. Bridge bored,—it required concentration. She would play the game of sex with Gilbert if he were to be found. So the boy had to be disposed of.
"Harry," she said, when he joined her, chuckling at having come top dog out of the recent blaze, "you'd better go straight to bed now. We're going to be up early in the morning, you know."
"Just what I was thinking," he answered. "By Jove, you've given me a corking good evening. The best of my young life. You ... you certainly are,—well, I don't know how to do you justice. I'd have to be a poet." He fumbled for her hand and kissed it a little sheepishly.
They went in. "You're a nice boy, Harry," she said. There was something in his charming simplicity and muscular strength that reminded her of,—but she refused to let the name enter her mind.
"I could have broken that chap like a dry twig, too, easy. Who does he think he is?" He would have pawned his life at that moment for the taste of her lips.
She stood at the bottom of the stairs and held out her hand. "Good night, old boy," she said.
And he took it and hurt it. "Good night, Joany," he answered.
That pet name hurt her more than his eager grasp. It was Marty's own word—Marty, who—who—
She threw up her head and stamped her foot, and slammed the door of her thoughts. "Who cares?" she said to herself, challenging life and fate. "Come on. Make things move."
She saw Palgrave standing alone in the library looking at the sea. "You might be Canute," she said lightly.
His face was curiously white. "I'm off in the morning," he said. "We may as well say good-by now."
"Good-by, then," she answered.
"I can't stay in this cursed place and let you play the fool with me."
"Why should you?"
"There'll be Hosack and the others as well as your new pet."
"That's true."
He caught her suddenly by the arms. "Damn you," he said. "I wish to God I'd never seen you."
She laughed. "Cave man stuff, eh?"
He let her go. She had the most perfect way of reducing him to ridicule.
"I love you," he said. "I love you. Aren't you going to try, even to try, to love me back?"
"No."
"Not ever?"
"Never." She went up to him and stood straight and slim and bewitching, eye to eye. "If you want me to love you, make me. Work for it, move Heaven and earth. You can't leave it to me. I don't want to love you. I'm perfectly happy as I am. If you want me, win me, carry me off my feet and then you shall see what it is to be loved. It's entirely up to you, understand that. I shall fight against it tooth and nail, but I give you leave to do your best. Do you accept the challenge?"
"Yes," he said, and his face cleared, and his eyes blazed.
At the moment when the Nice Boy, as brown as the proverbial berry, was playing a round of golf with Joan within sound of the sea, Howard Oldershaw, his cousin, drove up to the little house in East Sixty-fifth Street to see Martin.
He, too, had caught the sun, and his round fat face was rounder and fatter than ever. He, too, had the epitome of health, good nature, and misdirected energy. He performed a brief but very perfect double shuffle on the top step while waiting for the door to open, and then barged past the constitutionally unsurprised man servant, sang out a loud woo-hoo and blew into the library like an equinoctial gale.
Pipe in mouth, and wearing a thin silk dressing gown, Martin was standing under the portrait of his father. He slipped something quickly into his pocket and turned about. It was a photograph of Joan.
"Well, you Jack-o'-Lantern," he said. "It's better late than never, I suppose."
Howard sent his straw hat spinning across the room. It landed expertly in a chair. "My dear chap, your note's been lying in my apartment for a week, snowed under my bills. I drove back this morning, washed the bricks out of my eyes and came right around. What are you grumbling about?"
"I'm not grumbling. When you didn't show up in answer to my note I telephoned, and they told me you were away. Where've you been?"
"Putting in a week at the Field Club at Greenwich," replied Howard, filling a large cigarette case from the nearest box, as was his most friendly habit. "Two sweaters, tennis morning, noon and night, no sugar, no beer, no butter, no bread, gallons of hot water—and look at me! Martin, it's a tragedy. If I go on like this, it's me for Barnum's Circus as the world's prize pig. What's the trouble?"
There was not the usual number of laughter lines round Martin's eyes, but one or two came back at the sight and sound of his exuberant friend. "No trouble," he said, lying bravely. "I got here the day you left and tried to find you. That's all. I wanted you to come down to Shinnecock and play golf. Everybody else seems to be at Plattsburg, and I was at a loose end."
"Golf's no good to me. It wouldn't reduce me any more than playing the piano with somebody dying in the next room. Been here all the week?"
"Yes," said Martin.
"What? In this fug hole, with the sun shining? Out with it, Martin. Get it off your chest, old son."
Just for an instant Martin was hugely tempted to make a clean breast of everything to this good-hearted, tempestuous person, under whose tight skin there was an uncommon amount of shrewdness. But it meant dragging Joan into open discussion, and that was all against his creed. He had inherited from his father and his father's father an absolute incapability of saying anything to anybody about his wife. And so he slammed the door of his soul and presented an enigmatical front.
"There's nothing on my chest," he said. "Business downtown has kept me here,—legal stuff and that sort of thing. But I'm free now. Got any suggestions?"
Howard accepted this. If a pal was determined not to confide and get invaluable advice, what was the use of going for him with a can opener? But one good look at the face whose every expression he knew so well convinced him that something was very much the matter. "Why, good Lord," he said to himself, "the old thing looks as if he'd been working night and day for an examination and had been plucked. I wonder which of the two girls is at the back of all this,—the wife or the other?" Rumors had reached his way about both.
"What do you want to do?" he asked.
"I don't care," said Martin. "Any damn thing so long as it's something with somebody. What's it matter?"
He didn't quite manage to hide the little quiver in his voice, and it came to Howard Oldershaw for the first time how young they both were to be floundering on the main road, himself with several entanglements and money worries, his friend married and with another complication. They were both making a pretty fine hash of things, it seemed, and just for a moment, with something of boyishness that still remained behind his sophistication, he wished that they were both back at Yale, unhampered and unencumbered, their days filled with nothing but honest sport and good lectures and the whole joy of life.
"It's like this with me, Martin," he said, with a rather rueful grin. "I'm out of favor at home just now and broke to the wide. There are one or two reasons why I should lie low for a while, too. How about going out to your place in the country? I'll hit the wily ball with you and exercise your horses, lead the simple life and, please God, lose some flesh, and guarantee to keep you merry and bright in my well-known, resilient way. What do you say, old son?"
Martin heartily appreciated Howard's sound method of swinging everything round to himself and trying to make out that it was all on his side to go out to the house in which Joan ought to be. He was not a horseman or a golfer, and the simple life had few attractions for him. Well, that was friendship.
"Thanks, old man," he said. "That's you to the life, but I vote we get a change from golf and riding. Come down to Devon with me, and let's do some sailing. You remember Gilmore? I had a letter from him this morning, asking if I'd like to take his cottage and yawl. Does that sound good?"
"Great," cried Howard. "Sailing—that's the game, and by gum, swimming's the best of all ways of dropping adipose deposit. Wire Gilmore and fix it. I'll drive you out to-morrow. By the way, I found a letter from my cousin Harry among the others. He's in that part of the world. He's frightfully gone on your wife, it appears."
Martin looked up quickly. "Where is she?" he asked.
"Why, they're both staying at the Hosacks' place at Easthampton. Didn't you know that?" He was incredulous.
"No," said Martin.
Howard metaphorically clapped his hand over his mouth. Questions were on the tip of his tongue. If Martin were not in the mood to take him into his confidence, however, there must be a good reason for it, but,—not to know where his wife was! What on earth was at the bottom of all this? "All right," he said. "I've one or two things I must do, and I'll be round in the morning, or is that too soon?"
"The sooner the better," said Martin. "I'll send the cook and Judson down by the early train. They'll have things in shape by the time we show up. I'm fed up with New York and can smell the water already. Will you dine with me to-night and see a show?"
"I can't," said Howard, and laughed.
"I see. To-morrow, then."
"Right. Great work. So long, old son. Get busy and do what you have to do to-day, then we can leave this frying pan to-morrow with nothing on our minds."
"I haven't anything to do," said Martin.
Howard picked up his hat and caught it with his head in the manner of a vaudeville artist. But he didn't go. He stood waiting, keyed to a great sympathy. There was something in Martin's voice and at the back of his eyes which made him see him plainly and suddenly as a man standing all alone and wounded. But he waited in vain. There was a curious silence,—a rather painful and embarrassing silence, during which these two lads, who had been pretending to be men, dodged each other's eyes.
And then Howard, with an uncharacteristic awkwardness, and looking very young, made a quick step forward, and with a sort of gentle roughness grasped Martin by the arm. "But you've got something to say," he said. "Good God, man, have we been pals for nothing? I hide nothing from you. I can help."
But Martin shook his head. He tried to speak and failed. There was something hard in his throat. But he put his hand very warmly on his friend's shoulder for a moment and turned away abruptly. "Joan, Joan," he cried in his heart, "what are you doing, what are we both doing? Why are we killing the days that can never come back?"
He heard Howard go out. He heard the front door close and the honk of the horn. And for a long time he stood beneath the portrait of the man who had gone so far away and who alone could have helped him.
The telephone bell rang.
Martin was spoken to by the girl that lived in the rabbit warren in West Forty-sixth Street in the rooms below those of Tootles. "Can you come round at once?" she asked. "It's about Tootles—urgent."
And Martin answered, "Yes, now, at once."
After all, then, there might be something to do.
Master of all the sky, the sun fell warmly on the city, making delicious shadows, gliding giant buildings, streaming across the park, chasing the endless traffic along the Avenue, and catching at points of color. It was one of those splendid mornings of full-blown Tune, when even New York,—that paradox of cities,—had beauty. It was too early in the year for the trees to have grown blowsy and the grass worn and burnt. The humidity of midsummer was held back by the energy of a merry breeze which teased the flags and sent them spinning against the oriental blue of the spotless sky.
Martin walked to West Forty-sixth Street. There was an air of half-time about the Avenue. The ever-increasingly pompous and elaborate shops, whose window contents never seem to vary, wore a listless, uninterested expression like that of a bookmaker during the luncheon hour at the races. Their glittering smile, their enticement and solicitation, their tempting eye-play were relaxed. The cocottes of Monte Carlo at the end of the season could not have assumed a greater indifference. But there were the same old diamonds and pearls, the same old canvases, the same old photographs, the same old antiques, the same old frocks and shoes and men's shirtings, the same old Persian rugs and Japanese ware, the same cold, hard plates and china, the very same old hats and dinks and dressing-gowns and cut flowers and clubs, and all the same doormen in the uniforms that are a cross between those of admirals and generals, the men whose only exercise during the whole of the year is obtained by cutting ice and sweeping snow from just their particular patch of pavement. In all the twists and changes, revolutions and cross currents, upheavals and in-fallings that affect this world, there is one great street which, except for a new building here and there, resolutely maintains its persistent sameness. Its face is like that of a large, heavily made-up and not unbeautiful woman, veil-less and with some dignity but only two expressions, enticement and indifference. A man may be lost at the North Pole, left to die on the west coast of Africa, married in London, or forcibly detained in Siberia, but, let him return to life and New York, and he will find that whatever elsewhere Anno Domini may have defaced and civilization made different, next to nothing has happened to Fifth Avenue.
Martin had told Howard of the way he had found Joan on the hill, how she had climbed out of window that night and come to him to be rescued and how he had brought her to town to find Alice Palgrave away and married her. All that, but not one word of his having been shown the door on the night of the wedding, of her preference for Palgrave, her plunge into night life, or his own odd hut human adventure with Susie Capper as a result of the accident. But for the fact that it wasn't his way to speak about his wife whatever she did or left undone, Martin would have been thankful to have made a clean breast of everything. Confession is good for the soul, and Martin's young soul needed to be relieved of many bewilderments and pains and questionings. He wished that he could have continued the story to Howard of the kid's way Joan had treated him,—a way which had left him stultified,—of how, touched by the tragedy that had reduced the poor little waif of the chorus to utter grief and despair, he had taken her out to the country to get healing in God's roofless cathedral, and of how, treating her, because of his love and admiration of Joan, with all the respect and tenderness that he would have shown a sister, it had given him the keenest pleasure and delight to help her back to optimism and sanity. He would like to have told Howard all the simple and charming details of that good week, giving him a sympathetic picture of the elfish Tootles enjoying her brief holiday out in the open, and of her recovery under the inspiration of trees and flowers and brotherliness, to all of which she was so pathetically unaccustomed. He wouldn't have told of the many efforts made by Tootles to pay him back in the only way that seemed to her to be possible, even if he had known of them,—he had not been on the lookout for anything of that sort. Nor would he, of course, have gone into the fact that Tootles loved him quite as much as he loved Joan,—he knew nothing of that. But he would have said much of the joy that turned cold at the sight of Joan's face when she saw Tootles lying on the sofa in his den, of her rush to get away, of the short, sharp scene which followed her unexpected visit, and of his having driven Tootles back to town the following morning at her urgent request,—a curious, quiet Tootles with the marks of a sleepless night on her face. Also he would have said something of his wild despair at having been just ten minutes too late to find Joan at the house in East Sixty-fifth Street, of his futile attempts to discover where she had gone, and of the ghastly, mystifying days back in the country, waiting and wondering and writing letters that he never posted,—utterly unaware of the emotion which had prompted Joan to walk into his den that night, but quite certain of the impression that she had taken away with her.
It was with a sense of extraordinary isolation that Martin walked down Fifth Avenue. Two good things had, however, come out of his talk with Howard Oldershaw. One was the certainty of this man's friendship. The other the knowledge of the place at which Joan was staying. This last fact made him all the more anxious to get down to the cottage. Devon was only a short drive from Easthampton, and that meant the possibility of seeing and speaking to Joan. Good God, if only she could understand a little of what she meant to him, and how he craved and pined for her.
The dressmaker on the street floor of the rabbit warren had gone out of business. Failed probably, poor thing. Tootles had once said that the only people she ever saw in the shop were pressing creditors. A colored woman of bulbous proportions and stertorous breathing was giving a catlick to the dirty stairway. A smell of garlic and onions met Martin on his way to the rooms of Tootles' friend, and on the first landing he drew back to let two men pass down who looked like movie actors. They wore violet ties and tight-fitting jackets with trench belts and short trousers that should have been worn by their younger brothers. The actor on the next floor, unshaven and obviously just out of bed, was cooking breakfast in his cubby-hole. He wore the upper part of his pajamas and a pair of incredibly dirty flannel trousers. The marks of last night's grease paint were on his temples and eyebrows. He hummed a little song to the accompaniment of sizzling bacon.
When Martin knocked on the door of the apartment of the girl to whom he had never spoken except over the telephone and whose name he remembered to be Irene Stanton, a high-pitched, nasal voice cried out.
"Come right in." He went right in and was charged at by a half-bred Chow whose bark was like a gunman's laugh, and a tiny pink beast which worked itself into a state of hysterical rage. But when a high-heeled shoe was flung at them from the bedroom, followed by a volley of fruit-carrier words of the latest brand, they retired, awed and horror-stricken, to cover.
Martin found himself in a small, square living room with two windows looking over the intimate backs of other similar houses. Under the best of conditions it was not a room of very comfortable possibilities. In the hands of its present occupant, it was, to Martin's eyes, the most depressing and chaotic place he had ever seen. The cheap furniture and the cheaper wall paper went well with a long-unwhite-washed ceiling and smudged white paint. A line of empty beer bottles which stood on a mantelpiece littered with unframed photographs and dog-eared Christmas cards struck a note so blase that it might almost have been committed for a reason. On the square mission table in the center there was a lamp with a belaced pink shade at a cock-eyed angle which resembled the bonnet of a streetwalker in the early hours of the morning. An electric iron stood coldly beneath it with its wire attached to a fixture in the wall. Various garments littered the chairs and sofa, and jagged pieces of newspaper which had been worried by the dogs covered the floor.
But the young woman who shortly made her appearance was very different from the room. Her frock was neat and clean, her face most carefully made up, her shoes smart. She had a wide and winning grin, teeth that should have advertised a toothpaste, and a pair of dimples which ought to have been a valuable asset to any chorus. "Why, but you HAVE done a hustle," she said. "I haven't even had time to tidy up a bit." She cleared a chair and shook a finger at the dogs, who, sneaking out from under the sofa, were eyeing her with apprehensive affection. The Chow's mother had evidently lost her heart to a bulldog. "Excuse the look of this back attic," she added. "I've got to move, and I'm in the middle of packing."
"Of course," said Martin, eager to know why he had been sent for. "It's about Tootles, you said."
"Very much so." She sat on the edge of the table, crossed her arms, and deliberately looked Martin over with expert eyes. Knowing as much about men as a mechanic of a main-road motor-repairing shop knows about engines, her examination was acute and thorough.
Martin waited quietly, amused at her coolness, but impatient to come to cues. She was a good sort, he knew. Tootles had told him so, and he was certain that she had asked to see him out of friendship for the girl upstairs.
Her first question was almost as disconcerting and abrupt as a Zeppelin bomb. "What did you do to Tootles?"
Martin held her examining gaze. "Nothing, except give her a bit of a holiday," he said.
"I saw you go off with her that morning." She smiled and her eyes became a little more friendly. "She wrote me a letter from your place and said she'd found out what song writers meant by the word heaven."
"Did she?" said Martin. "I'm glad."
It came to her in a flash that her little pal had fallen in love with this boy and instantly she understood the mystery of Tootles' change of method and point of view—her moping, her relaxed grip on life. She meant almost nothing to the boy and knew it.
"But don't you think you might have been to see her since you brought her back?" she asked.
"I've been very worried," said Martin simply.
"Is that so?" and then, after another pause, this girl said a second astonishing thing. "I wish I didn't see in you a man who tells the truth. I wish you were just one of the ordinary sort that comes our way. I should know how to deal with you better."
"Tell me what you mean," said Martin.
"Shall I? All right, I will." She stood up with her hands on her hips. "If you'd played the usual game with little Tootles and dropped her cold, I wouldn't let you get out of this room without coming up to scratch. I'd make you cough up a good-sized check. There's such a thing as playing the game even by us strap-hangers, you know. As it is, I can see that you were on the square, that you're a bit of a poet or something and did Tootles a good turn for nothing, and honestly, I don't know the next move. You don't owe her anything, you see."
"Is money the trouble?" asked Martin.
Irene Stanton shot out an odd, short laugh. "Let me tell you something," she said. "You know what happened at the dress rehearsal of 'The Ukelele Girl'? Well, the word's gone around about her chucking the show at the last minute, and it's thumbs down for Tootles. She hadn't a nickel when she came back from your place, and since then she's pawned herself right down to the bone to pay her rent and get a few eats. She wouldn't take nothing from me because I'm out too, and this is a bad time to get into anything new. Only two things can stop her from being put out at the end of the week. One's going across the passage to the drunken fellow that writes music, and the other's telling the tale to you. She won't do either. I've never seen her the way she is now. She sits around, staring at the wall, and when I try to put some of her usual pep into her she won't listen. She's all changed since that taste of the country, and I figure she won't get on her feet again without a big yank up. She keeps on saying to herself, like a sort of song, 'Oh, Gawd, for a sight of the trees,' and I've known girls end it quick when they get that way."
Martin got up. "Where do you keep your pen and ink?" he asked. Poor old Tootles. There certainly was something to do.
Irene bent forward eagerly. "Are you going to see her through this snag?"
"Of course I am."
"Ah, that's the talk. But wait a second. We got to be tricky about this." She was excited and tremendously in earnest. "If she gets to know I've been holding out the hat to you, we're wasting time. Give me the money, see? I'll make up a peach of a story about how it came to me,—the will of a rich uncle in Wisconsin or something, you know,—and ask her to come and help me blow it in somewhere on the coast, see? She gave me three weeks' holiday once. It's my turn now, me being in luck.... But perhaps you don't trust me?"
"You trust me," said Martin, and gave her one of his honest smiles.
He caught sight of a bottle of ink on the window sill. There was a pen of sorts there also. He brought them to the table and made out a check in the name of his fellow conspirator. He was just as anxious as she was to put "a bit of pep" into the little waif who had sat beneath the portrait of his father. There was no blotting paper, so he waved it in the air before handing it over.
A rush of tears came to Irene's eyes when she saw what he had written. She held out her hand, utterly giving up an attempt to find words.
"Thank you for calling up," said Martin, doing his best to be perfectly natural and ordinary. "I wish you'd done so sooner. Poor old Tootles. Write to the Devon Yacht Club, Long Island, and let me know how you get on. We've all three been up against some rotten bad luck, haven't we? Good-by, then. I'll go up to Tootles now."
"No, no," she said, "don't. That'd bring my old uncle to life right away. She'd guess you was in on this, all right. Slip off and let me have a chance with my movie stuff." With a mixture of emotion and hilarity she suddenly waved the check above her head. "Can you imagine the fit the receiving teller at my little old bank'll throw when I slip this across as if it meant nothing to me?"
And then she caught up one of Martin's hands and did the most disconcerting thing of all. She pressed it to her lips and kissed it.
Martin got as red as a beet. "Well, then, good-by," he said, making for the door. "Good luck."
"Good-by and good luck to you. My word, but you've made optimism sprout all over my garden, and I thought the very roots of it were dead."
For a few minutes after Martin was gone, she danced about her appalling room, and laughed and cried and said the most extraordinary things to her dogs. The little pink beast became hysterical again, and the Chow leaped into a bundle of under-clothing and worried the life out of it. Finally, having hidden the check in a safe place, the girl ran upstairs to break the good news of her uncle's death to Tootles. Why, they could do the thing like ladies, the pair of them. It was immense, marvellous, almost beyond belief! That old man of Wisconsin deserved a place in Heaven.... Heaven—Devon.
It was an inspiration. "Gee, but that's the idea!" she said to herself. "Devon—and the sight of that boy. That'll put the pep back, unless I'm the original nut. And if he doesn't care about her now, he may presently. Others have."
And when she went in, there was Tootles staring at the wall, and through it and away beyond at the place Martin had called the Cathedral, and at Martin, with his face dead-white because Joan had turned and gone.
It was a different Tootles who, ten days later, sat on a bank of dry ferns that overlooked a superb stretch of water and watched the sun go down. The little half-plucked bird of the Forty-sixth Street garret with the pale thin face and the large tired eyes had almost become the fairy of Joan's hill once more, the sun-tanned little brother of Peter Pan again. A whole week of the air of Devon and the smell of its pines, of the good wholesome food provided by the family with whom she and Irene were lodging, of long rambles through the woods, of bathing and sleeping, and the joy of finding herself among trees had performed that "yank" of which her fellow chorus lady had spoken.
Tootles was on her feet again. Her old zest to live had been given back to her by the wonder and the beauty of sky and water and trees. A child of nature, hitherto forced to struggle for her bread in cities, she was revived and renewed and refreshed by the sweet breath and the warm welcome of that simple corner of God's earth to which Irene had so cunningly brought her. Her starved, city-ridden spirit had blossomed and become healthy out there in the country like a root of Creeping Jenny taken from a pot on the window-sill of a slum house and put back into good brown earth.
The rough and ready family with whom they were lodging kept a duck farm, and it was to this white army of restless, greedy things that Tootles owed her first laugh. Tired and smut-bespattered after a tedious railway journey she had eagerly and with childish joy gone at once to see them fed, the old and knowing, the young and optimistic, and all the yellow babies with uncertain feet and tiny noises. After that, a setting sun which set fire to the sky and water and trees, melting and mingling them together, and Tootles turned the corner. The motherless waif slept that night on Nature's maternal breast and was comforted.
The warm-hearted Irene was proud of herself. Devon—Heaven—it was indeed an inspiration. The only fly in her amber came from the fact that Martin was away. But when she discovered that he and his friend had merely gone for a short trip on the yawl she waited with great content for their return, setting the seeds in Tootles' mind, with infinite diplomacy and feminine cunning, of a determination to use all her wiles to win even a little bit of love from Martin as soon as she saw him again.
Playing the part of one who had unexpectedly benefited from the will of an almost-forgotten relative she never, of course, said a word of why she had chosen Devon for this gorgeous holiday. Temporarily wealthy it was not necessary to look cannily at every nickel. Before leaving New York she had bought herself and Tootles some very necessary clothes and saw to it that they lived on as much of the fat of the land as could be obtained in the honest and humble house in which she had found a large two-bedded room. Her cigarettes were Egyptian now and on the train she had bought half a dozen new novels at which she looked with pride. Hitherto she had been obliged to read only those much-handled blase-looking books which went the round of the chorus. Conceive what that meant! Also she had brought with her a bottle of the scent that was only, so far as she knew, within reach of leading ladies. Like the cigarettes and the books, this was really for Tootles to use, but she borrowed a little from time to time.
As for Irene Stanton, then, she was having, and said so, the time of her young life. She richly deserved it, and if her kindness and thoughtfulness, patience and sympathy had not been entered in the big volume of the Recording Angel that everlasting young woman must have neglected her pleasant job for several weeks.
And, as for Tootles, it is true that her bobbed hair still owed its golden brilliance to a bottle, but the white stuff on her face had been replaced by sunburn, and her lips were red all by themselves.
She was watching the last of the great red globe when her friend joined her. There had been a race of sloops that afternoon, and there was unusual animation on the quay and at the little club house. A small power boat, on which were the starter and judges and others, had just put in with a good deal of splutter and fuss. On the stoop of the club a small band was playing, and a bevy of young people were dancing. Following in the wake of the last sloop a yawl with a dingey in tow was coming towards the quay.
Seeing that Tootles was in one of her ecstatic moods and was deaf to remarks, Irene saved her words to cool her porridge and watched the incoming yawl. She did so at first without much interest. It was merely a sailboat to her city eyes, and her good lines and good management meant nothing. But as she came nearer something familiar in the cut of the man at her helm caught her attention. Surely those broad shoulders and that deep chest and small head could belong only to Martin Gray? They did, they did. It was that boy at last, that boy about whom Tootles had gone dippy, that boy whose generosity had made their holiday possible, that boy the first sight of whom would put the last touch to Tootles' recovery—that boy who, if her friend set her mind and feminine charm to work, might, it seemed to the practical Irene, make her future safe. Strap-hangers had very few such chances.
With a tremendous effort she sat wordless and waited, knowing that Martin must come that way to his cottage. With all her sense of the dramatic stirred she watched the business of coming to anchor with some impatience and when finally the dingey was hauled in and the two men got aboard, loosed off and rowed to shore, excitement sent the blood tingling through her veins. She heard them laugh and look up towards the club, now almost deserted; cars were being driven inland in quick succession. She watched them, hatless and sun-tanned, come nearer and nearer. She got up as if to go, hesitated, caught Martin's eye, gave an exclamation of well-acted amazement and waved her hand. "Well," she cried out, "for Heaven's sake! I never thought you meant this little old Devon!"
Howard had long ago caught sight of the two girls and wondered if they were pretty, hoping they would remain until he could decide the point for himself. They were, both of them, and Martin knew them. Good enough. He stood by while Martin greeted the one who spoke and then saw the other wake suddenly at the sound of his friend's voice, stumble to her feet and go forward with a little cry.
"Why, Tootles," said Martin warmly. "I never thought of seeing you here. How well you look."
It was like dreaming true. Tootles could only smile and cling to his hand.
"By Jove, the other girl," thought Howard, with what, after all, was only an easy touch of intuition. The girl's face told her story. "What will this mean?" Then there were introductions, questions and answers, laughter, jokes, a quick exchange of glances between Martin and Irene, in which he received and acknowledged her warning, and a little silence.
"Come up to the cottage and have dinner with us," said Martin, breaking it rather nervously. "Can you?"
Tootles nodded. Devon—Heaven. How perfectly the words rhymed.
"You couldn't keep us away with a stick," said Irene. This was the way things should go. Also, the jovial, fat person with the roving eyes might brighten things considerably for her.
"Great work!" Said Howard.
And then, taking Tootle's arm and breaking into enthusiastic details of the sailing trip, Martin led the way up to the cottage among the firs. It was good to have been able to put little Tootles into spirits again.
Howard followed with Irene. "Gee whiz!" he said to himself, "some dimples!"
A few miles away as the crow flies Gilbert Palgrave In his bedroom in St. James's Palace cursed himself and life because Joan was still as difficult to win as sunshine was to bottle.
And up in the sky that hung above them all the angels were lighting the stars.
Martin was not given to suspicion. He accepted people at their face value and believed in human nature. It never occurred to him, then, that the apparently ingenuous and disarming Irene, with her straight glance and wide smile, had brought Tootles to Devon except by accident or for anything but health and peace. He was awfully glad to see them. They added to the excellent effect upon his spirits which had been worked by the constant companionship of the irrepressible Howard, before whose habitual breeziness depression could stand little chance.
Also he had youth and health and plenty to do in gorgeous weather, and so his case, which he had been examining rather morbidly, assumed a less painful aspect. His love and need of Joan remained just as strong, but the sense of martyrdom brought about by loneliness and self-analysis left him. Once more he assured himself that Joan was a kid and must have her head until she became a woman and faced facts. Over and over again he repeated to himself the creed that she had flung into the teeth of fate, and in this he found more excuse than she deserved for the way in which she had used him to suit her purpose and put him into the position of a big elder brother whose duty it was to support her, in loco parentis, and not interfere with her pastimes. However much she fooled and flirted, he had an unshakable faith in her cleanness and sweetness, and if he continued to let her alone, to get fed up with what she called the Merry-go-round, she would one day come home and begin all over again. She was a kid, just a kid as she had said, and why, after all, should she be bullied and bully-ragged before she had had time to work it off? That's how he argued.
Meanwhile, he was, thankfully enough, no longer alone. Here were Howard and the two girls and the yawl and the sun, and he would keep merry and bright until Joan came back. He was too proud and sensitive to go to Joan and have it all out with her and thus dispel what had developed into a double misunderstanding, and too loyal to go to Joan's mother and tell his story and beg for help. Like Joan and Howard, and who knows how many other young things in the world, he was paying the inevitable penalty for believing that he could face the problems of life unassisted, unadvised and was making a dreadful hash of it in consequence. He little knew that his kindness to Tootles had made Joan believe that he had exchanged his armor for broadcloth and put her in a "who cares?" mood far more dangerous than the one which had sent her into the night life of New York, or that, owing to Tootles, she was, at that very moment, for the fun of the thing, driving Gilbert Palgrave to a state of anger and desperation which might lead to tragedy. Poor young things, misguided and falsely proud and at a loose end! What a waste of youth and spring which a few wise words of counsel would retrieve and render blessed.
And as for Tootles, with her once white face and red lips and hair that came out of a bottle, Martin was to her what Joan was to Palgrave and for the same reason. Irene's hints and innuendos had taken root. Caring nothing for the practical side of her friend's point of view,—the assured future business,—all her energies were bent to attract Martin, all that was feminine in her was making a huge effort to win, by hook or crook, somehow soon, an answer, however temporary, to her love. Never mind what happened after these summer weeks were over. What matter if she went mad so that she had her day? She had never come across any man like this young Martin, with his clean eyes and sensitive soul and honest hands, his, to her, inconceivable capacity of "being brother," his puzzling aloofness from the lure of sex. She didn't understand what it meant to a boy of Martin's type to cherish ideals and struggle to live up to a standard that had been set for him by his father. In her daily fight for mere self-preservation, in which joy came by accident, any such thing as principle seemed crazy. Her street—Arab interpretation of the law of life was to snatch at everything that she could reach because there was so much that was beyond her grasp. Her love for Martin was the one passion of her sordid little life, and she would be thankful and contented to carry memories back to her garret which no future rough-and-tumble could ever take away or blot out.
For several days after the first of many dinners with the boys, Tootles played her cards with the utmost care. The foursome became inseparable, bathing, sailing and motoring from morning to night. If there was any truth in the power of propinquity, it must have been discovered then. Howard attached himself to Irene whom he found something more than merry and amusing,—a girl of indomitable courage and optimism, in fact. He liked her immensely. And so Tootles paired off with Martin and had innumerable opportunities of putting forward the challenge of sex. She took them all, but with the most carefully considered subtlety. She descended to nothing obvious, as was to be expected from one of her type, which was not famous for such a thing as self-restraint. She paid great attention to her appearance and kept a close watch on her tongue. She played what she imagined was the part of a little lady, toned down her usual exuberance, her too loud laugh and her characteristic habit of giving quick and smart back answers. But in all her long talks with Martin she hinted ever so lightly that she and he had not been thrown together from opposite poles without a reason. She tried to touch his mind with the thought that it was to become what she said it might the night of the accident,—a romance, a perfectly private little affair of their own, stolen from their particular routine, which could be ended at a moment's notice. She tried to wrap the episode up in a page of poetry which might have been torn from a little book by Francois Villon and give it a wistfulness and charm that she thought would appeal to him. But it was not until one more than usually exquisite night, when the spirit of July lingered in the air and the warmth of the sun still lay among the stars, that she made her first step towards her goal. Howard and Irene had wandered down to the water, and she was left with Martin sitting elfishly among the ferns on the bank below the cottage and above the silver lapping water. Martin, very much alive to the magic spell of the night, with the young sap stirring in his veins, lay at her feet, and she put her hand caressingly on his head and began to talk in a half whisper.
"Boy, oh, boy," she said, "what shall I do without you when this dream comes to an end?"
"Dream again," said Martin.
"Down there in the city, so far away from trees?"
"Why not? We can take our dreams with us wherever we go. But it isn't coming to an end yet."
"How long will it last?"
"Until the sun gets cold," said Martin, catching her mood, "and there's a chill in the air."
She slipped down a little so that he should see the light in her eyes. There was hardly an inch between their lips, and the only sound was the beating of her heart. Youth and July and the scent of honeysuckle.
"I thought I was dead when you helped me out of that wreck," she went on in a quivering voice, and her long-fingered hand on his face. "I think I must be really dead to-night. Surely this is too sweet to be life."
"Dear little Tootles," said Martin softly. She was so close that he could feel the rise and fall of her breasts. "Don't let's talk of death. We're too young."
The sap was stirring in his veins. She was like a fairy, this girl, who ought never to have wandered into a city.
"Martin," she said, "when the sun gets cold and there's a chill in the air will you ever come back to this hour in a dream?"
"Often, Tootles, my dear."
"And will you see the light in my eyes and feel my hands on your face and my lips on your lips?"
She bent forward and put them there and drew back with a shaking sob and scrambled up and fled.
She had seen the others coming, but that was not why she had torn herself away. One flash of sex was enough that night. The next time he must do the kissing.
Eve and July and the scent of honeysuckle!
Breakfast was on the table. To Irene, who came down in her dressing
gown with her hair just bundled up and her face coated with powder,
eight o'clock was an unearthly hour at which to begin the day. In New
York she slept until eleven, read the paper until twelve, cooked and
disposed of a combined breakfast-lunch at one, and if it was a matinee
day, rushed round to the theater, and if it wasn't, killed time until
her work called her in the evening. A boob's life, as she called it,
was a trying business, but the tyranny of the bustling woman with whom
she lodged was such that if breakfast was not eaten at eight o'clock it
was not there to eat. Like an English undergraduate who scrambles out
of bed to attend Chapel simply to avoid a fine, this product of
Broadway theaterdom conformed to the rule of Mrs. Burrell's energetic
house because the good air of Devon gave her a voracious appetite.
Then, too, even if she missed breakfast, she had to pay for it, "so
there you are, old dear."
Tootles, up with the lark as usual, was down among the ducks, giving Farmer Burrell a useful hand. She delighted in doing so. From a country grandfather she had inherited a love of animals and of the early freshness of the morning that found eager expression, now that she had the chance of giving it full rein. Then, too, all that was maternal in her nature warmed at the sight and sound of all those new, soft, yellow things that waddled closely behind the wagging tails of their mothers, and it gave her a sort of sweet comfort to go down on her knees and hold one of these frightened babies against her cheek.
Crying out, "Oo-oo, Tootles," from halfway down the cinder path, Irene, stimulated by the aroma of hot coffee and toast, and eggs and bacon, returned to the living room and fell to humming, "You're here and I'm here."
Tootles joined her immediately, a very different looking little person from the tired-eyed, yawning girl of the city rabbit warren. Health was in her eyes and a little smile at the corners of her mouth. Quick work was made of the meal to the intermittent duck talk of Mrs. Burrell who came in and out of the kitchen through a creaking door,—a normal, noisy soul, to whom life was a succession of laborious days spent between the cooking stove and the washtub with a regular Saturday night, in her best clothes, at the motion-picture theater at Sag Harbor to gape at the abnormality of Theda Bara and scream with uncontrolled mirth at the ingenious antics of Charlie Chaplin. An ancient Ford made possible this weekly dip into these intense excitements.
And then the two girls left the living room with its inevitable rocking chairs and framed texts and old heating stove with a funnel through the wall and went out into the sun.
"Well, dearie," said Irene, sitting on the edge of the stoop, within sound of the squeaking of a many-armed clothes drier, teased by a nice sailing wind. "Us for the yawl to-day."
"You for the yawl," said Tootles. "I'm staying here to help old man Burrell. It's his busy day."
Irene looked up quickly. "What's the idea?"
"Just that,—and something else. I don't want to see Martin till this evening. I moved things last night, and I want him to miss me a bit."
"Ah," said Irene. "I guessed it meant something when you made that quick exit when we moved up. Have you got him, dearie?"
Tootles shot out a queer little sigh and nodded.
"That's fine. He's not like the others, is he? But you've played him great. Oh, I've seen it all, never you fear. Subtle, old dear, very subtle. Shouldn't have had the patience myself. Go in and win. He's worth it." Tootles put her hands over her face and a great sob shook her.
In an instant, Irene had her in her arms. "Dear old Tootles," she said, "it means an awful lot to you, don't it? Don't give way, girlie. You've done mighty well so far. Now follow it up, hot and fast. That boy's got a big heart and he's generous and kind, and he won't forget. I brought you here for this, such a chance as it was, and if I can see you properly fixed up and happy, my old uncle's little bit of velvet will have come in mighty useful, eh? Got a plan for to-night?"
Tootles nodded again. "If I don't win to-night," she said, "it's all over. I shall have to own that he cares for me less than the dust. I shall have to throw up my hands and creep away and hide. Oh, my God, am I such a rotten little freak as all that, Irene? Tell me, go on, tell me."
"Freak? You! For Heaven's sake. Don't the two front rows give nobody but you the supper signal whenever the chorus is on?"
"But they're not like Martin. He's,—well, I dunno just what he is. For one thing there's that butterfly he's married to. He's never said as much as half a word about her to me, but the look that came into his eyes when he saw her the night I told you about,—I'd be run over by a train for it any time. He's a man alright and wants love as bad as I do. I know that, but sometimes, when I watch his face, when neither of us is talking, there's a queer smile on it, like a man who's looking up at somebody, and he sets his jaw and squares his shoulders just as if he had heard a voice telling him to play straight. Many times I've seen it, Irene, and after that I have to begin all over again. I respect him for it, and it makes me love him more and more. I've never had the luck to meet a man like him. The world would be a bit less rotten for the likes of you and me if there were more of him about, I tell you. But it hurts me like the devil because it makes me feel no better than a shoe with the buttons off and the heel all worn down, and I ask myself what's the blooming use. But last night I kissed him, and I saw his eyes glint for the first time and to-night,—to-night, Irene, I'm going to play my last card. Yes, that's what I'm going to do, play the last card in the pack."
"How?" asked Irene eagerly, sympathy and curiosity bubbling to the top.
Tootles shook her head. "It isn't lucky to go talking about it." she said, with a most wistful smile. "You'll know whether it's the heights or the depths for me when you see me in the morning."
"In the morning? Shan't you be..."
"Don't ask. Just wish me luck and go and have a good day with the boys. I shall be waiting for you at the cottage. And now I'm off down to the ducks. Say I've got a headache and don't let 'em come round and try to fetch me. So long, Irene; you've been some pal to me through this and I shall never forget."
Whereupon Tootles went off to lend the unloquacious Burrell a helping hand, and Irene ran up to the bedroom to dress.
From the pompous veranda of the Hosack place Gilbert Palgrave, sick with jealousy, watched Joan swimming out to the barrels with that cursed boy in tow. And he, too, had made up his mind to play his last card that night.
Man and woman and love,—the old, inevitable story.
The personnel of the Hosacks' house party had changed.
Mrs. Noel d'Oyly had led her little husband away to Newport to stay with Mrs. Henry Vanderdyke, where were Beatrix and Pelham Franklin, with a bouncing baby boy, the apple of Mr. Vanderdyke's eye. Enid Ouchterlony had left for Gloucester, Massachusetts, where her aunt, Mrs. Horace Pallant, entertained in an almost royal fashion and was eager to set her match-making arts to work on behalf of her only unmarried niece. Enid had gone to the very edge of well-bred lengths to land Courtney Millet, but Scots ancestry and an incurable habit of talking sensibly and rather well had handicapped her efforts. She had confided to Primrose with a sudden burst of uncharacteristic incaution that she seemed doomed to become an old man's darling. Her last words to the sympathetic Primrose were, "Oh, Prim, Prim, pray that you may never become intellectual. It will kill all your chances." Miss Hosack was, however, perfectly safe.
Milwood, fired by a speech at the Harvard Club by Major General Leonard Wood, had scratched all his pleasant engagements for the summer, and was at Plattsburg learning for the first time, at the camp which will some day occupy an inspiring chapter in the history of the United States, the full meaning of the words "duty" and "discipline." Their places had been taken by Major and Mrs. Barnet Thatcher and dog, Regina Waterhouse and Vincent Barclay, a young English officer invalided out of the Royal Flying Corps after bringing down eight German machines. A cork leg provided him with constant amusement. He had a good deal of property in Canada and was making his way to Toronto by easy stages. A cheery fellow, cut off from all his cherished sports but free from even the suggestion of grousing. Of his own individual stunts, as he called them, he gave no details and made no mention of the fact that he carried the D.S.O. and the Croix de Guerre in his bag. He had met the Hosacks at the American Embassy in London in 1913. He was rather sweet on Primrose.
The fact that Joan was still there was easily accounted for. She liked the place, and her other invitations were not interesting. Hosack didn't want her to go either, but of course that had nothing to do with it, and so far as Mrs. Hosack was concerned, let the bedroom be occupied by some one of her set and she was happy enough. Indeed, it saved her the brain fag of inviting some one else, "always difficult with so many large houses to fill and so few people to go round, my dear."
Harry Oldershaw was such a nice boy that he did just as he liked. If it suited him he could keep his room until the end of the season. The case of Gilbert Palgrave was entirely different. A privileged, spoiled person, who made no effort to be generally agreeable and play up, he was rather by way of falling into the same somewhat difficult category as a minor member of the British Royalty. His presence was an honor although his absence would have been a relief. He chose to prolong his visit indefinitely and there was an end of it.
Every day at Easthampton had, however, been a nightmare to Palgrave. Refusing to take him seriously, Joan had played with him as a cat plays with a mouse. Kind to him one minute she had snubbed him the next. The very instant that he had congratulated himself on making headway his hopes had been scattered to the four winds by some scathing remarks and her disappearance for hours with Harry Oldershaw. She had taken a mischievous delight in leading him on with winning smiles and charming and appealing ways only to burst out laughing at his blazing protestations of love and leave him inarticulate with anger and wounded vanity. "If you want me to love you, make me," she had said. "I shall fight against it tooth and nail, but I give you leave to do your best." He had done his best. With a totally uncharacteristic humbleness, forgetting the whole record of his former easy conquests, and with this young slim thing so painfully in his blood that there were times when he had the greatest difficulty to retain his self-control, he had concentrated upon the challenge that she had flung at him and set himself to teach her how to love with all the thirsty eagerness of a man searching for water. People who had watched him in his too wealthy adolescence and afterwards buying his way through life and achieving triumphs on the strength of his, handsome face and unique position would have stared in incredulous amazement at the sight of this love-sick man in his intense pursuit of a girl who was able to twist him around her little finger and make him follow her about as if he were a green and callow youth. Palgrave, the lady-killer; Palgrave, the egoist; Palgrave, the superlative person, who, with nonchalant impertinence, had picked and chosen. Was it possible?
Everything is possible when a man is whirled off his feet by the Great Emotion. History reeks with the stories of men whose natures were changed, whose careers were blasted, whose honor and loyalty and common sense were sacrificed, whose pride and sense of the fitness of things were utterly and absolutely forgotten under the stress of the sex storm that hits us all and renders us fools or heroes, breaking or making as luck will have it and, in either case, bringing us to the common level of primevality for the love of a woman. Nature, however refined and cultivated the man, or rarified his atmosphere, sees to this. Herself feminine, she has no consideration for persons. To her a man is merely a man, a creature with the same heart and the same senses, working to the same end from the same beginning. Let him struggle and cry "Excelsior!" and fix his eyes upon the heights, let him devote himself to prayer or go grimly on his way with averted eyes, let him become cynic or misogynist, what's it matter? Sooner or later she lays hands upon him and claims him as her child. Man, woman and love. It is the oldest and the newest story in the world, and in spite of the sneers of thin-blooded intellectuals who think that it is clever to speak of love as the particular pastime of the Bolsheviki and the literary parasites who regard themselves as critics and dismiss love as "mere sex stuff," it is the everlasting Story of Everyman.
Young and new and careless, obsessed only with the one idea of having a good time,—never mind who paid for it,—Joan knew nothing of the danger of trifling with the feelings of a high-strung man who had never been denied, a man over-civilized to the point of moral decay. If she had paused in her determined pursuit of amusement and distraction to analyze her true state of mind she might have discovered an angry desire to pay Fate out for the way in which he had made things go with Martin by falling really and truly in love with Gilbert. As it was, she recognized his attraction and in the few serious moments that forced themselves upon her when she was alone she realized that he could give her everything that would make life easy and pleasant. She liked his calm sophistication, she was impressed, being young, by his utter disregard of laws and conventions, and she was flattered at the unmistakable proofs of his passionate devotion. But she would have been surprised to find beneath her careless way of treating herself and everybody round her an unsuspected root of loyalty towards Alice and Martin that put up a hedge between herself and Gilbert. There was also something in the fine basic qualities of her undeveloped character that unconsciously made her resent this spoiled man's assumption of the fact that, married or not, she must sooner or later fall in with his wishes. She was in no mood for self-analysis, however, because that meant the renewal of the pain and deep disappointment as to Martin which was her one object to hide and to forget. So she kept Gilbert in tow, and supplied her days with the excitement for which she craved by leading him on and laughing him off. It is true that once or twice she had caught in his eyes a look of madness that caused her immediately to call the nice boy to her support and make a mental note of the fact that it would be wise never to trust herself quite alone with him, but with a shrug of the shoulders she continued alternately to tease and charm, according to her mood.
She did both these things once again when she came up from the sea to finish the remainder of the morning in the sun. Seeing Gilbert pacing the veranda like a bear with a sore ear, she told Harry Oldershaw to leave her to her sun bath and signalled to Gilbert to come down to the edge of the beach. The others were still in the sea. He joined her with a sort of reluctance, with a look of gall and ire in his eyes that was becoming characteristic. There was all about him the air of a man who had been sleeping badly. His face was white and drawn, and his fingers were never still. He twisted a signet ring round and round at one moment and worried at a button on his coat the next. His nerves seemed to be outside his skin. He stood in front of Joan antagonistically and ran his eyes over her slim young form in its wet bathing suit with grudging admiration. He was too desperately in love to be able to apply to himself any of the small sense of humor that was his in normal times and hide his feelings behind it. He was very far from being the Gilbert Palgrave of the early spring,—the cool, satirical, complete man of the world.
"Well?" he asked.
Joan pretended to be surprised. "Well what, Gilbert dear? I wanted to have a nice little talk before lunch, that's all, and so I ventured to disturb you."
"Ventured to disturb me! You're brighter than usual this morning."
"Ah I? Is that possible? How sweet of you to say so. Do sit down and look a little less like an avenging angel. The sand's quite warm and dry."
He kicked a little shower of it into the air. "I don't want to sit down," he said. "You bore me. I'm fed up with this place and sick to tears of you."
"Sick to tears of me? Why, what in the world have I done?"
"Every conceivable and ingenious thing that I might have expected of you. Loyalty was entirely left out of your character, it appears. Young Oldershaw and the doddering Hosack measure up to your standard. I can't compete."
Joan allowed almost a minute to go by in silence. She felt at the very tip-top of health, having ridden for some hours and gone hot into the sea. To be mischievous was natural enough. This man took himself so seriously, too. She would have been made of different stuff or have acquired a greater knowledge of Palgrave's curious temperament to have been able to resist the temptation to tantalize.
"Aren't you, by any chance, a little on the rude side this morning, Gilbert?"
"If you call the truth rude," he said, "yes."
"I do. Very. The rudest thing I know."
He looked down at her. She was leaning against the narrow wooden back of a beach chair. Her hands were clasped round her white knees. She wore little thin black shoes and no stockings. A tight rubber bathing cap which came low down on her forehead gave her a most attractively boyish look. She might have been a young French Pierrot in a picture by Sem or Van Beers. He almost hated her at that moment, sitting there in all the triumph of youth, untouched by his ardor, unaffected by his passion.
"You needn't worry," he said. "You won't get any more of it from me. So that you may continue to amuse yourself undisturbed I withdraw from the baby hunt. I'm off this afternoon."
He had cried "Wolf!" so many times that Joan didn't believe him.
"I daresay a change of air will do you good," she said. "Where are you going?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "What's it matter? Probably to that cottage of mine to play hermit and scourge myself for having allowed you to mortify me and hold me up to the ridicule of your fulsome court of admirers."
"Yes, that cottage of yours. You've forgotten your promise to drive me over to see it, haven't you?"
Palgrave wheeled round. This was too much of a good thing. "Be careful, or my rudeness will become more truthful than even you will be able to swallow. Twice last week you arranged for me to take you over and both times you turned me down and went off with young Oldershaw."
"What IS happening to my memory?" asked Joan.
"It must be the sea air."
He turned on his heel and walked away.
In an instant she was up and after him, with her hand on his arm.
"I'm awfully sorry, Gilbert," she said. "Do forgive me."
"I'd forgive you if you were sorry, but you're not."
"Yes, I am."
He drew his arm away. "No. You're not really anything; in fact you're not real. You're only a sort of mermaid, half fish, half girl. Nothing comes of knowing you. It's a waste of time. You're not for men. You're for lanky youths with whom you can talk nonsense, and laugh at silly jokes. You belong to the type known in England as the flapper—that weird, paradoxical thing with the appearance of flagrant innocence and the mind of an errand boy. Your unholy form of enjoyment is to put men into false positions and play baby when they lay hands on you. Your hourly delight is to stir passion and then run into a nursery and slam the door. You dangle your sex in the eyes of men and as soon as you've got them crazy, claim chastity and make them ashamed. One of these days you'll drive a man into the sort of mad passion that will make him give you a sound thrashing or seduce you. I don't want to be that man. Oldershaw is too young for you to hurt and Hosack too old, and apparently Martin Gray has chucked you and found some human real person. As for me, I've had enough. Good morning."
And once more, having delivered himself coldly and clearly of this brutally frank indictment he went up the steps to the veranda and into the house.
There was not even the tail of a smile on Joan's face as she watched him go.
Lunch was not quite the usual pleasant, happy-go-lucky affair that day. The gallant little Major, recently married to the fluffy-minded Mrs. Edgar Lee Reeves and her peevish little dog, sat on the right of the overwhelmingly complacent Cornucopia. With the hope of rendering himself more youthful for this belated adventure with the babbling widow he had been treated by a hair specialist. The result was, as usual, farcically pathetic. His nice white hair which had given him a charming benignity and cleanness had been turned into a dead and musty black which made him look unearthly and unreal. His smart and carefully cherished moustache which once had laid upon his upper lip like cotton wool had been treated with the same ink-colored mixture. His clothes, once so perfectly suitable, were now those built for a man of Harry Oldershaw's youthful lines and gave him the appearance of one who had forced himself into a suit made for his son. It was of a very blue flannel with white lines,—always a trying combination. His tie and socks were en suite and his gouty feet were martyrized to this scheme of camouflage by being pressed into a pair of tight brown and white shoes. Having been deprived of his swim for fear that his youthfulness might come off in the water and with the rather cruel badinage of his old friend Hosack still rankling in his soul, the poor little old gentleman was not in the best of tempers. Also he had spent most of the morning exercising Pinkie-Winkie while his wife had been writing letters, and his nerves were distinctly jaded. The pampered animal which had taken almost as solemn a part of his marriage vows as the bride herself had insisted upon making a series of strategic attacks against Mrs. Hosack's large, yellow-eyed, resentful Persian Tom, and his endeavors to read the morning paper and rescue Pinkie from certain wreckage had made life a bitter and a restless business. He was unable to prevent himself from casting his mind back to those good bachelor days of the previous summer when he had taken his swim with the young people, enjoyed his sunbath at the feet of slim and beautiful girls, and looked forward to a stiff cocktail in his bathhouse like a natural and irresponsible old buck.
Gilbert Palgrave faced him, an almost silent man who, to Cornucopia's great and continually voiced distress, allowed her handsomely paid cook's efforts to go by contemptuously untouched. It rendered her own enthusiastic appetite all the more conspicuous.
For two reasons Hosack was far from happy. One was because Mrs. Barnet Thatcher was seated on his right pelting him with brightness and the other because Joan, on his left, looked clean through his head whenever he tried to engage her in sentimental sotto voce.
Gaiety was left to Prim and the wounded Englishman and to young Oldershaw and the towering Regina who continually threw back her head to emit howls of laughter at Barclay's drolleries while she displayed the large red cavern of her mouth and all her wonderful teeth. After every one of these exhausting paroxysms she said, with her characteristic exuberance of sociability, "Isn't he the best thing?"
"Don't you think he's the most fascinating creature?" to any one whose eye she caught,—a nice, big, beautiful, insincere girl who had been taught at her fashionable school that in order to succeed in Society and help things along she must rave about everything in extravagant language and make as much noise as her lungs would permit.
Joan's unusual lack of spirits was noticed by every one and especially, with grim satisfaction, by Gilbert Palgrave. With a return of optimism he told himself that his rudeness expressed so pungently had had its effect. He congratulated himself upon having, at last, been able to show Joan the sort of foolish figure that she cut in his sight and even went so far as to persuade himself that, after all, she must do something more than like him to be so silent and depressed.
His deductions were, however, as hopelessly wrong as usual. His drastic criticism had been like water on a duck's back. It inspired amusement and nothing else. It was his remark that Martin Gray had chucked her and found some human real person that had stuck, and this, with the efficiency of a surgeon's knife, had cut her sham complacence and opened up the old wound from which she had tried so hard to persuade herself that she had recovered. Martin-Martin-what was he doing? Where was he, and where was that girl with the white face and the red lips and the hair that came out of a bottle?
The old overwhelming desire to see Martin again had been unconsciously set blazing by this tactless and provoked man. It was so passionate and irresistible that she could hardly remain at the table until the replete Cornucopia rose, rattling with beads. And when, after what seemed to be an interminable time, this happened and the party adjourned to the shaded veranda to smoke and catch the faint breeze from the sea, she instantly beckoned to Harry and made for the drawing-room.
In this furniture be-clogged room all the windows were open, but the blazing sun of the morning had left it hot and stuffy. A hideous squatting Chinese goddess, whose tongue, by a mechanical appliance, lolled from side to side, appeared to be panting for breath, and the cut flowers in numerous pompous vases hung their limp heads. It was a gorgeously hot day.
Young Oldershaw bounded in, the picture of unrealized health. His tan was almost black, and his teeth and the whites of, his eyes positively gleamed. He might have been a Cuban.
"Didn't I hear you tell Prim last night that you'd had a letter from your cousin?"
"Old Howard? Yes." He was sorry that she had.
"Is Martin with him?" It was an inspiration, an uncanny piece of feminine intuition.
Young Oldershaw was honest. "He's staying with Gray," he said reluctantly.
"Where?"
"At Devon."
"Devon? Isn't that the place we drove to the other day—with a little club and a sort of pier and sailboats gliding about?"
"Yes. They've got one."
Ah, that was why she had had a queer feeling of Martinism while she had sat there having tea, watching the white sails against the sky. On one of those boats bending gracefully to the wind Martin must have been.
"Where are they living?"
"In a cottage that belongs to a pal of Gray's, so far as I could gather."
In a cottage, together! Then the girl whom she had called "Fairy,"—the girl who was human and real, according to Gilbert, couldn't be, surely couldn't be, with them.
"Will you drive me over?" she asked.
"When?"
"Now."
"Why, of course, Joan, if I—must," he said. It somehow seemed to him to be wrong and incredible that she had a husband,—this girl, so free and young and at the very beginning of things, like himself, and whom he had grown into the habit of regarding as his special—hardly property, but certainly companion and playmate.
"If you're not keen about it, Harry, I'll ask Mr. Hosack or a chauffeur. Pray don't let me take you an inch out of your way."
In an instant he was off his stilts and on his marrow bones. "Please don't look like that and say those things. You've only got to tell me what you want and I'll get it. You know that."
"Thank you, Harry, the sooner the better, then," she said, with a smile that lit up her face like a sunbeam. She must see Martin, she must, she must! The old longing had come back. It was like a pain. And being with Howard Oldershaw in that cottage he was alone, and being alone he had got back into his armor. SHE had a clean slate.
"Hurry, hurry," she said.
And when Harry hurried, as he did then, though with a curious misgiving, there were immediate results. Before Joan had chosen a hat, and for once it was difficult to make a choice, she heard his whistle and from the window of her bedroom saw him seated, hatless and sunburnt to the roots of his fair hair, in his low-lying two-seater.
It was, at his pace, a short run eastward over sandy roads, lined with stunted oaks and thick undergrowth of poison ivy, scrub and ferns; characteristic Long Island country with here a group of small untidy shacks and there a farm and outhouses with stone walls and scrap heaps, clothes drying on a line, chickens on the ceaseless hunt and a line of geese prowling aimlessly, easily set acackle,—a primitive end-of-everywhere sort of country just there, with sometimes a mile of half burned trees, whether done for a purpose or by accident it would be difficult to say. At any rate, no one seemed to care. It all had the look of No Man's Land,—unreclaimed and unreclaimable.
For a little while nothing was said. Out of a clear sky the sun beat down upon the car and the brown sand of the narrow road. Many times the boy shot sidelong glances at the silent girl beside him, burning to ask questions about this husband who was never mentioned and who appeared to him to be something of a myth and a mystery. He didn't love Joan, because it had been mutually agreed that he shouldn't. But he held her in the sort of devoted affection which, when it exists between a boy and a girl, is very good and rare and even beautiful and puts them close to the angels.
Presently, catching one of these deeply concerned glances, she put her little shoulder against his shoulder in a sisterly way. "Go on, then, Harry," she said. "Ask me about it. I know you want to know."
And he did. Somehow he felt that he ought to know, that he had the right. After all he had stopped himself from loving her at her urgent request, and their friendship was the best thing that he had ever known. And he began with, "When did you do it?"
"Away back in history," she said, "or so it seems. It's really only a few months."
"A few months! But you can hardly have been with him any time."
"I have never really been with him," she said. She wanted him to know everything. Now that the wound was open again and Martin in possession of her once more, she felt that she must talk about it all to some one, and who could be better than Harry, who was so like a brother?
The boy couldn't believe that she meant what she implied but would have bitten off his tongue rather than put a direct question. "Is he such a rotter?" he asked instead.
"He's not a rotter. He's just Martin—generous, sensitive, dead straight and as reliable as a liner. You and he were made in twin molds."
He flushed with pleasure—but it was like meeting a new Joan, a serious, laughterless Joan, with an odd little quiver in her voice and tears behind her eyes. He felt a new sense of responsibility by being confided in. Older, too. It was queer—this sudden switch from thoughtless gaiety to something which was like illness in a house and which made Joan almost unrecognizable.
He began again. "But then—" and stopped.
"I'm the rotter," she said. "It's because of me that he's in Devon and I'm at Easthampton, that he's sailing with your cousin, and I'm playing the fool with Gilbert. I was a kid, Harry, and thought I might go on being a kid for a bit, and everything has gone wrong and all the blame is mine."
"You're only a kid now," said Harry, trying to find excuses for her. He resented her taking all the blame.
She shook her head. "No, I'm not. I'm only pretending to be. I came to Easthampton to pretend to be. All the time you've known me I've been pretending,—pretending to pretend. I ceased to be a kid before the spring was over,—when I came face to face with something I had driven Martin to do and it broke me. I've been bluffing since then,—bluffing myself that I didn't care and that it wasn't my fault. I might have kept it up a bit longer,—even to the end of the summer, but Gilbert said something this morning that took the lynch pin out of the sham and brought it all about my ears."
And there was another short silence,—if it could be called silence with the whirring of the engine and the boy driving with the throttle out.
"You care for him, then?" he asked finally, looking at her.
She nodded and the tears came.
It was a great shock to him, somehow; he couldn't quite say why. This girl had, as she had said, played the fool with Gilbert,—led the man on and teased him into desperation. He loathed the supercilious fellow and didn't give a hang how much he suffered. Anyway, he was married and ought to have known better. But what hit was the fact that all the while she had loved this Martin of hers,—she, by whom he dated things, who had given him a new point of view about girls and who was his own very best pal. That was not up to her form and somehow hurt.
And she saw that it did and was deeply sorry and ashamed. Was she to have a bad effect on every man she met? "I won't make excuses, Harry," she said. "They're so hopeless. But I want you to know that I sprang into marriage before I'd given a thought to what it all meant, and I took it as a lark, a chapter in my adventure, something that I could easily stop and look at after I'd seen and done everything and was a little breathless. I thought that Martin had gone into it in the same spirit and that for the joke of the thing we were just going to play at keeping house, as we might have played at being Indians away in the woods. It was the easiest way out of a hole I was in and made it possible for me not to creep back to my grandmother and take a whipping like a dog. Do you understand?"
The boy nodded. He had seen her do things and heard her say things on the spur of the moment that were almost as unbelievable.
His sympathy and quick perception were like water to her. And it was indescribably good to be believed without incredulous side-looks and suspicions, half-smiles such as Hosack would have given,—and some of the others who had lost their fineness in the world.
"And when Martin,—who was to me then just what you are, Harry dear,—came up to my room in his own particular natural way, I thought it was hard luck to be taken so literally and not be left alone to find my wings for a little. I had just escaped from a long term of subjection, and I wanted to have the joy of being free—quite absolutely free. Still not thinking, I sent him away and like a brick he went, and I didn't suppose it really mattered to him, any more than it did to me, and honestly if it had mattered it wouldn't have made any difference because I had promised myself to hit it up and work off the marks of my shackles and I was full of the 'Who Cares?' feeling. And then Gilbert Palgrave came along and helped to turn my head. Oh, what a perfect little fool I was, what a precocious, shallow, selfish little fool. And while I was having what I imagined was a good time and seeing life, Martin was wandering about alone, suffering from two things that aren't good for boys,—injustice and ingratitude. And then of course I woke up and saw things straight and knew his value, and when I went to get him and begin all over again he wasn't mine. I'd lost him."
The boy's eyebrows contracted sharply. "What a beastly shame," he said, "I mean for both of you." He included Martin because he liked him now, reading between the lines. He must be an awfully decent chap who had had a pretty bad time.
"Yes," said Joan, "it is, for both of us." And she was grateful to him for such complete understanding,—grateful for Martin, too. They might have been brothers, these boys. "But for you, Easthampton would have been impossible," she added. "I don't mean the house or the place or the sea, which is glorious. I mean from what I have forced myself to do. I came down labelled 'Who Cares?' caring all the time, and just to share my hurt with some one I've made Gilbert care too. He's in an ugly mood. I feel that he'll make me pay some day—in full. But I'm not afraid to be alone now and drop my bluff because I believe Martin is waiting for me and is back in armor again with your cousin. And I believe the old look will come into his eyes when he sees me, and he'll hear me ask him to forgive and we'll go back and play at keeping house in earnest. Harry, I believe that. Little as I deserve it I'm going to have another chance given to me,—every mile we go I feel that! After all, I'm awfully young and I've kept my slate clean and I ought to be given another chance, oughtn't I?"
Harry nodded and presently brought the car to a stop under the shadow of the little clubhouse. Half a dozen other cars were parked there, and a colored chauffeur was sitting on the steps of the back entrance, fast asleep with his chin on his chest. The small but vigorous orchestra was playing a fox-trot on the far veranda, and the sound of shuffling feet resembled that of a man cleaning something with sandpaper. There was an army of flies on the screen door of the kitchen and on several galvanized iron bins stuffed with ginger-ale bottles and orange peel.
"We'll leave the car here," said Harry, "and go and have a look for the cottage. It'll be easy to find. There aren't many of 'em, if I remember right."
Joan took his arm. She had begun to tremble. "Let's go this way first," she said, going the right way by instinct.
"If they're in," said Harry, "and I should guess they are.—there's no wind,—I'll draw old Howard off for an hour or so."
"Yes, please do, Harry."
And they went up the sandy incline, over the thick undergrowth, and the sun blazed down on the shining water, and half a dozen canvas-covered catboats near the little pier. Several people were sitting on it in bathing clothes, and some one was teaching a little girl to swim. The echo of her gurgling laughter and little cries came to them clearly. The sound of music and shuffling feet grew fainter and fainter. Gardiner's Island lay up against the horizon like a long inflated sand bag. There were crickets everywhere. Three or four large butterflies gamboled in the shimmering air.
Away out, heading homewards, Martin's yawl, with Irene lying full stretch on the roof of the cabin, and Howard whistling for a wind, crept through the water, inch by inch.
With the tiller under one arm and a pipe in his mouth, long empty, sat Martin, thinking about Joan. Hearing voices, Tootles looked up from a book that she was trying to read. She had been lying in the hammock on the stoop of Martin's cottage for an hour, waiting for Martin. It had taken her a long time to do her hair and immense pains to satisfy herself that she looked nice,—for Martin. Her plan was cut and dried in her mind, and she had been killing time with all the impatience and throbbing of nerves of one who had brought herself up to a crisis which meant either success and joy, or failure and a drab world. She couldn't bear to go through another day without bringing about a decision. She felt that she had to jog Fate's elbow, whatever was to be the insult. She had discovered from a casual remark of Howard's that Martin, those hot nights, had taken to sleeping on the boat. Her plan, deliberately conceived as a follow-up to what had happened out under the stars the night before, was to swim out to it and wait for him in the cabin. She knew, no one so well, that it was in the nature of a forlorn hope, but she was desperate. She loved him intransitively, to the utter extinction of the little light of modesty which her hand-to-mouth existence had left burning. She wanted love or death, and she was going to put up this last fight for love with all the unscrupulousness of a lovesick woman.
She saw two people coming towards the cottage, a tall, fair, sun-tanned youth, hatless and frank-eyed like Martin, and—
She got up. A cold hand seemed suddenly to have been placed on her heart. Joan,—it was Joan, the girl who, once before, at Martin's house, had sent the earth spinning from under her feet and put Martin suddenly behind barbed wire. What hideous trick was this of Fate's? Why was this moment the one chosen for the appearance of this girl,—his wife? This moment,—her moment?
Fight? With tooth and nail, with all the cunning and ingenuity of a member of the female species to protect what she regarded as her own. She and her plan against the world,—that was what it was. Thank God, Martin was not in sight. She had a free hand.
She had not been seen. A thick honeysuckle growing up the pillar had hidden her. She slipped into the house quickly, her heart beating in her throat. "I'll try this," said Harry. "Wait here." He left Joan within a few feet of the stoop, went up the two steps, and not finding a bell, knocked on the screen door. In less than an instant he saw the girl with bobbed hair come forward. "I'm sorry to trouble you," he said, with a little bow, "I thought Mr. Gray might live here," and turned to go. Obviously it was the wrong house.
Very clearly and distinctly Tootles spoke. "Mr. Gray does live here. I'm Mrs. Gray. Will you leave a message?"
Harry wheeled round. He felt that the bullet which had gone through his back had lodged in Joan's heart. He opened his mouth to speak but no word came. And Tootles spoke again, even more clearly and distinctly. She intended that her voice should travel.
"My husband won't be back for several days," she said, "but I shall be very glad to tell him that you called if you will leave your name."
"It—it doesn't matter," said Harry, stammering. After an irresolute, unhappy pause, he turned to go—
He went straight to Joan. She was standing with her eyes shut and both hands on her heart, as white as a white rose. She looked like a young slim tree that had been struck by lightning.
"Joan," he said, "Joan," and touched her arm. There was no answer.
"Joan," he said, "Joany."
And with a little sob she tottered forward.
He caught her, blazing with anger that she had been so hurt, inarticulate with indignation and a huge sympathy, and with the one strong desire to get her away from that place, picked her up in his arms,—a dead delicious weight,—and carried her down the incline of sand and undergrowth to his car, put her in ever so gently, got in himself, backed the machine out, turned it and drove away.
And Tootles, breathing hard and shaking, stood on the edge of the stoop, and with tears streaming down her face, watched the car become a speck and disappear.
The sun had gone down, and the last of its lingering glory had died before the yawl managed to cajole her way back to her mooring.
Dinner was ready by the time the hungry threesome, laughing and talking, arrived at the cottage. Howard, spoiling for a cocktail, made for the small square dining-room, and Irene, waving her hand to Tootles, cried out, "Cheero, dearie, you missed a speedy trip, I don't think," and took her into the house to tidy up in the one bathroom. Martin drew up short on the edge of the stoop, listened and looked about, holding his breath. It was most odd, but—there was something in the still air that had the sense of Joan in it.
After a moment, during which his very soul asked for a sight of her, he stumped into the living room and rang the bell impatiently.
The imperturbable Judson appeared at once, his eyebrows slightly raised.
"Has any one been here while I've been away?" asked Martin.
"No, sir. No one except Miss Capper, who's been reading on the stoop."
"You're quite sure?"
"You never can be quite sure about anything in this life, sir, but I saw no one."
"Oh," said Martin. "All right, then." But when he was alone, he stood again, listening and looking. There was nothing of Joan in the room. A mixture of honeysuckle and tobacco and the aroma of cooking that had slipped through the swing door into the the kitchen. That was all. And Martin sighed deeply and said to himself "Not yet. I must go on waiting," and went upstairs to his bedroom. He could hear Irene's voice above the rush of water in the bathroom and Howard's, outside, raised in song. In the trees outside his window a bird was piping to its mate, and in the damp places here and there the frogs had already begun to try their voices for their community chorus. It was a peaceful earth, thereabouts falsely peaceful. An acute ear could easily have detected an angry roar of guns that came ever nearer and nearer, and caught the whisper of a Voice calling and calling.
When Martin returned to the wood-lined sitting room with its large brick chimney, its undergraduate chairs and plain oak furniture, its round thick blue and white mats and disorderly bookcase, Tootles was there, a Tootles with a high chin, a half defiant smile, and honeysuckle at her belt.
"Tootles."
"Yes?"
"Have you been alone all the afternoon?"
"Yes." (Fight? Tooth and nail.) "Except for the flies.... Why, boy?"
"Oh, nothing. I thought—I mean, I wondered—but it doesn't matter. By gum, you have made the room look smart, haven't you? Good old Tootles. Even a man's room can be made to look like something when a girl takes an interest in it."
If she had been a dog she would have wagged her tail and crinkled up her nose and jumped up to put her nozzle against his hand. As it was she flushed with pleasure and gave a little laugh. She was a thousandfold repaid for all her pains. But, during the first half of a meal made riotous by the invincible Howard and the animated Irene, Tootles sat very quiet and thoughtful and even a little awed. How could Martin have sensed the fact that she had been there?... Could she,—could she possibly, even with the ever-ready help of nature,—hope to win against such a handicap? She would see. She would see. It was her last card. But during all the rest of the meal she saw the picture of a muscular sun-tanned youth carrying that pretty unconscious thing down the incline to a car, and, all against her will, she was sorry. That girl, pampered as she was, outside the big ring of hard daily effort and sordid struggle as she always had had the luck to be, loved, too. Gee, it was a queer world.
The stoop called them when they left the boxlike dining room. It was still hot and airless. But the mosquitoes were out with voracious appetite and discretion held them to the living room.
Irene flung herself on the bumpy sofa with a cigarette between her lips and a box near to her elbow. "This's the life," she said. "I shall never be able to go back to lil' old Broadway and grease paint and a dog kennel in Chorusland."
"Sufficient for the day," said Howard, loosening his belt. "If a miracle man blew in here right now with a million dollars in each hand and said: 'Howard Guthrie Oldershaw,'—he'd be sure to know about the Guthrie,—'this is all yours if you'll come to the city,' I'd..."
Irene leaned forward with her mouth open and her round eyes as big as headlights. "Well?"
"Take it and come right back."
"You disappoint me, Funny-face. Go to the piano and hit the notes. That's all you're fit for."
It was a baby grand, much out of tune, but Howard, bulging over the stool, made it sound like an orchestra,—a cabaret orchestra, and ran from Grieg to Jerome Kern and back to Gounod, syncopating everything with the gusto and the sense of time that is almost peculiar to a colored professional. Then he suddenly burst into song and sang about a baby in the soft round high baritone of all men who run to fat and with the same quite charming sympathy. A useful, excellent fellow, amazingly unself-conscious and gifted.
Martin was infinitely content to listen and lie back in a deep straw chair with a pipe between his teeth, the memories of good evenings at Yale curling up in his smoke. And Tootles, thinking and thinking, sat, Puck-like, at his feet, with her warm shoulders against his knees. Not in her memory could she delve for pleasant things, not yet. Eh, but some day she might be among the lucky ones, if—if her plan went through—
Howard lit another cigarette at the end of the song, but before he could get his hands on the notes again Irene bounded to her feet and went over to the piano. "Say, can you play 'Love's Epitome'?" she pronounced it "Eppy-tomy."
"Can a duck swim?" asked Howard, resisting a temptation to emit a howl of mirth. She was too good a sort to chaff about her frequent maltreatment of the language.
"Go ahead, then, and I'll give you all a treat." He played the sentimental prelude of this characteristic product of the vaudeville stage, every note of which was plagiarized from a thousand plagiarisms and which imagined that eternity rhymed with serenity and mother with weather. With gestures that could belong to no other school than that of the twice-dailies and the shrill nasal voice that inevitably goes with them, Irene, with the utmost solemnity, went solidly through the whole appalling thing, making the frequent yous "yee-ooo" in the true "vawdville" manner.
To Tootles it was very moving, and she was proud of her friend. Martin almost died of it, and Howard was weak from suppressed laughter. It was the first time that Irene had shown the boys what she could do, and she was delighted at their enthusiastic applause. She would have rendered another of the same sort gladly enough,—she knew dozens of them, if Tootles had not given her a quick look and risen to her feet.
"Us for the downey," she said, and put the palm of her hand on Martin's lips. He kissed it.
"Not yet," said Howard. "It's early."
"Late enough for those who get up at dawn, old dear. Come on, Irene."
And Irene, remembering what her friend had said that morning, played the game loyally, although most reluctant to leave that pleasant atmosphere, and said "Good night." And she was in such good voice and Howard played her accompaniment like a streak. Well, well.
Tootles took her hand away gently, gave Martin a little disturbing smile, put her arm round the robust shoulders of her chum, opened the screen door and was gone.
Howard immediately left the piano. He had only played to keep things merry and bright. "Me for a drink," he said. "And I think I've earned it."
Martin's teeth gleamed as he gave one of his silent laughs.
"How well you know me, old son," he said.
"Of course. But—why?"
"I like Tootles awfully. She's one in a million. But somehow it's—oh, I dunno,—mighty difficult to talk to her."
"Poor little devil," said Howard involuntarily.
"But she's having a real good time—isn't she?"
"Is she?" He helped himself to a mild highball in reluctant deference to his weight.
"I've never seen her look so well," said Martin.
Wondering whether to tell the truth about her state of mind, which his quick sophisticated eyes had very quickly mastered, Howard drank, and decided that he wouldn't. It would only make things uncomfortable for Martin and be of no service to Tootles. If she loved him, poor little soul, and he was not made of the stuff to take advantage of it, well, there it was. He, himself, was different, but then he had no Joan as a silent third. No, he would let things alone. Poor old Tootles.
"Great weather," he said, wrenching the conversation into a harmless generality. "Are you sleeping on the yawl to-night?"
"Yes," replied Martin. "It's wonderful on the water. So still. I can hear the stars whisper."
"Most of the stars I know get precious noisy at night," said Howard, characteristically unable to let such a chance go by. Then he grew suddenly grave and sat down. "Martin, I'm getting frightfully fed up with messing about in town. I'm going to turn a mental and physical somersault and get a bit of self-respect."
"Oh? How's that, old man."
"It's this damn war, I think. I've been reading a book in bed by a man called Philip Gibbs. Martin, I'm going to Plattsburg this August to see if they can make something of me."
Martin got up. "I'm with you," he said. "If ever we get into this business I'm going to be among the first bunch to go. So we may as well know something. Well, how about turning in now? There'll be a wind to-morrow. Hear the trees?" He filled his pocket with cigarettes and slung a white sweater over his shoulder.
"All right," said Howard. "I shall read down here a bit. I won't forget to turn out and lock up." He had forgotten one night and Judson had reported him.
"Good night, old son."
"Good night, old man."
He was not given much to reading, but when Martin left the cottage and stood out in the liquid silver of the moon under the vast dome which dazzled with stars, and he caught the flash of fireflies among the undergrowth that were like the lanterns of the fairies a line came into his mind that he liked and repeated several times, rather whimsically pleased with himself for having found it at exactly the right moment. It was "the witching hour of night."
He remained on top of the incline for a little while, moved to that spirit of the realization of God which touches the souls of sensitive men when they are awed by the wonder and the beauty of the earth. He stood quite still, disembodied for the moment, uplifted, stirred, with all the scents and all the whisperings about him, humble, childlike, able, in that brief flight of ecstasy, to understand the language of another world.
And then the stillness was suddenly cut by a scream of vacuous laughter, probably that of an exuberant Irish maid-servant, to whom silences are made to break, carrying on, most likely, a rough flirtation with a chauffeur.
It brought Martin back to earth like the stick of a rocket. But he didn't go down immediately to the water. He sat there and nursed his knees and began to think. Whether it was Howard's unexpected talk of Plattsburg and of being made something of or not he didn't know. What he did know was that he was suddenly filled with a sort of fright.... "Good God," he said to himself, "time's rushing away, and I'm nearly twenty-six. I'm as old as some men who have done things and made things and are planted on their feet. What have I done? What am I fit to do? Nearly twenty-six and I'm still playing games like a schoolboy!... What's my father saying? 'We count it death to falter not to die' ... I've been faltering—and before I know anything about it I shall be thirty—half-time.... This can't go on. This waiting for Joan is faltering. If she's not coming to me I must go to her. If it's not coming right it must end and I must get mended and begin again. I can't stand in father's shoes with all he worked to make in my hands like ripe plums. It isn't fair, or straight. I must push up a rung and carry things on for him. Could I look him in the face having slacked? My God, I wish I'd watched the time rush by! I'm nearly twenty-six ... Joan—to-morrow. That's the thing to do." He got up and strode quickly down to the water. "If she's going to be my wife, that's a good step on. And she can help me like no one but my father. And then I'll make something of myself. If not ... if not,—no faltering, Gray,—then I'll do it alone for both their sakes."
He chucked his sweater into the dingey, shoved it off the beach and sprang in and rowed strongly towards the yawl. Somehow he felt broader of back and harder of muscle for this summing up of things, this audit of his account. He was nearly twenty-six and nothing was done. That was the report he had to make to his conscience, that was what he had to say to the man who smiled down upon him from his place in the New York house.... Good Lord, it was about time that he pulled himself together.
The yawl was lying alone, aloof from the other small craft anchored near the pier. Her mast seemed taller and her lines more graceful silhouetted against the sky, silvered by the moon. It was indeed the witching hour of night.
He got aboard and tied up the dingey, cast a look round to see that everything was shipshape, took in a deep breath and went into the cabin. He was not tired and never felt less like sleep. His brain was clear as though a fog had risen from it, and energy beat in him like a running engine. He would light the lamp, get into his pajamas and think about to-morrow and Joan. He was mighty glad to have come to a decision.
Stooping, he lit the lamp, turned and gave a gasp of surprise.
There, curled up like a water sprite on the unmade bunk lay Tootles in bathing clothes, holding a rubber cap in her hand, her head, with its golden bobbed hair, dented into a cushion.
For a moment she pretended to be asleep, but anxiety to see how Martin was looking was too much for her. Also her clothes were wet and not very comfortable. She opened her eyes and sat up.
"My dear Tootles!" said Martin, "what's the idea? You said you were going home to bed." She would rather that he had been angry than amused. "It was the night," she said, "and something in the air. I just had to bathe and swam out here. I didn't think you'd be coming yet. I suppose you think I'm bug-house."
"No, I don't. If I hadn't taken my bathing suit to the cottage to be mended I'd have a dip myself. Cigarette?" He held one out.
But she shook her head. How frightfully natural and brotherly this boy was, she thought. Was her last desperate card to be as useless as all the rest of the pack? How could it be! They might as well be on a desert island out there on the water and she the only woman on it.
"Feel a bit chilly? You'd better put on this sweater."
She took it from him but laid it aside. "No. The air's too warm," she said. "Oh, ho, I'm so sleepy," and she stretched herself out again with her hands under her head.
"I'm not," said Martin. "I'm tremendously awake. Let's talk if you're not in a hurry to get back."
"I'm very happy here," she answered. "But must we have that lamp? It glares and makes the cabin hot."
"The moon's better than all the lamps," said Martin, and put it out. He sat on his bunk and the gleam of his cigarette came and went. It was like a big firefly in the half dark cabin. "To-morrow," he said to himself, with a tingle running through his blood, "to-morrow—and Joan."
Tootles waited for him to speak. She might as well have been miles away for all that she affected him. He seemed to have forgotten that she was alive.
He had. And there was a long silence.
"To-morrow,—and Joan. That's it. I'll go over to Easthampton and take her away from that house and talk to her. This time I'll break everything down and tell her what she means to me. I've never told her that."
"He doesn't care," thought Tootles. "I'm no more than an old shoe to him."
"If I'd told her it might have made a difference. Even if she had laughed at me she would have had something to catch hold of if she wanted it. By Jove, I wish I'd had the pluck to tell her."
"He even looks at me and doesn't see me," she went on thinking, her hopes withering like cut flowers, her eagerness petering out and a great humiliation creeping over her. "What's the matter with me? Some people think I'm pretty. Irene does ... and last night, when I kissed him there was an answer.... Has that girl come between us again?"
And so they went on, these two, divided by a thousand miles, each absorbed in individual thought, and there was a long queer silence.
But she was there to fight, and having learned one side of men during her sordid pilgrimage and having an ally in Nature, she got up and sat down on the bunk at his side, snuggling close.
"You are cold, Tootles," he said, and put his arm round her.
And hope revived, like a dying fire licked by a sudden breeze, and she put her bobbed head on his broad shoulder.
But he was away again, miles and miles away, thinking back, unfolding all the moments of his first companionship with Joan and looking at them wistfully to try and find some tenderness; thinking forward, with the picture of Joan's face before him and wondering what would come into her eyes when he laid his heart bare for her gaze.
Waiting and waiting, on the steady rise and fall of his chest,—poor little starved Tootles, poor little devil,—tears began to gather, tears as hot as blood, and at last they broke and burst in an awful torrent, and she flung herself face down upon the other bunk, crying incoherently to God to let her die.
And once more the boy's spirit, wandering high in pure air, fell like the stick of a rocket, and he sprang up and bent over the pitiful little form,—not understanding because Joan held his heart and kept it clean.
"Tootles," he cried out. "Dear old Tootles. What is it? What's happened?"
But there was only brotherliness in his kind touch, only the same solicitude that he had shown her all along. Nothing else. Not a thing. And she knew it, at last, definitely. This boy was too different, too much the other girl's—curse her for having all the luck.
For an instant, for one final desperate instant, she was urged to try again, to fling aside control and restraint and with her trembling body pressed close and her eager arms clasped about his neck, pour out her love and make a passionate stammering plea for something,—just something to put into her memory, her empty loveless memory,—but suddenly, like the gleam of a lamp in a tunnel, her pride lit up, the little streak of pride which had taken her unprofaned through all her sordid life, and she sat up, choked back her sobs, and dried her face with the skirt of her bathing dress.
"Don't mind me," she said. "It's the night or something. It got on my nerves, I suppose, like—like the throb of an organ. I dunno. I'm all right now, anyway." And she stood in front of him bravely, with her chin up, but her heart breaking, and her attempt to make a laugh must surely have been entered in the book of human courage.
But before Martin could say anything, she slipped into the cockpit, balanced herself on the ledge of the cabin house, said "Good night, old dear," and waved her hand, dived into the silver water and swam strongly towards the beach.
It began to dawn upon Hosack that Joan had slipped away with Harry Oldershaw from the fact that Palgrave first became restless and irritable, then had a short sharp spat with Barclay about the length of the line on the Western front that was held by the British and finally got up and went into the house and almost immediately prowled out alone for a sulky walk along the beach.
Chortling as he watched him, although annoyed that he, himself, was not going to have an opportunity of saying soft things to Joan for some hours, Hosack made himself comfortable, lit another cigar and pondered sleepily about what he called "the infatuation of Gilbert the precious."
"I can sympathize with the feller's being gone on the girl," he said to himself, undisturbed by Regina's frequent bursts of loud laughter at young Barclay's quiet but persistent banter, "but dammit, why make a conspicuous ass of himself? Why make the whole blessed house party, including his hostess, pay for his being turned down in favor of young Harry? Bad form, I call it. Any one would imagine that he was engaged to be married to Joan and therefore had some right to a monopoly by the way he goes on, snarling at everybody and showing the whites of his eyes like a jealous collie. Everybody's talking, of course, and making jokes about him, especially as it's perfectly obvious that the harder he hunts her the more she dodges him.... Curious chap, Gilbert. He goes through life like the ewe lamb of an over-indulgent mother and when he takes a fancy to a thing he can't conceive why everybody doesn't rush to give it him, whatever the cost or sacrifice.... If young Harry hadn't been here to keep her amused and on the move I wonder if Joan would have been a bit kinder to our friend G. P.? She's been in a weird mood, as perverse as April. I don't mind her treating me as if I was a doddering old gentleman so long as she keeps Gilbert off.... A charming, pretty, heart-turning thing. I'd give something to know the real reason why that husband of hers lets her run loose this way. And where's her mother, and why don't those old people step in?—such a child as she is. Well, it's a pretty striking commentary on the way our young people are brought up, there's no doubt about it. If she was my daughter, now—but I suppose she'd tell me to go and hang myself if I tried to butt in. Divorce and a general mess-up-the usual end, I take it."
He shook his head, and his ash dropped all over his clothes and he began to nod. He would have given a great deal to put his feet on a chair and a handkerchief over his face and sink into a blissful nap. The young people had gone off somewhere, and there were only his wife, the Major, and the bride on the veranda. And, after all, why shouldn't he? Cornucopia could always be relied upon to play up—her conversational well was inexhaustible, and as for Mrs. Thatcher—nothing natural ever stopped the incessant wagging of her tongue.
But it was not to be. He heard a new voice, the squeak of a cane chair suddenly pushed back, looked up to see the Major in an attitude of false delight and out came Mrs. Cooper Jekyll followed,—as he inwardly exclaimed,—"by the gentle Alice Palgrave, by all that's complicating! Well, I'm jiggered."
"Well," cried Cornucopia, extending her ample hand. "This IS a surprise."
"Yes, I intended it to be," said Mrs. Jekyll, more than ever Southampton in her plague veil and single eyeglass, "just to break the aloofness of your beach life."
"And dear Alice, too,—neater than ever. How very nice to see you, my dear, and how's your poor mother?"
Her little hand disappearing between Mrs. Hosack's two podgy members like the contents of a club sandwich, Alice allowed herself to be kissed on both cheeks, murmured an appropriate response, greeted the Thatchers, waved to Hosack who came forward as quickly as he could with pins and needles in one leg and threw a searching glance about for Gilbert.
Every one caught it and gathered instinctively that Mrs. Jekyll had been making mischief. She had certainly succeeded in her desire to break the aloofness. The presence of Alice at that moment, with Gilbert behaving like a madman, was calculated to set every imagination jumping.
"Um, this won't make G. P. any better tempered," thought Hosack, not without a certain sense of glee.
Mrs. Jekyll disclosed her nose and mouth, which, it seemed, were both there and in perfect condition. "I was in town yesterday interviewing butlers,—that Swiss I told you about refused to be glared at by Edmond and left us on the verge of a dinner party, summing us all up in a burst of pure German,—and there was Alice having a lonely lunch at the Ritz, just back from her mother's convalescent chair. I persuaded her to come to me for a few days and what more natural than that she should want to see what this wonderful air has done for Gilbert—who has evidently become one of the permanent decorative objects of your beautiful house."
"Cat," thought Mrs. Thatcher.
"And also for the pleasure of seeing so many old friends," said Alice. "What a gorgeous stretch of sea!" She bent forward and whispered congratulations to the Major's bride. Her quiet courage in the face of what she knew perfectly well was a universal knowledge of the true state of Gilbert's infatuation was good to watch. With his one brief cold letter in her pocket and Mrs. Jekyll's innuendoes,—"all in the friendliest spirit,"—raking her heart, her self-control deserved all the admiration that it won from the members of the house party. To think that Joan, her friend and schoolfellow in whose loyalty she had had implicit faith should be the one to take Gilbert away from her.
With shrewd eyes, long accustomed to look below the surface of the thin veneer of civilization that lay upon his not very numerous set, Hosack observed and listened for the next half an hour, expecting at any moment to see Joan burst upon the group or Gilbert make his appearance, sour, immaculate and with raised eyebrows. He studied Mrs. Jekyll, with her brilliantly made-up face, her apparent lack of guile, and her ever-watchful eye. He paid tribute to his copious wife for her determined babble of generalities, well-knowing that she was bursting with suppressed excitement under the knowledge that Alice had come to try and patch up a lost cause. He chuckled at the feline manners of the little lady whom they had all known so long as Mrs. Edgar Lee Reeves, her purring voice, her frequent over-emphasis of exuberant adjectives, her accidental choice of the sort of verb that had the effect of smashed crockery, her receptiveness to the underlying drama of the situation and the cunning with which she managed to hide her anxiety to be "on" in the scene which must inevitably come. He examined his old friend, Thatcher, under whose perfect drawing-room manners, felicitous quips and ready laughter there was an almost feminine curiosity as to scandal and the inadvertent display of the family wash. And, having a certain amount of humor, he even turned an introspective eye inwards and owned up to more than a little excitement as to what was going to happen when Gilbert realized that Mrs. Jekyll had brought his wife over to rescue him. Conceive Gilbert being rescued! "All of us as near the primeval as most of us are to lunacy," he told himself. "Education, wealth, leisure and all the shibboleths of caste and culture,—how easily they crack and gape before a touch of nature. Brooks Brothers and Lucile do their derndest to disguise us, but we're still Adam and Eve in a Turkish bath.... Somehow I feel,—I can't quite say why,—that this comedy of youth in which the elements of tragedy have been dragged in by Gilbert, is coming to a head, and unless things run off at a sudden tangent I don't see how the curtain can fall on a happy ending for Joan and the husband who never shows himself and the gentle Alice. Spring has its storms and youth its penalties. I'm beginning to believe that safety is only to be found in the dull harbor of middle-age, curse it, and only then with a good stout anchor."
It was at the exact moment that Joan and Harry went together up the incline towards Martin's cottage at Devon, eyed by Tootles through the screen door, that Gilbert came back to the veranda and drew up short at the sight of his wife.
It was when Gilbert, after a most affectionate greeting and ten minutes of easy small talk, led her away from the disappointed group, that Alice made her first mistake.
"You don't look at all well, Gilbert," she said anxiously.
The very fact that he knew himself to be not at all well made him hate to be told so. An irritable line ran across his forehead. "Oh, yes, I'm well," he said, "never better. Come along to the summer house and let's put a dune between us and those vultures."
He led her down a flight of stone steps and over a stretch of undulating dry sand to the place where Hosack invariably read the morning paper and to which his servants led their village beaux when the moon was up, there to give far too faithful imitations of the hyena. And there he sat her down and stood in front of her, enigmatically, wondering how much she knew. "If it comes to that," he said, "you look far from well yourself, Alice."
And she turned her pretty, prim face up to him with a sudden trembling of the lips. "What do you expect," she asked, quite simply, "when I've only had one short letter from you all the time I've been away."
"I never write letters," he said. "You know that. How's your mother?"
"But I wrote every day, and if you read them you'd know."
He shifted one shoulder. These gentle creatures could be horribly disconcerting and direct. As a matter of fact he had failed to open more than two of the collection. They were too full of the vibration of a love that had never stirred him. "Yes, I'm glad she's better. I'm afraid you've been rather bored. Illness is always boring."
"I can only have one mother," said Alice.
Palgrave felt the need of a cigarette. Alice, admirable as she was, had a fatal habit, he thought, of uttering bromides.
And she instantly regretted the remark. She knew that way of his of snapping his cigarette case. Was that heavily be-flowered church a dream and that great house in New York only part of a mirage? He seemed to be the husband of some other girl, barely able to tolerate this interruption. She had come determined to get the truth, however terrible it might be. But it was very difficult, and he was obviously not going to help her, and now that she saw him again, curiously worn and nervous and petulant, she dreaded to ask for facts under which her love was to be laid in waste.
"No wonder you like this place," she said, beating about the bush.
"I don't. I loathe it. The everlasting drumming of the sea puts me on edge. It's as bad as living within sound of the elevated railway. And at night the frogs on the land side of the house add to the racket and make a row like a factory in full blast. I'd rather be condemned to a hospital for incurables than live on a dune." He said all this with the sort of hysteria that she had never noticed in him before. He was indeed far from well. Hardly, in fact, recognizable. The suave, imperturbable Gilbert, with the quiet air of patronage and the cool irony of the polished man of the world,—what had become of him? Was it possible that Joan had resisted him? She couldn't believe such a thing.
"Then why have you stayed so long?" she asked, with this new point of view stirring hope.
"There was nowhere else to go to," he answered, refusing to meet her eyes.
This was too absurd to let pass. "But nothing has happened to the house at Newport, and the yacht's been lying in the East River since the first of June and you said in your only letter that the two Japanese servants have been at the cottage near Devon for weeks!"
"I'm sick of Newport with all its tuft-hunting women, and the yacht doesn't call me. As for the cottage, I'm going there to-morrow, possibly to-night."
Alice got up quickly and stood in front of him. There was a spot of color on both her cheeks, and her hands were clasped together. "Gilbert, let's both go there. Let's get away from all these people for a time. I won't ask you any questions or try and pry into what's happened to you. I'll be very quiet and help you to find yourself again."
She had made another mistake. His sensitiveness gave him as many quills as a porcupine. "Find myself," he said, quoting her unfortunate words with sarcasm. "What on earth do you mean by that, my good child?"
She forced back her rising tears. Had she utterly lost her rights as a wife? He was speaking to her in the tone that a man uses to an interfering sister. "What's to become of me?" she asked.
"Newport, of course. Why not? Fill the house up. I give you a free hand."
"And will you join me there, Gilbert?"
"No. I'm not in the mood."
He turned on his heel and went to the other side of the summer house, and flicked his half-smoked cigarette into the scrub below. A frog took a leap. When he spoke again it was with his back to her. "Don't you think you'd better rejoin Mrs. Jekyll? She may be impatient to get off."
But Alice took her courage in both hands. If this was to be the end she must know it. Uncertainty was not to be endured any longer. All her sleepless nights and fluctuations of hope and despair had marked her, perhaps for life. Hers was not the easily blown away infatuation of a debutante, the mere summer love of a young girl. It was the steady and devoted love of a wife, ready to make sacrifices, to forgive inconstancies, to make allowances for temporary aberrations and, when necessary, to nurse back to sanity, without one word or look of reproach, the husband who had slipped into delinquency. Not only her future and his were at stake, but there were the children for whom she prayed. They must be considered.
And so, holding back her emotion, she followed him across the pompous summer house in which, with a shudder, she recognized a horrible resemblance to a mausoleum, and laid her little hand upon his arm.
"Gilbert," she said, "tell me the truth. Be frank with me. Let me help you, dear."
Poor little wife. For the third time she had said the wrong thing. "Help"—the word angered him. Did she imagine that he was a callow youth crossed in love?
He drew his arm away sharply. There was something too domestic in all this to be borne with patience. Humiliating, also, he had to confess.
"When did I ever give you the right to delve into my private affairs?" he asked, with amazing cruelty. "We're married,—isn't that enough? I've given you everything I have except my independence. You can't ask for more than that,—from me."
He added "from me" because the expression of pain on her pretty face made him out to be a brute, and he was not that. He tried to hedge by the use of those two small words and put it to her, without explanation, that he was different from most men,—more careless and callous to the old-fashioned vows of marriage, if she liked, but different. That might be due to character or upbringing or the times to which he belonged. He wasn't going to argue about it. The fact remained. "I'll take you back," he added.
But she blocked the way. "I only want your love," she said. "If you've taken that away from me, nothing else counts."
He gave a sort of groan. Her persistence was appalling, her courage an indescribable reproach. For a moment he remained silent, with a drawn face and twitching fingers, strangely white and wasted, like a man who had been through an illness,—a caricature of the once easy-going Gilbert Palgrave, the captain of his fate and the master of his soul.
"All right then," he said, "if you must know, you shall, but do me the credit to remember that I did my best to leave things vague and blurred." He took her by the elbow and put her into a chair. With a touch of his old thoughtfulness and rather studied politeness he chose one that was untouched by the sun that came low over the dune. Then he sat down and bent forward and looked her full in the eyes.
"This is going to hurt you," he said, "but you've asked for the truth, and as everything seems to be coming to a head, you'd better have it, naked and undisguised. In any case, you're one of the women who always gets hurt and always thrives on it. You're too earnest and sincere to be able to apply eye-wash to the damn thing we call life, aren't you?"
"Yes, Gilbert," she answered, with the look of one who had been placed in front of a firing squad, without a bandage over her eyes.
There was a brief pause, filled by what he had called the everlasting drumming of the sea.
"One night, in Paris, when I was towering on the false confidence of twenty-one,"—curious how, even at that moment, he spoke with a certain self-consciousness,—"I came out of the Moulin Rouge alone and walked back to the Maurice. It was the first time I'd ever been on the other side, and I was doing it all in the usual way of the precocious undergraduate. But the 'gay Paree' stuff that was specially manufactured to catch the superfluous francs of the pornographic tourist and isn't really in the least French, bored me, almost at once. And that night, going slowly to the hotel, sickened by painted women, chypre and raw champagne I turned a mental somersault and built up a picture of what I hoped I should find in life. It contained a woman, of course—a girl, very young, the very spirit of spring, whose laugh would turn my heart and who, like an elusive wood nymph, would lead me panting and hungry through a maze of trees. I called it the Great Emotion and from that night on I tried to find the original of that boyish picture, looking everywhere with no success. At twenty-nine, coming out of what seemed to be the glamor of the impossible, I married you to oblige my mother,—you asked for this,—and imagined that I had settled into a conventional rut. Do you want me to go on with it?"
"Please, Gilbert," said Alice.
He shrugged his shoulders as much as to say, "Well, if you enjoy the Christian martyr business it's entirely your lookout."
But he dropped his characteristic habit of phrase making and became more jerky and real. "I respected you, Alice," he went on. "I didn't love you but I hoped I might, and I played the game. I liked to see you in my house. You fitted in and made it more of a home than that barrack had ever been. I began to collect prints and first editions, adjust myself to respectability and even to look forward with pride to a young Gilbert."
Alice gave a little cry and put her hand up to her breast. But he was too much obsessed by his own pain to notice hers.
"And then,—it's always the way,—I saw the girl. Yes, by God, I saw the girl, and the Great Emotion blew me out of domestic content and the pleasant sense of responsibility and turned me into the panting hungry youth that I had always wanted to be." He stopped and got up and walked up and down that mausoleum, with his eyes burning and the color back in his face.
"And the girl is Joan?" asked Alice in a voice that had an oddly sharp note for once.
"Yes," he said. "Joan.... She's done it," he added, no longer choosing his words. "She's got me. She's in my blood. I'm insane about her. I follow her like a dog, leaping up at a kind word, slinking away with my tail between my legs when she orders me to heel. My God, it's hell! I'm as near madness as a poor devil of a dope fiend out of reach of his joy. I wish I'd never seen her. She's made me loathe myself. She's put me through every stage of humiliation. I'd rather be dead than endure this craving that's worse than a disease. You were right when you said that I'm ill. I am ill. I'm horribly ill. I'm ... I'm..."
He stammered and his voice broke, and he covered his face with his hands.
And instantly, with the maternal spirit that goes with all true womanly love ablaze in her heart, Alice went to him and put her arms about his neck and drew his head down on her shoulder.
And he left it there, with tears.
A little later they sat down again side by side, holding hands.
As Hosack had told himself, and Gilbert had just said, things seemed to be coming to a head. At that moment Tootles was strung up to play her last card, Joan was being driven back by Harry from the cottage of "Mrs. Gray" and Martin, becalmed on the water, with an empty pipe between his teeth, was thinking about Joan.
Palgrave was comforted. The making of his confession was like having an abscess lanced. In his weakness, in his complete abandonment of affectation, he had never been so much of a man.
There was not to Alice, who had vision and sympathy, anything either strange or perverse in the fact that Gilbert had told his story and was not ashamed. Love had been and would remain the one big thing in her own life, the only thing that mattered, and so she could understand, even as she suffered, what this Great Emotion meant to Gilbert. She adopted his words in thinking it all over. They appealed to her as being exactly right.
She too was comforted, because she saw a chance that Gilbert, with the aid of the utmost tact and the most tender affection, might be drawn back to her and mended. She almost used Hosack's caustic expression "rescued." The word came into her mind but was instantly discarded because it was obvious that Joan, however impishly she had played with Gilbert, was unaffected. Angry as it made her to know that any girl could see in Gilbert merely a man with whom to fool she was supremely thankful that the complication was not as tragic as it might have been. So long as Joan held out, the ruin of her marriage was incomplete. Hope, therefore, gleamed like a distant light. Gilbert had gone back to youth. It seemed to her that she had better treat him as though he were very young and hurt.
"Dearest," she said, "I'm going to take you away."
"Are you, Alice?"
"Yes. We will go on the yacht, and you shall read and sleep and get your strength back."
He gave a queer laugh. "You talk like a mother," he said, with a catch in his voice.
She went forward and kissed him passionately.
"I love you like a mother as well as a wife, my man," she whispered. "Never forget that."
"You're,—you're a good woman, Alice; I'm not worthy of you, my dear."
It pained her exquisitely to see him so humble.... Wait until she met Joan. She should be made to pay the price for this! "Who cares?" had been her cry. How many others had she made to care?
"I'll go back to Mrs. Jekyll now," she went on, almost afraid that things were running too well to be true, "and stay at Southampton to-night. To-morrow I'll return to New York and have everything packed and ready by the time you join me there. And I'll send a telegram to Captain Stewart to expect us on Friday. Then we'll go to sea and be alone and get refreshment from the wide spaces and the clean air."
"Just as you say," he said, patting her hand. He was terribly like a boy who had slipped and fallen.
Then she got up, nearer to a breakdown than ever before. It was such a queer reversal of their old positions. And in order that he shouldn't rise she put her hands on his shoulders and stood close to him so that his head was against her breast.
"God bless you, dearest boy," she said softly. "Trust in me. Give all your troubles to me. I'm your wife, and I need them. They belong to me. They're mine. I took them all over when you gave me my ring." She lifted his face that was worn as from a consuming fire and kissed his unresponsive lips. "Stay here," she added, "and I'll go back. To-morrow then, in New York."
He echoed her. "To-morrow then, in New York," and held her hand against his forehead.
Just once she looked back, saw him bent double and stopped. A prophetic feeling that she was never to hear his voice again seized her in a cold grip,—but she shook it off and put a smile on her face with which to stand before the scandal-mongers.
And there stood Joan, looking as though she had seen a ghost.
Alice marched up to her, blazing with anger and indignation. She was not, at that moment, the gentle Alice, as everybody called her, Alice-sit-by-the-fire, equable and pacific, believing the best of people. She was the mother-woman eager to revenge the hurt that had been done to one who had all her love.
"Ah," she said, "you're just in time for me to tell you what I think of you."
"Whatever you may think of me," replied Joan, "is nothing to what I think of myself."
But Alice was not to be diverted by that characteristic way of evading hard words, as she thought it. She had seen Joan dodge the issues like that before, many times, at school. They were still screened from the veranda by a scrub-supported dune. She could let herself go.
"You're a thief," she blurted out, trembling and out of all control for once. "Not a full-blown thief because you don't steal to keep. But a kleptomaniac who can't resist laying hands on other women's men. You ought not to be allowed about loose. You're a danger, a trap. You have no respect for yourself and none for friendship. Loyalty? You don't know the meaning of the word. You're not to be trusted out of sight. I despise you and never want to see you again."
Could this be Alice,—this little fury, white and tense, with clenched hands and glinting eyes, animal-like in her fierce protectiveness?
Joan looked at her in amazement. Hadn't she already been hit hard enough? But before she could speak Alice was in breath again. "You can't answer me back,—even you, clever as you are. You've nothing to say. That night at my house, when we had it out before, you said that you were not interested in Gilbert. If that wasn't a cold-blooded lie what was it? Your interest has been so great that you've never let him alone since. You may not have called him deliberately, but when he came you flaunted your sex in his face and teased him just to see him suffer. You were flattered, of course, and your vanity swelled to see him dogging your heels. There's a pretty expressive word for you and your type, and you know it as well as I do. Let me pass, please."
Joan moved off the narrow board-walk without a word.
And Alice passed, but piqued by this unexpected silence, turned and went for her once most intimate friend again. If she was callous and still in her "Who Cares?" mood words should be said that could never be forgotten.
"I am Mrs. Gray. My husband won't be back for several days," These were the only words that rang in Joan's ears now. Alice might as well have been talking to a stone.
"Things are coming to a head," Alice went on, unconsciously using Gilbert's expression and Hosack's.
"And all the seeds that you've carelessly sown have grown into great rank weeds. Ask Mrs. Jekyll what you've driven Martin into doing if you're curious to know. She can tell you. Many people have seen. But if you still don't care, don't trouble, because it's too late. Go a few yards down there and look at that man bent double in the summer house. If you do that and can still cry out 'Who Cares?' go on to the hour when everything will combine to make you care. It can't be far away."
"I'm Mrs. Gray. My husband won't be back for several days." Like the song of death the refrain of that line rose above the sound of the sea and of Alice's voice. Joan could listen to nothing else.
And Alice caught the wounded look in the eyes of the girl in whom she had once had faith and was recompensed. And having said all that she had had in her mind and more than she had meant to say, she turned on her heel, forced herself back into control and went smiling towards the group on the veranda. And there Joan remained standing looking as though she had seen a ghost,—the ghost of happiness.
"Mrs. Gray,—and her husband Martin.... But what have I got to say,—I, who refused to be his wife? It only seemed half true when I found them together before, although that was bad enough. But this time, now that my love for Martin has broken through all those days of pretending to pretend and that girl is openly in that cottage, nothing could be truer. It isn't Martin who has taken off his armor. It's I who have cut the straps and made it fall from his shoulders Oh, my God, if only I hadn't wanted to finish being a kid."
She moved away, at last, from the place where Alice had left her and without looking to the right or left walked slowly down to the edge of the sea. Vaguely, as though it was something that had happened in a former life, she remembered the angry but neat figure of Alice and a few of the fierce words that had got through to her. "Rank weeds ... driven Martin ... too late.... Who Cares?" Only these had stuck. But why should Alice have said them? It was all unnecessary. She knew them. She had said them all on the way back from Devon, all and many more, seated beside that nice boy, Harry, in his car.... She had died a few feet from the stoop of the cottage, in the scent of honeysuckle and Come back to something that wasn't life to be tortured with regrets. All the way back she had said things to herself that Alice, angry and bitter as she had seemed to be, never could have invented. But they too were unnecessary. Saying things now was of no more use than throwing stones into the sea at any time. Rank weeds ... driven Martin ... too late ... who cares—only who cares should have come first because everything else was the result.
And for a little while, with the feeling that she was on an island, deserted and forgotten, she stood on the edge of the sea, looking at a horizon that was utterly blank. What was she to do? Where was she to go? ... Not yet a woman, and all the future lay about her in chaos.... Once more she went back in spirit to that room of Martin's which had been made the very sanctum of Romance by young blood and moonlight and listened to the plans they had made together for the discovery of a world out of which so many similar explorers had crept with wounds and bitterness.
"I'm going to make my mark," she heard Martin cry. "I'm going to make something that will last. My father's name was Martin Gray, and I'll make it mean something out here for his sake."
"And I," she heard herself say, "will go joy-riding on that huge Round-about. I've seen what it is to be old and useless, and so I shall make the most of every day and hour while I'm young. I can live only once, and I shall make life spin whichever way I want it to go. If I can get anybody to pay my whack, good. If not, I'll pay it myself,—whatever it costs. My motto's going to be a good time as long as I can get it and who cares for the price!"
Young fool, you young fool!
The boy followed her to the window, and the moonlight fell upon them both.
"Yes, you'll get a bill all right. How did you know that?"
And once more she heard her answer. "I haven't lived with all those old people so long for nothing. But you won't catch me grumbling if I get half as much as I'm going out for. Listen to my creed, Martin, and take notes if you want to keep up with me.... I shall open the door of every known Blue Room, hurrying out if there are ugly things inside. I shall taste a little of every known bottle, feel everything there is to feel except the thing that hurts, laugh with everybody whose laugh is catching, do everything there is to do, go into every booth in the big Bazaar, and when I'm tired and there's nothing left, slip out of the endless procession with a thousand things stored in my memory. Isn't that the way to live?"
"Young fool, you young fool," she cried, with the feeling of being forgotten and deserted, with not one speck on the blank horizon. "You've failed—failed in everything. You haven't even carried out your program. Others have paid,—Martin and Gilbert and Alice, but the big bill has come in to you ... Who cares? You do, you do, you young fool, and you must creep out of the procession with only one thing stored in your memory,—the loss of Martin, Martin."
It was a bad hour for this girl-child who had tried her wings too young.
And when Gilbert straightened up and gave thanks to God for the woman who had never stirred him, but whose courage and tenderness had added to his respect, he too turned towards the sea with its blank horizon,—the sea upon which he was to be taken by his good wife for rest and sleep, and there was Joan ... young, and slight and alluring, with her back to him and her hands behind her back, and the mere sight of her churned his blood again, and set his dull fire into flames. Once more the old craving returned, the old madness revived, as it always would when the sight and sound of her caught him, and all the common sense and uncommon goodness of the little woman who had given him comfort rose like smoke and was blown away.... To win this girl he would sacrifice Alice and barter his soul. She was in his blood. She was the living picture of his youthful vision. She only could satisfy the Great Emotion.... There was the plan that he had forgotten,—the lunatic plan from which, even in his most desperate moment, he had drawn back, afraid,—to cajole her to the cottage away from which he would send his servants; make, with doors and windows locked, one last passionate appeal, and then, if mocked and held away, to take her with him into death and hold her spirit in his arms.
To own himself beaten by this slip of a girl, to pack his traps and leave her the field and sneak off like a beardless boy,—was that the sort of way he did things who had had merely to raise his voice to hear the approach of obsequious feet? ... Alice and the yacht and nothing but sea to a blank horizon? He laughed to think of it. It was, in fact, unthinkable.
He would put it to Joan in a different way this time. He would hide his fire and be more like that cursed boy. That would be a new way. She liked new things.
He left the summer house, only the roof of which was touched by the last golden rays of the sun, and with curious cunning adopted a sort of caricature of his old light manner. There was a queer jauntiness in his walk as he made his way over the sand, carrying his hat, and a flippant note in his voice when he arrived at her side.
"Waiting for your ship to come home?" he asked.
"It's come," she said.
"You have all the luck, don't you?"
She choked back a sob.
He saw the new look on her face. Something,—perhaps boredom,—perhaps the constant companionship of that cursed boy,—had brought her down from her high horse. This was his chance! ...
"You thought I had gone, I suppose?"
"Yes," she said.
"To-morrow suits me best. I'm off to-morrow,—I've not decided where. A long journey, it may be. If you're fed up with these people what do you say to my driving you somewhere for dinner? A last little dinner to remind us of the spring in New York?"
"Would you like me to very much?"
He steadied his voice. "We might be amused, I think."
"That doesn't answer my question," she said.
"I'd love you to," he answered. "It would be fair, too. I've not seen much of you here."
Yes, it would be fair. Let her try, even at that late stage of the game, to make things a little even. This man had paid enough.
"Very well," she said. "Let's go." It would be good to get away from prying eyes and the dull ache of pain for a few hours.
He could hardly believe his ears. Joan,—to give him something! It was almost incredible.
She turned and led the way up. The sun had almost gone. "I'll get my hat at once," she said, "I'll be ready in ten minutes."
His heart was thumping. "I'll telephone to a place I know, and be waiting in the car."
"Let me go in alone," she said. "We don't want to be held up to explain and argue. You're sure you want me to come?" She drew up and looked at him.
He bowed to hide his face. "Of all things on earth," he said.
She ran on ahead, slipped into the house and up to her room.
Exultant and full of hope, Gilbert waited for a moment before following her in. Going straight to the telephone room he shut the door, asked for the number of his cottage and drummed the instrument with his fingers.
At last!
"Is that you, Itrangi? ... Lay some sort of dinner for two,—cold things with wine. It doesn't matter what, but at once. I shall be over in about an hour. Then get out, with the cook. I want the place to myself to-night. Put the door key on the earth at the left-hand corner of the bottom step. Telephone for a car and go to the hotel at Sag Harbor. Be back in the morning about nine. Do these things without fail. I rely upon you."
He hardly waited for the sibilant assurance before putting back the receiver. He went round to the garage himself. This was the first time he had driven Joan in his car. It might be the last.
Harry was at the bottom of the stairs as Joan came down.
"You're not going out?" he asked. She was still in day clothes, wearing a hat.
"Yes, I am, Harry."
"Where? Why?"
She laid her hand on his arm. "Don't grudge Gilbert one evening,—his last. I've been perfectly rotten to him all along."
"Palgrave? Are you going out with Palgrave?"
"Yes, to dine somewhere. I want to, Harry, oh, for lots of reasons. You know one. Don't stop me." Her voice broke a little.
"But not with Palgrave."
"Why?"
"I saw him dodge out of the telephone room a minute ago. He looked—queer. Don't go, Joan."
"I must," she said and went to the door. He was after her and caught hold of her arm.
"Joan, don't go. I don't want you to."
"I must," she said again. "Surely you can understand? I have to get away from myself."
"But won't I do?"
"It's Gilbert's turn," she said. "Let go, Harry dear." It was good to know that she hadn't hurt this boy.
"I don't like it. Please stay," but he let her go, and watched her down the steps and into the car, with unaccountable misgiving. He had seen Gilbert's face.
And he saw it again under the strong light of the entrance—triumphant.
For minutes after the car had gone, with a wave from Joan, he stood still, with an icy hand on his heart.
"I don't like it," he repeated. "I wish to God I'd had the right to stop her."
She thought that he didn't love her, and he had done his best to obey. But he did love her, more than Martin, it seemed, more than Gilbert, he thought, and by this time she was well on her way to—what?
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