RODNEY LOSES A BATTLE
Rodney Bangs, author of "The Black Pearl" and co-author of "The Man
Above," was annoyed. When Mr. Bangs was annoyed he usually betrayed the
fact, for his was an open nature.
He was betraying it now. His clear, red-brown eyes were clouded. The
healthy pink of his youthful cheeks had deepened to an unbecoming flush.
His wide, engaging grin, the grin of a friendly bulldog, was lacking,
and his lips were set tight. Even his burnished red pomadour added to
the general pugnaciousness of his appearance. Standing up at its most
aggressive angle, it seemed to challenge the world.
Sitting on a low chair in the dressing-room of the bachelor apartment he
and Laurence Devon occupied together, Rodney drew on a shoe and stamped
his foot down into it with an emphasis that shook the floor. Devon,
fastening his tie before the full-length mirror set in the door leading
to their common bath-room, started at the sound, like a high-strung
prima donna. This was one of Laurie's temperamental mornings.
"What the devil's the matter with you, Bangs?" he demanded, but without
ill humor. "Can't you get on a shoe without imitating the recoil of a
seventy-five centimeter gun?"
Bangs grunted, drew on the other shoe, and drove his foot into it with
increased energy. Laurie looked at him, and this time there was a spark
in his black eyes. Very quietly he turned, crossed the small room, and,
planting himself in front of his chum, resentfully stared down at the
dynamic youth.
"What's the idea?" he demanded. "Are you deliberately trying to be
annoying?"
Rodney did not raise his head. His fingers were busy with a complicated
knot.
"Oh, shut up!" he muttered.
Laurie, his hands in his pockets, remained where he was. Under his
continued inspection, the fingers of Bangs grew clumsy. He fumbled with
the knot, and, having unfastened it, prolonged to the utmost the process
of lacing his shoes. He knew what must come as soon as he settled back
in his chair. It had been coming for days. He was in for an unpleasant
ten minutes. But the situation was one he had deliberately created as
the only possible way of bringing about a serious talk with his friend.
Now that it was here, he was anxious to make the most of it. With head
bent and thoughts busy he played for time.
At last, the shoes laced and his campaign mapped out, he sat up and met
Laurie's eyes. Their expression of antagonism, temporary though he knew
it to be, hurt him. Devon, when he had his own way, and he usually had
it, was a singularly sweet-tempered chap. Never before, throughout their
year of close association, had he looked at Bangs like that. Rodney knew
that he deserved the look. For days past he had deliberately subjected
his companion to a series of annoyances, small but intensely irritating.
"Well?" demanded Laurie. "What's the answer?"
"What answer?" Rodney was in the position of a small boy challenged to
combat in cold blood. He was experiencing some difficulty in working
himself up to the necessary heat for an engagement. But Laurie's next
words helped him out.
"You've been making a damned nuisance of yourself for the last week," he
said deliberately. "I want to know why."
Bangs squared his stocky shoulders and rose to his feet. His brown eyes
were below the level of his chum's black ones, but the two glances met
sharply and a flash passed between them. Under the force of his rising
excitement the voice of Rodney shook.
"The reason I've been a damned nuisance," he said curtly, "is because
you've been acting like an infernal fool, and I'm sick of it."
Laurie's lips tightened, but the other rushed on without giving him a
chance to reply. The moment was his. He must crowd into it all he had
not dared to say before and might not be given a chance to say again.
"Oh, I know what you'll say!" he cried. "It's none of my business, and
you're your own master, and all that sort of rot. And I know you're not
drinking, and God knows I'm not ass enough to take on any high moral
tone and try to preach to you, whatever you do. What gets my goat,
Devon, and the only thing I'm worrying about, is this damnable waste of
your time and mine."
Laurie grinned, and the grin infuriated Bangs. He whirled away from it.
A footstool impeded his progress, and he kicked it out of his way with
large abandon. It was his habit to rush about a room when he was talking
excitedly. He rushed about now; and Laurie lit a cigarette and watched
him, at first angrily, then with a growing tolerance born of memories of
scenes in their plays which Bangs had threshed out in much this same
manner. The world could never be wholly uninteresting while Rodney
pranced about in it, cutting the air with gestures like that.
"Here I am," snapped Rodney, "ready with my play, the best plot I've had
yet. You won't let me even mention it to you. Here's the new season.
Here's Epstein, sitting on our door-mat with a check-book in each hand,
waiting to put on anything we give him. You know he's lost a small
fortune this fall. You know it's up to us to give him a play that will
pull him out of the hole he's in. Here's Haxon, the best director in
town, marking time and holding off other managers in the hope that you
and I will get down to business. And here you are, the fellow we're all
counting on--" He stopped for breath and adjectives.
"Yes," Laurie politely prompted him. "Here I am. What about it? What am
I doing?"
"You know damned well what you're doing. You're loafing!" Bangs fired
the word at him as if it were a shell from a Big Bertha. "You're loafing
till it makes us all sick to look at you. We thought a week or two of it
would be enough, when you realized the conditions; but it's gone on for
a month; and, instead of getting tired, you're getting more and more
into the loafing habit. You abuse time till it shrieks in agony."
"Good sentence," applauded Laurie. "But don't waste it on me. Put it
into a play."
Bangs seemed not to hear him. He was standing by the room's one window,
now, staring unseeingly out of it, his hands deep in his pockets, taking
in the knowledge of the failure of his appeal. Under the realization of
this he tossed a final taunt at his partner over his shoulder.
"I can forgive the big blunders a man makes in his life," he muttered;
"but, by God, I haven't much patience with a chap that lies around and
shirks at a time like this!"
Laurie removed the half-smoked cigarette from his mouth, and not finding
an ash tray within reach, carefully crushed out its burning end against
the polished top of the dressing-case. He had grown rather pale.
"That will be about all, Bangs," he said quietly. "What you and Epstein
and Haxon don't seem to remember is just one thing. If you don't like
matters as they are, it's mighty easy to change them. It doesn't take
half a minute to agree to dissolve a partnership."
"I know." Bangs returned to his chair, and, dropping limply into it, his
hands still in his pockets, stared despondently at his outstretched
legs. "That's all it means to you," he went on, morosely. "Our
partnership is one in a thousand. It's based on friendship as well as on
financial interest. If I do say it, it represents a combination of
brains, ability, backing, and prospects that comes only once in a
lifetime, if it comes at all. Yet in one year you're sick of it, and
tired of work. You're ready to throw it all over, and to throw over at
the same time the men whose interests are bound up with yours. You're
dawdling in cabarets and roadhouses and restaurants, when you might be
doing Work--" Bangs's voice capitalized the word--"real work," he added
fiercely, "work other fellows would give their souls to be able to do."
He ended on a flat note, oddly unlike his usual buoyant tones, and sat
still as if everything had been said.
Laurie lit a fresh cigarette, drew in a mouthful of smoke, and exhaled
it in a series of pretty rings. In his brief college experience he had
devoted some time to acquiring this art. Admiringly watching the little
rings pass through the big rings, he spoke with studied carelessness.
"It was a pretty good scene, Bangs," he said, "and it showed careful
rehearsing. But it would be a lot more effective if you had a real
situation to base it on. As it is, you're making a devil of a row about
nothing. I worked like a horse all last year, and you know it. Now I'm
resting, or loafing, if you prefer to call it that, and"--he bit off the
words and fairly threw them at his friend--"it will save you and Epstein
and Haxon a lot of mental wear and tear if you will mind your own
business and let me alone."
Bangs raised his eyes and dropped them again.
"You _are_ our business," he somberly reminded his partner. "I've got so
I can't work without you," he added, with a humility new to him. "You
know that. And you know I've got the plot. It's ready--great Scott, it's
boiling in me! I'm crazy to get it out. And here I've got to sit around
watching you kill time, while you know and I know that you'd be a damn
sight happier if you were on the job. Good Lord, Laurie, work's the
biggest thing there is in life! Doesn't it mean anything at all to you?"
"Not just now." Laurie spoke with maddening nonchalance.
"Then there's something rotten in you."
Laurie winced, but made no answer. He hoped Bangs would go on talking
and thus destroy the echo of his last words, with which the silent room
seemed filled. But nothing came. Rodney's opportunity had passed, and he
was lost in depressed realization of its failure. Laurie strolled back
to the mirror, his forgotten tie dangling in his hand.
"We'll let it go at that," he said then. "Think things over, and make up
your mind what you want to do about the contract."
"All right."
Bangs replied in the same flat notes he had used a moment before, and
without changing his position; but the two words gave Laurie a shock. He
did not believe that either Rodney or Epstein would contemplate a
dissolution of their existing partnership; but an hour ago he would not
have believed that Rodney Bangs could say to him the things he had said
just now.
He was beginning to realize that he had tried his partners sorely in the
month that had passed since his return to town; and all for what? He
himself had brought out of the foolish experience nothing save a tired
nervous system, a sense of boredom such as he had not known for a year,
and, especially when he looked at Bangs, an acute mental discomfort
which introspective persons would probably have diagnosed as the pangs
of conscience. Laurie did not take the trouble to diagnose it. He merely
resented it as a grievance added to the supreme grievance based on the
fact that he had not yet even started on the high adventure he had
promised himself.
He was gloomily considering both grievances, and tying his tie with his
usual care, when something in the mirror caught and held his attention.
He looked at it, at first casually, then with growing interest. In the
glass, directly facing him, was a wide studio window. It was open,
notwithstanding the cold January weather, and a comfortable,
middle-aged, plump woman, evidently a superior type of caretaker, was
sitting on the sill, polishing an inner pane. The scene was as vivid as
a mirage, and it was like the mirage in that it was projected from some
point which itself remained unseen.
Laurie turned to the one window the dressing-room afforded--a double
French window, at his right, but a little behind him, and reaching to
the floor. Through this he could see across a court the opposite side of
his own building, but no such window or commonplace vision as had just
come to him. In his absorption in the phenomenon he called to Bangs, who
rose slowly, and, coming to his side, regarded the scene without much
interest.
"It's a cross projection from a house diagonally opposite us," he said,
after studying the picture a moment. "It must be that old red studio
building on the southwest corner of the square. If we had a room back of
this and looking toward the west, we could see the real window."
"As it is," said Laurie, "we've got a reserved seat for an intimate
study of any one who lives there. I wonder who has that studio?"
Bangs had no idea. He was grateful to the little episode, however, for
spreading over the yielding ground beneath his feet the solid strip on
which he had crossed back to his chum. He threw an arm across Laurie's
shoulders and looked into his face, with something in his expression
that reminded young Devon of a favorite collie he had loved and lost in
boyhood.
"All right now?" the look asked, just as the dog's look had asked it of
the little chap of ten, when something had gone wrong. Rodney's creed of
life was held together by a few primitive laws, the first of which was
loyalty. Already he was reproaching himself for what he had said and
done. Laurie carefully completed the tying of his tie, and turned to him
with his gayest smile.
"Hurry up and finish dressing," he cheerfully suggested, "and we'll go
out to breakfast. Since you insist on waiting 'round for me like Mary's
little lamb, I suppose I've got to feed you."
Rodney's wide grin responded, for the first time in many days. He
bustled about, completing his toilet, and ten minutes later the two
young men started out together with a lightness of spirit which each
enjoyed and neither wholly understood. Both had a healthy horror of
"sentimental stuff" and a gay, normal disregard of each other's feelings
in ordinary intercourse. But in the past half-hour, for the first time
in their association, they had come close to a serious break, and the
soul of each had been chilled by a premonitory loneliness as definite as
the touch of an icy finger. In the quick reaction they experienced now
their spirits soared exultantly. They breakfasted in a fellowship such
as they had not known since Barbara's marriage, the month before.
If Bangs had indulged in any dream of a change of life in Laurie,
however, following this reconciliation, the next few days destroyed the
tender shoots of that hope. Laurie's manner retained its pleasant
camaraderie, but work and he met as strangers and passed each other by.
The routine of his days remained what they had been during the past five
weeks. He gadded about, apparently harmlessly, came home at shocking
hours, and spent most of the bracing January days wrapped in a healthful
slumber that infuriated Bangs, who wandered in and out of their
apartment like an unhappy ghost. On the rare occasions when he and
Rodney lunched or dined together, Laurie was entirely good-humored and
when Epstein was with them seemed wholly impervious to any hints thrown
out, none too subtly, by his producing partner.
"Listen, Laurie," said that disgusted individual, almost a month after
the new year had been ushered in, "the new year's here. That's a good
time for a young fella to get busy again on somethin' vorth while. Ain't
I right?"
Laurie suppressed a yawn and carefully struck off with his little finger
the firm ash of an excellent cigarette. He was consuming thirty or
forty cigarettes a day, and his nerves were beginning to show the effect
of this indulgence.
"I believe it is," he courteously agreed. "It has been earnestly
recommended to the young as a good time to start something."
"Vell," Epstein's voice took on the guttural notes of his temperamental
moments, "don't that mean nothin' to you?"
Laurie grinned. He had caught the quick look of warning Bangs shot at
the producer and it amused him.
"Not yet," he said. "Not till I've had my adventure."
Epstein sniffed.
"The greatest adventure in life," he stated dogmatically, "is to make a
lot of money. I tell you vy. Because then you got all the other
adventures you can handle, trying to hold on to it!"
Bangs, who was developing a new and hitherto unsuspected vein of tact,
encouraged Epstein to enlarge on this congenial theme. He now fully
realized that Devon would go his own gait until he wearied of it, and
that no argument or persuasion could enter his armor-clad mind. The
position of Bangs was a difficult one, for while he was accepting and
assimilating this unpleasant fact, Epstein and Haxon--impatient men by
temperament and without much training in self-control--were getting
wholly out of patience and therefore out of hand. Haxon, indeed, was for
the time entirely out of hand, for he had finally started the rehearsals
of a new play which, he grimly informed Bangs, would make "The Man
Above" look like a canceled postage-stamp.
Bangs repeated the comment to his chum the next morning, during the late
dressing-hour which now gave them almost their only opportunity for a
few words together. He had hoped it would make an impression, and he
listened with pleasure to a sharp exclamation from Laurie, who chanced
to be standing before the door mirror in the dressing-room, brushing his
hair. The next instant Bangs realized that it was not his news which had
evoked the tribute of that exclamation.
"Come here!" called Laurie, urgently. "Here's something new; and, by
Jove, isn't she a beauty!"
Bangs interrupted his toilet to lounge across the room. Looking over
Laurie's shoulder, his eyes found the cynosure that held the gaze of his
friend. The wide-open studio window was again reflected in the mirror,
but with another occupant.
This was a girl, young and lovely. She appeared in the window like a
half-length photograph in a frame. Her body showed only from above the
waist. Her elbows were on the sill. Her chin rested in the hollows of
her cupped hands. Her wavy hair, parted on one side and drawn softly
over the ears in the fashion of the season, was reddish-gold. Her eyes
were brown, and very thoughtful. Down-dropped, they seemed to stare at
something on the street below, but the girl's expression was not that of
one who was looking at an object with interest. Instead, she seemed lost
in a deep and melancholy abstraction.
Laurie, a hair-brush in each hand, stared hard at the picture.
"Isn't she charming!" he cried again.
Bangs's reply revealed a severely practical side of his nature.
"She'll have a beastly cold in the head if she doesn't shut that
window," he grumpily suggested. But his interest, too, was aroused. He
stared at the girl in the mirror with an attention almost equal to
Laurie's.
As they looked, she suddenly stirred and moved backward, as if occultly
warned of their survey. They saw her close the window, and, drawing a
chair close to it, sit down and stare out through the pane, still with
that intent, impersonal expression. Bangs strolled back to the
dressing-case and resumed his interrupted toilet. Laurie, fumbling
vaguely with his brushes, kept his eyes on the girl in the mirror.
"Do you suppose we could see her if we went out on the street?" he
asked, suddenly.
"Her? Oh, you mean that girl?" With difficulty Bangs recalled his
thoughts from Haxon's new play. "No, I don't think so," he decided. "You
see, we're up on the tenth floor, so she must be fairly high up, too."
"She's a wonder." Laurie was still gazing into the mirror. "Prettiest
girl I've ever seen, I think," he reflected aloud.
Bangs snorted.
"She's probably a peroxide," he said. "Even if she isn't, she can't hold
a candle to your sister."
"Oh, Barbara--" Laurie considered the question of Barbara's beauty as if
it were new to him. "Babs is good-looking," he handsomely conceded. "But
there's something about this girl that's unusual. Perhaps it's her
expression. She doesn't look happy."
Bangs sighed with ostentation.
"If you want to study some one that isn't happy, look at me," he invited
warmly. "If that play of mine isn't out of me pretty soon, I'll have to
have an operation!"
Laurie made no reply to this pathetic prediction, and Bangs sadly shook
his head and concluded his toilet, meditating gloomily the while on the
unpleasant idiosyncrasies of every one he knew. To see Devon turn
suddenly into a loafer upset all his theories as well as all his plans.
Laurie, for some reason, dawdled more than usual that morning. It was
after eleven before he went to breakfast. An hour earlier Bangs departed
alone for their pet restaurant.
The girl in the mirror remained at her window for a long time, and
Laurie watched her in growing fascination. It was not until she rose and
disappeared that he felt moved to consider so sordid a question as that
of food.
He joined Bangs just as that youth was finishing his after-breakfast
cigar. Even under its soothing influence, he was in the mood of combined
exasperation and depression with which his friends were becoming
familiar.
"If we had begun work as soon as we got back to town after your sister's
wedding," he told Laurie, "we'd have had two acts ready by now, in the
rough."
"No reason why you shouldn't have four acts ready, so far as I can see,"
murmured Laurie, cheerfully attacking his grape-fruit. "All you've got
to do is to write 'em."
Bangs's lips set.
"Not till I've talked 'em over with you and got your ideas," he
declared, positively. "If you'd just let me give you an outline--"
Laurie set down his cup.
"Do I get my breakfast in peace, or don't I?" he demanded, coldly.
"You do, confound you!"
Bangs bit off the end of a fresh cigar and smoked it in stolid silence.
He was a person of one idea. If he couldn't talk about the play, he
couldn't talk at all. He meditated, considering his characters, his
situations, his partner's and his own position, in a mental jumble that
had lately become habitual and which was seriously affecting his nerves.
Laurie, as he ate, chatted cheerfully and at random, apparently avoiding
with care any subject that might interest his partner. Bangs rose
abruptly.
"Well, I'm off," he said. "See you at dinner time, I suppose."
But Laurie, it appeared, had engagements. He was taking a party of
friends out to Gedney Farms that evening, in his new car, and they might
decide to stay there for a day or two. Also, though he did not confide
this fact to Bangs, he had an engagement for the afternoon, at a place
where the card rooms were quiet and elegant and the stakes high.
He had been there half a dozen times, and had played each time. He had
been able to keep himself in hand. In fact, a great part of the
fascination of the game now lay in the study of its effect on himself
and its test of his new-born will power. Thus far, he had played exactly
as much as he had planned to play, and had secretly exulted in the fact.
What he intended, he told himself, was to learn to do things in
moderation; neither to fear them nor to let them master him.
The attraction of these diversions filled his mind. He quite forgot the
girl in the mirror, and it was no thought of her that drew him back to
New York that night. The plans of his guests had changed, that was all.
The change brought him home at eleven o'clock. Bangs was in his own
room, finding in sleep a wall of unconsciouness that separated him from
his troubles. Laurie decided upon the novel pleasure of a long night of
slumber for himself.
He fell asleep with surprising ease, and immediately, as it seemed, he
saw the girl in the mirror. She was walking toward him, through what
appeared to be a heavy fog. Her hands were outstretched to him, and he
hurried to meet her; but even as he did so the fog closed down and he
lost her, though he seemed to hear her voice, calling him from somewhere
far away.
He awoke late in the morning with every detail of the dream vivid in his
mind, so vivid, indeed, that when he approached the mirror after his
morning plunge, it seemed almost a continuation of the dream to find the
girl there.
He stopped short with a chuckle. The curtains of his French window were
drawn apart, and in the mirror he saw the reflection of the girl as she
stood in profile near her own uncurtained window and slowly dressed her
hair.
It was wonderful hair, much more wonderful down than up. Laurie, who had
a sophisticated notion that most of the hair on the heads of girls he
knew had been purchased as removable curls and "transformations," stared
with pleasure at the red-gold mass that fell down over the girl's white
garment. Then, with a little shock, he realized that the white garment
was a nightdress. It was evident that, high in her lonely room, the girl
thought herself safe from observation and was quietly making her toilet
for the morning.
Well, she should be safe. With a quick jerk, Laurie drew together the
heavy curtains that hung at the sides of the long window. Then, smiling
a little, he slowly dressed. His thoughts dwelt on the girl. It was odd
that she should be literally projected into his life in that unusual
fashion. He had never had any such experience before, nor had he heard
of one just like it. It was unique and pleasant. It was especially
pleasant to have her so young and so charming to look at. She might have
been a disheveled art student, given to weird color effects, or an
austere schoolma'am, or some plump and matter-of-fact person who set
milk bottles on the sill and spread wet handkerchiefs to dry on the
window-panes. As it was, all that disturbed him was her expression. He
wished he knew her name and something more about her. His thoughts were
full of her.
Before he left the room he parted the curtains again to open the window
wide, following his usual program. As he did so he glanced into his
mirror. He saw her open window, but it was lifeless. Only his own
disappointed face confronted him.