Theodora Lydia Lorillard Hayden, confronted by the first entirely
sleepless night of her career, hugged her wounded pride to her breast
and went pioneering. She lay on her narrow bed blazing new trails of
thought. She turned and twisted and waited for morning, as torn in
spirit as a Belgian villager over whom the iron hooves of war had
trampled. For she found herself a victim of strange and violent
reactions and her body a small but seething cauldron of bitterness.
The more she thought of Raoul Uhlan and his affront to her the more she
hated him. The scene in her studio began to take on the distorted
outlines of a nightmare, merging into something as disquieting as
remembered dreams of being denuded. Even when the ordained reactions of
nature demanded lassitude after tempest she found the incandescent coals
of her hatred fanned by the thought of her helplessness. For it was for
more than the mere indignities to her person that she hated the man. She
hated him for crushing down with an over-brutal heel the egg-shell dream
of her emancipation. She hated him for defiling her peace of mind, for
undermining her faith in a care-free world which she had fought so hard
to attain. He had done more than hurt her pride; he had shaken her
temple of art down about her ears.
Teddie began to see, as she felt seismic undulations in what she had so
foolishly accepted as bed-rock, that her home-life had perhaps stood for
more than she imagined. It had meant not an accidental but an
elaborately sustained dignity, a harboring seclusion, an achieved though
cluttered-up spaciousness where the wheels of existence revolved on
bearings so polished that one was apt to forget their power. And all
this took her thoughts on to Ruby Reamer, the businesslike young girl of
the studios from whom, without quite realizing it, she had learned so
much. Beside the worldly-wise and sophisticated Ruby, Teddie remembered,
she had more than once felt like a petted and pampered and slightly
over-fed Pomeranian beside a quick-witted street-wanderer who’d only too
early learned to forage for a living. And the question as to what Ruby
might do in any such contingency led her to a calmer and colder
assessment of her own resources.
But these, she found, were even more limited than she had imagined.
There seemed no one to whom she could turn in her emergency, no one to
whom she could look for any restoration of dignity without involving
some still greater loss of dignity. And that one word of “dignity,” for
all her untoward impulses of insurrection, was a very large word in the
lexicon of Teddie’s life. She had been mauled and humiliated. She had
been unthinkably misjudged and cheapened. And it was as much the insult
to her intelligence as the hammer-blow to her pride which made her ache
with the half-pagan hunger of rebellious youth for adequate atonement.
It wasn’t until daylight came that any possible plan of procedure
presented itself. Then, as she paced her studio in the more lucid white
light of morning, with the sheathed blade of her indignation still
clanking at her heels, her eye fell on the crayon sketch of Gunboat
Dorgan’s well muscled right arm.
She stopped short, arrested by a thought as new as though it had bloomed
out of the cherrywood table beside her. Then she sat down in the
velvet-draped armchair, letting this somewhat disturbing thought slip
from her head to her heart, as it were, where it paced its silent
parliaments of instinct until she had breakfasted. In leaving it thus to
instinct she felt that she was leaving it to a conference of ancestral
ghosts to argue over and fight out to a finish. But when that decision
was once made she accepted it without questioning. Her only hope, she
suddenly felt, lay in Gunboat Dorgan. Her only chance of balancing
life’s ledger of violence rested with that East Side youth with the
fore-shortened Celtic nose and the cauliflower ear. It was Gunboat
Dorgan who could do for her what the situation demanded.
Her only way of getting in touch with young Dorgan, she remembered, was
through Ruby Reamer. But Ruby’s telephone number had been left with her
in case of need, and with impulse still making her movements crisp she
went to the telephone and called up her model.
“Ruby,” she said in the most matter-of-fact tone of which she was
capable, “can you tell me where I can find your friend, Mr. Dorgan?”
There was a ponderable space of silence.
“And what do you want with me friend Mr. Dorgan?” asked the voice over
the wire, not without a slight saber-edge of suspicion.
Teddie entrenched herself behind a timely but guarding trill of
laughter.
“It’s for something I can’t very well tell you,” she said, “something
that I’ll be able to explain to you later on.”
And again a silence that was obviously meditative intervened.
“Of course I’ve never tried to butt in on Gunnie’s personal affairs,”
announced a somewhat dignified Miss Reamer, remembering that the lady on
the other end of the wire was much more attractive than anything she
could fashion out of pastels. “But when Gunnie makes a date he’s never
held himself above explainin’ it to me.”
Teddie fortified herself with a deep breath.
“Then suppose we leave the explaining to him, when he feels that the
psychological moment has arrived,” she suggested. “So I’ll be obliged if
you can tell me just where and how I might get in touch with Mr.
Dorgan?”
“I guess maybe you’ll find him at the Aldine Athletic Club about this
time any morning,” Ruby finally conceded, without any perceptible
decrease of dignity. And with that the conference ended.
It took time, however, to get in touch with the gentleman in question.
It was, in fact, three long hours before Gunboat had finished with his
boxing-class at the Aldine Athletic Club, had taken his shower and his
rub-down, and had apparelled himself in attire befitting a call on a
rib, as he expressed it, who could bed her ponies down in bank-notes if
she had a mind to. When he appeared before Teddie, accordingly, he did
so in oxblood shoes and light tan gloves and a close-fitting “college”
suit that translated him into anything but a knight of brawn.
“Mr. Dorgan,” promptly began Teddie, with a quietness which was merely a
mask to her inner excitement, “I’m in a very great difficulty and I’ve
been wondering if you’d be willing to help me out of it.”
“What’s the trouble, lady?” asked Gunboat, a little stiff and
embarrassed in his Sunday best as he gazed at her out of an honest but
guarded eye. For the knights of the ring, in their own world and in
their own way, have many advances of the softer sex to withstand and
many blandishments of the rose-sheathed enemy to be wary of.
But Teddie was direct enough, once she was under way.
“I’ve just been insulted in this studio by a brute who calls himself a
man, intolerably and atrociously insulted.”
Gunboat Dorgan’s face lost a little of its barricaded look. This was a
matter which brought him back to earth again. And Teddie saw that
nothing was to be gained by beating about the bush.
“And this man threatens to come here to-day and repeat that insult,” she
went on. “And, to speak quite plainly, I want some one to protect me.”
Gunboat’s face brightened. He moistened a hard young lip with the point
of his tongue as he stood gazing into clouded eyes for which lances
would surely have been shattered at Ashley.
“Who’s the guy what’s been gettin’ fresh?” he demanded.
Teddie, looking very lovely in a tailored black suit with an Ophelia
rose pinned to its front, did her best to resist all undue surrender to
the lethal tides of sympathy.
“It’s a beast called Raoul Uhlan,” she announced, disturbed for a moment
by the slenderness of her would-be champion. But it was only for a
moment, for she remembered the flexed right arm Ruby Reamer had tried to
caliper with her admiring fingers on the afternoon that the
crayon-drawing had been made.
“That puddin’!” cried Gunboat, with a touch of ecstasy. “Why, that guy
tried to pull the soft stuff with Ruby last winter, but nothin’ put me
wise until it was six months too late.” He fell to pacing the
studio-rug, as though it were a roped ring, with significant undulatory
movement of the shoulders. “Say, lady, what d’ yuh want me to do to that
cuff-shooter? Blot ’im out?”
There was a hard light in the pagan young eyes of the girl in black.
“Yes,” she announced, without hesitation.
“Then he’ll get his!” affirmed the other, just as promptly.
“I want you to give him a lesson that he’ll never, never forget,” she
explained, a little paler than usual. “I want you to show him it isn’t
safe to insult defenseless girls.”
“Oh, I’ll show ’im!” announced Gunboat, with his chin out and his heels
well apart. “He’ll know something when I get through wit’ him. And he’ll
have a map like a fried egg!”
“But I don’t want you to——”
“Leave that to me, lady,” interrupted her champion, sensing what he
recognized as purely feminine compunctions. “Yuh’ve gotta know when to
quit, in this business, the same as when to start. Just leave it to me,
and I’ll do it, and do it right!”
“And what,” demanded Teddie in the most businesslike tone of which she
was capable, “will you expect me to pay you for this?”
“Pay me?” repeated Gunboat Dorgan, wheeling about on her. “Who said
anything about a purse in this bout? I’m not doin’ this for pay.”
“Then what are you doing it for?” asked the slightly perplexed Teddie.
“I’m doin’ it for _yuh_!” asserted Gunboat, leaning fraternally over the
table-end.
“I’ve that little club-roadster of my own,” the entirely unpractical
Teddie rather feebly suggested, feeling the appropriateness of some
effort to depersonalize the issue. “It wouldn’t be pay, of course. But
when you and Ruby settle down in your flat it would be nice for running
out into the country in hot weather. You’d take _that_, surely?”
Gunboat essayed a hand-movement of repudiation which he’d seen quite
often in the movies. He was warmly conscious, in fact, of an appeasing
touch of the theatrical in this knight-errantry that had bobbed so
unexpectedly up at the tail end of a humdrum morning of dub-drilling and
bag-punching.
“Noth-thing doin’!” he said with decision. “I get enough out of it when
I see that stiff go to the mat. Yuh say he’s goin’ to horn in here at
three o’clock. Well, I’ll breeze in at three-two, railroad time. And
I’ll learn him to think twice before he flies that zooin’-bug around a
girl who’s been born and bred a lady!”
And even Teddie, as she stood up and shook hands with her new-found
champion, was troubled by a vague yet persistent touch of theatricality
about the situation as a whole. But she had made her decision, and she
intended to stick to it.
She watched Gunboat step to the door, with his hat in his hand, come to
a stop, and then step back to the table-end.
“Say,” he said with a slightly self-conscious and not altogether heroic
look on his face, “don’t say anything to—to Miss Reamer about this,
lady, if yuh don’t mind. It’s not that I’ve got anything to hide. But
yuh know what women are!”
And, with an even more fraternal nod of the head, he passed out through
the door with his peculiarly light and panther-like tread, and was gone.