circle--within her own apartment-house, in fact. On the floor above,
also in large, bright rooms of high rental, and so that they were
exchanging visits frequently during the day, often _en déshabille_,
using the stairway that wound up round the elevator-shaft, lived a
certain Mrs. Kitty Drew, I believe she called herself. She was plump
and blond, and so very scented that her aroma lay on a hallway for an
hour after she had scurried through it. She was well known and chiefly
distinguished by a large court-plaster crescent which she wore on her
left shoulder-blade. She enjoyed the bounty of a Wall Street broker
who for one day had attained the conspicuousness of cornering the
egg-market.
There were two or three others within this group. A Mrs. Denison,
half French, and a younger girl called Babe. But Mrs. Drew and Hester
were intimates. They twaddled daily in one or the other’s apartments,
usually lazy and lacy with negligée, lounging about on the mounds of
lingerie pillows over chocolates, cigarettes, novels, Pomeranians, and
always the headache-powders, nerve-sedatives, or smelling-salts, a
running line of “Lord, I’ve a head!” “I need a good cry for the blues!”
“Talk about a dark-brown taste,” or, “There was some kick to those
cocktails last night,” through their conversation.
KITTY: Br-r-r! I’m as nervous as a cat to-day.
HESTER: Naughty, naughty bad doggie to bite muvver’s diamond ring.
KITTY: Leave it to you to land a pear-shaped diamond on your hooks.
HESTER: He fell for it, just like that!
KITTY: You could milk a billiard-ball.
HESTER: I don’t see any “quality of mercy” to spare around your flat.
There were the two years of high school, you see.
“Ed’s going out to Geyser Springs next month for the cure. I told him
he could not go without me unless over my dead body, he could not.”
“Geyser Springs. That’s thirty miles from my home town.”
“Your home town? Nighty-night! I thought you was born on the corner of
Forty-second street and Broadway with a lobster claw in your mouth.”
“Demopolis, Ohio.”
“What is that--a skin-disease?”
“My last relation in the world died out there two years ago. An aunt.
Wouldn’t mind some Geyser Springs myself if I could get some of this
stiffness out of my joints.”
“Come on, I dare you! May Denison and Chris will come in on it, and
Babe can always find somebody. Make it three or four cars full and
let’s motor out. We all need a good boiling, anyways. Wheeler looks
about ready for spontaneous combustion, and I got a twinge in my left
little toe. You on?”
“I am, if he is.”
“‘If he is!’ He’d fall for life in an Igorrote village with a ring in
his nose if you wanted it.”
And truly enough, it did come about that on a height-of-the-season
evening, a highly cosmopolitan party of four couples trooped into the
solid-marble foyer of the Geyser Springs Hotel, motor-coated, goggled,
veiled; a whole litter of pigskin and patent-leather bags, hampers, and
hat-boxes, two golf-bags, two Pomeranians, a bull in spiked collar,
furs, leather coats, monogrammed rugs, thermos bottles, air-pillows,
robes, and an ensemble of fourteen wardrobe-trunks sent by express.
They took the “cure.” Rode horseback, motored, played roulette at the
casino for big stakes, and eschewed the American plan of service for
the smarter European idea, with a special à-la-carte menu for each
meal. Extraordinary-looking mixed drinks, and strictly against the
mandates of the “cure,” appeared at their table. Strange midnight
goings-on were reported by the more conservative hotel guests, and
the privacy of their circle was allowed full integrity by the little
veranda groups of gouty ladies or middle-aged husbands with liver-spots
on their faces. The bath-attendants reveled in the largest tips of the
season. When Hester walked down the large dining-room evenings, she was
a signal for the craning of necks for the newest shock of her newest
extreme toilette. The kinds of toilettes that shocked the women into
envy and mental notes of how the under arm was cut, and the men into
covert delight. Wheeler liked to sit back and put her through her paces
like a high-strung filly.
“Make ’em sit up, girl! You got them all looking like dimes around
here.”
One night, she descended to the dining-room in a black evening gown so
daringly lacking in back and yet, withal, so slimly perfect an elegant
thing that an actual breathlessness hung over the hall, the clatter of
dishes pausing.
There was a gold bird of paradise dipped down her hair over one
shoulder, trailing its smoothness like fingers of lace. She defied with
it as she walked.
“Take it from me,” said Kitty, who felt fat in lavender that night,
“she’s going it one too strong.”
Another evening, she descended, always last, in a cloth of silver,
with a tiny, an absurd, an impeccably tight silver turban dipped down
over one eye, and absolutely devoid of jewels except the pear-shaped
diamond on her left forefinger.
They were a noisy, a spending, a cosmopolitan crowd of too well-fed men
and too well-groomed women, ignored by the veranda groups of wives and
mothers, openly dazzling and arousing a tremendous curiosity in the
younger set, and quite obviously sought after by their own kind.
But Hester’s world, too, is all run through with sharply defined,
social schisms.
“I wish that Irwin woman wouldn’t always hang round our crowd,”
she said, one morning, as she and Kitty lay side by side in the
cooling-room after their baths, massages, manicures, and shampoos. “I
don’t want to be seen running with her.”
“Did you see the square emerald she wore last night?”
“Fake. I know the clerk at the Synthetic Jewelry Company had it made
up for her. She’s cheap, I tell you. Promiscuous. Who ever heard of
anybody standing back of her. She knocks around. She sells her old
clothes to Tessie, my manicurist. I’ve got a line on her. She’s cheap.”
Kitty, who lay with her face under a white mud of cold-cream and her
little mouth merely a hole, turned on her elbow.
“We can’t all be top-notchers, Hester,” she said. “You’re hard as
nails.”
“I guess I am, but you’ve got to be to play this game. The ones who
aren’t end up by stuffing the keyhole and turning on the gas. You’ve
got to play it hard or not at all. If you’ve got the name, you might as
well have the game.”
“If I had it to do over again--well, there would be one more
wife-and-mother rôle being played in this little old world, even if I
had to play it on a South Dakota farm.”
“‘Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well,’ I used to write in the
copy-book. Well, that’s the way I feel about this: To me, anything is
worth doing to escape the cotton stockings and lisle next to your
skin. I admit I never sit down and _think_. You know, sit down and take
stock of myself. What’s the use thinking? Live! Yes,” mused Hester,
her arms in a wreath over her head, “I think I’d do it all over again.
There’s not been so many at that. Three. The first was a Jew. He’d have
married me, but I couldn’t see it on six thousand a year. Nice fellow,
too--an easy spender in a small way, but I couldn’t see a future to
ladies’ neckwear. They make good husbands, Jews do. I hear he made good
later in munitions. Al was a pretty good sort, too, but tight. How I
hate tightness! I’ve been pretty lucky in the long run, I guess.”
“Did I say ‘hard as nails’?” said Kitty, grotesquely fitting a
cigarette in the aperture of her mouth. “I apologize. Why, alongside
of you, a piece of flint is morning cereal. Haven’t you ever had a
love-affair? I’ve been married twice--that’s how chicken-hearted I can
be. Haven’t you ever pumped a little faster just because a certain some
one walked into the room?”
“Once.”
“Once what?”
“I liked a fellow. Pretty much. A blond. Say, he was blond! I always
think to myself, Kit--next to Gerald you’ve got the bluest eyes under
heaven. Only, his didn’t have any dregs.”
“Thanks, dearie.”
“I sometimes wonder about Gerald. I ought to drive over while we’re out
here. Poor old Gerald Fishback!”
“Sweet name--‘Fishback.’ No wonder you went wrong, dearie.”
“Oh, I’m not getting soft. I saw my bed and made it, nice and soft and
comfy, and I’m lying on it without a whimper.”
“You just bet your life you made it up nice and comfy! You’ve the right
idea; I have to hand that to you. You command respect from them. Lord!
Ed would as soon fire a teacup at me as not. But, with me, it pays. The
last one he broke he made up to me with my opal-and-diamond beetle.”
“Wouldn’t wear an opal if it was set next to the Hope diamond.”
“Superstitious, dearie?”
“Unlucky. Never knew it to fail.”
“Not a superstition in my bones. I don’t believe in walking under
ladders or opening an umbrella in the house or sitting down with
thirteen, but, Lordy, never saw the like with you! Thought you’d have
the hysterics over that little old vanity mirror you broke that day out
at the races.”
“Br-r-r; I hated it.”
“Lay easy, dearie. Nothing can touch you the way he’s raking in the
war-contracts.”
“Great--isn’t it?”
“Play for a country home, dearie. I always say real estate and jewelry
are something in the hand. Look ahead in this game, I always say.”
“You just bet I’ve looked ahead.”
“So have I, but not enough.”
“Somehow, I never feel afraid. I could get a job to-morrow if I had to.”
“Say, dearie, if it comes to that, with twenty pounds off me, there’s
not a chorus I couldn’t land back in.”
“I worked once, you know, in Lichtig’s import shop.”
“Fifth Avenue.”
“Yes. It was in between the Jew and Al. I sold two thousand five
hundred dollars’ worth of gowns the first week.”
“Sure enough?”
“‘Girl,’ old man Lichtig said to me the day I quit; ‘girl,’ he said,
‘if ever you need this job again, come back; it’s waiting.’”
“Fine chance!”
“I’ve got the last twenty-five dollars I earned pinned away this minute
in the pocket of the little dark-blue suit I wore to work. I paid for
that suit with my first month’s savings. A little dark-blue Norfolk,
Lichtig let me have out of a stock for twenty-seven fifty.”
“Were they giving them away with a pound of tea?”
“Honest, Kitty, it was neat. Little white shirt-waist, tan shoes, and
one of those slick little five-dollar sailors, and every cent paid out
of my salary. I could step into that outfit to-morrow, look the part,
and land back that job or any other. I had a way with the trade, even
back at Finley’s.”
“Here, hold my jewel-bag, honey; I’m going to die of cold-cream
suffocation if she don’t soon come back and unsmear me.”
“Opal beetle in it?”
“Yes, dearie; but it won’t bite. It’s muzzled with my diamond
horseshoe.”
“Nothing doing. Kit. Put it under your pillow.”
“You better watch out. There’s a thirteenth letter in the alphabet; you
might accidentally use it some day. You’re going to have a sweet time
to-night, you are!”
“Why?”
“The boys have engaged De Butera to come up to the rooms.”
“You mean the fortune-teller over at the Stag Hotel?”
“She’s not a fortune-teller, you poor nervous wreck. She’s the
highest-priced spiritualist in the world. Moving tables--spooks--woof!”
“Faugh!” said Hester, rising from her couch and feeling about with her
little bare feet for the daintiest of pink-silk mules. “I could make
tables move too, at forty dollars an hour. Where’s my attendant? I want
an alcohol rub.”
They did hold séance that night in a fine spirit of lark, huddled
together in the _de-luxe_ sitting-room of one of their suites, and
little half-hysterical shrieks and much promiscuous ribaldry under
cover of darkness.
Madame De Butera was of a distinctly fat and earthy blondness, with a
coarse-lace waist over pink, and short hands covered with turquoise
rings of many shapes and blues.
Tables moved. A dead sister of Wheeler’s spoke in thin, high voice. Why
is it the dead are always so vocally thin and high?
A chair tilted itself on hind legs, eliciting squeals from the women.
Babe spoke with a gentleman friend long since passed on, and Kitty
with a deceased husband, and began to cry quite sobbily and took little
sips of high-ball quite gulpily. May Denison, who was openly defiant,
allowed herself to be hypnotized and lay rigid between two chairs, and
Kitty went off into rampant hysteria until Wheeler finally placed a
hundred-dollar bill over the closed eyes, and whether under it, or to
the legerdemain of madam’s manipulating hands, the tight eyes opened,
May, amid riots of laughter claiming for herself the hundred-dollar
bill, and Kitty, quite resuscitated, jumping up for a table cancan, her
yellow hair tumbling, and her China-blue eyes with the dregs in them
inclined to water.
All but Hester. She sat off by herself in a peacock-colored gown that
wrapped her body-suavity as if the fabric were soaking wet, a band of
smoky blue about her forehead. Never intoxicated, a slight amount of
alcohol had a tendency to make her morose.
“What’s the matter, Cleo?” asked Wheeler, sitting down beside her and
lifting her cool fingers one by one, and, by reason of some remote
analogy that must have stirred within him, seeing in her a Nile queen.
“What’s the matter, Cleo; does the spook-stuff get your goat?”
She turned on him eyes that were all troubled up like waters suddenly
wind-blown.
“God!” she said, her fingers, nails inward, closing about his arm.
“Wheeler--can--can the--dead--speak?”
But fleeting as the hours themselves were the moods of them all, and
the following morning there they were, the eight of them, light with
laughter and caparisoned again as to hampers, veils, coats, dogs, off
for a day’s motoring through the springtime countryside.
“Where to?” shouted Wheeler, twisting from where he and Hester sat in
the first of the cars to call to the two motor-loads behind.
“I thought Crystal Cave was the spot”--from May Denison in the last of
the cars, winding her head in a scarlet veil.
“Crystal Springs it is, then.”
“Is that through Demopolis?”
Followed a scanning of maps.
“Sure! Here it is! See! Granite City. Mitchell. Demopolis. Crystal
Cave.”
“Good Lord, Hester, you’re not going to spend any time in that dump?”
“It’s my home town,” she replied coldly. “The only relation I had
is buried there. It’s nothing out of your way to drop me on the
court-house steps and pick me up as you drive back. I’ve been wanting
to get there ever since we’re down here. Wanting to stop by your home
town you haven’t seen in five years isn’t unreasonable, is it?”
He admitted it wasn’t, leaning to kiss her.
She turned to him a face, soft, with one of the pouts he usually found
irresistible.
“Honey,” she said, “what do you think?”
“What?”
“Chris is buying May that chinchilla coat I showed you in Meyerbloom’s
window the day before we left.”
“The deuce he is!” he said, letting go of her hand but hers immediately
covering his.
“She’s wiring her sister in the ‘Girlie Revue’ to go in and buy it for
her.”
“Outrage--fifteen thousand dollars to cover a woman’s back! Look at the
beautiful scenery, honey! You’re always prating about views. Look at
those hills over there! Great--isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t expect it, Wheeler, if it wasn’t war-year and you landing
one big contract after another. I’d hate to see May show herself in
that chinchilla coat when we could beat her to it by a wire. I could
telegraph Meyerbloom himself. I bought the sable rug off him. I’d hate
it, Wheeler, to see her and Chris beat us to it. So would you. What’s
fifteen thousand when one of your contracts alone runs into the hundred
thousands? Honey?”
“Wire,” he said sourly, but not withdrawing his hand from hers.
They left her at the shady court-house steps in Demopolis, but with
pleasantry and gibe.
“Give my love to the town pump.”
“Rush the old oaken growler for me.”
“So long!” she called, eager to be rid of them. “Pick me up at six
sharp.”
She walked slowly up High Street. Passers-by turned to stare, but
otherwise she was unrecognized. There was a new Five-and-Ten-Cent
Store, and Finley Brothers had added an ell. High Street was paved.
She made a foray down into the little side street where she had spent
those queerly remote first seventeen years of her life. How dim her
aunt seemed! The little unpainted frame house was gone. There was a
lumber-yard on the site. Everything seemed to have shrunk. The street
was narrower and dirtier than she recalled it.
She made one stop, at the house of Maggie Simms, a high-school chum. It
was a frame house, too, and she remembered that the front door opened
directly into the parlor and the side entrance was popularly used in
lieu. But a strange sister-in-law opened the side door. Maggie was
married and living in Cincinnati. Oh, fine--a master mechanic, and
there were twins. She started back toward Finley’s, thinking of Gerald,
and half-way she changed her mind.
Maggie Simms married and living in Cincinnati. Twins! Heigh-ho--what a
world! The visit was hardly a success. At half after five, she was on
her way back to the court-house steps. Stupid to have made it six!
And then, of course, and quite as you would have it, Gerald Fishback
came along. She recognized his blondness long before he saw her. He
was bigger and more tanned, and, as of old, carried his hat in his
hand. She noticed that there were no creases down the front of his
trousers, but the tweed was good and he gave off that intangible aroma
of well-being.
She was surprised at the old thrill racing over her. Seeing him was
like an exquisite stab of quick steel through the very pit of her
being. She reached out, touching him, before he saw her.
“Gerald,” she said, soft and teasingly.
It was actually as if he had been waiting for that touch, because,
before he could possibly have perceived her, her name was on his lips.
“Hester!” he said, the blueness of his eyes flashing between blinks.
“Not Hester?”
“Yes; Hester,” she said, smiling up at him.
He grasped both her hands, stammering for words that wanted to come
quicker than he could articulate.
“Hester!” he kept repeating. “Hester!”
“To think you knew me, Gerald!”
“Know you! I’d know you blind-folded. And how--I--you’re beautiful,
Hester! I think you’ve grown five years younger.”
“You’ve got on, Gerald. You look it.”
“Yes; I’m general manager now at Finley’s.”
“I’m so glad. Married?”
“Not while there’s a Hester Bevins on earth.”
She started at her own name.
“How do you know I’m not?”
“I--I know--” he said, reddening up.
“Isn’t there some place we can talk, Gerald? I’ve thirty minutes before
my friends call for me.”
“Thirty minutes?”
“Your rooms? Haven’t you rooms or a room where we could go and sit
down?”
“Why--why, no, Hester,” he said, still red. “I’d rather you didn’t
go there. But here. Let’s stop in at the St. James Hotel. There’s a
parlor.”
To her surprise, she felt herself color up and was pleasantly conscious
of her finger-tips.
“You darling!” She smiled up at him.
They were seated presently in the unaired plush-and-cherry,
Nottingham-and-Axminster parlor of a small-town hotel.
“Hester!” he kept repeating. “Hester!”
“I’m a bad durl,” she said, challenging his eyes for what he knew.
“You’re a little saint walked down and leaving an empty pedestal in my
dreams.”
She placed his forefinger over his mouth.
“Sh-h,” she said. “I’m not a saint, Gerald; you know that.”
“Yes,” he said, with a great deal of boyishness in his defiance; “I do
know it, Hester, but it is those who have been through the fire who
come out--new. It was your early environment.”
“My aunt died on the town, Gerald, I heard. I could have saved her all
that if I had only known. She was cheap, aunt was. Poor soul! She never
looked ahead.”
“It was your early environment, Hester. I’ve explained that often
enough to them here. I’d bank on you, Hester--swear by you.”
She patted him.
“I’m a pretty bad egg, Gerald. According to the standards of a town
like this, I’m rotten, and they’re about right. For five years, Gerald,
I’ve--”
“The real _you_ is ahead of, and not behind you, Hester.”
“How wonderful,” she said, “for you to feel that way, but--”
“Hester,” he said, more and more the big boy, his knees touching the
floor now, and his big blond head nearing hers, “I don’t care about
anything that’s past; I only know that, for me, you are the--”
“Gerald,” she said, “for God’s sake!”
“I’m a two-hundred-a-month man now, Hester; I want to build you the
prettiest, the whitest little house in this town. Out in the Brierwood
section. I’ll make them kowtow to you, Hester; I--”
“Why,” she said slowly, and looking at him with a certain sadness, “you
couldn’t keep me in stockings, Gerald. The gora on this hat cost more
than one month of your salary.”
“Good God!” he said.
“You’re a dear, sweet boy just the same; but you remember what I told
you about my crêpe-de-Chine soul.”
“Just the same, I love you best in those crispy white shirt-waists you
used to wear and the little blue suits and sailor-hats. You remember
that day at Finley’s picnic, Hester, that day, dear, that you--you--”
“You dear boy!”
“But it--your mistake--it--it’s all over. You work now, don’t you,
Hester?”
Somehow, looking into the blueness of his eyes and their entreaty for
her affirmative, she did what you or I might have done. She half lied,
regretting it while the words still smoked on her lips.
“Why, yes, Gerald, I’ve held a fine position in Lichtig Brothers, New
York importers. Those places sometimes pay as high as seventy-five a
week. But I don’t make any bones, Gerald; I’ve not been an angel.”
“The--the Jew, Hester?”--his lips quivering with a nausea for the
question.
“I haven’t seen him in four years,” she answered truthfully.
He laid his cheek on her hand.
“I knew you’d come through. It was your environment. I’ll marry you
to-morrow--to-day, Hester; I love you.”
“You darling boy!” she said, her lips back tight against her teeth.
“You darling, darling boy!”
“Please, Hester--we’ll forget what has been.”
“Let me go,” she said, rising and pinning on her hat; “let me
go--or--or I’ll cry, and--and I don’t want to cry.”
“Hester,” he called, rushing after her and wanting to fold her back
into his arms, “let me prove my trust--my love--”
“Don’t! Let me go! Let me go!”
At slightly after six, the ultra cavalcade drew up at the court-house
steps. She was greeted with the pleasantries and the gibes.
“Have a good time, sweetness?” asked Wheeler, arranging her rugs.
“Yes,” she said, lying back and letting her lids droop; “but
tired--very, very tired.”
At the hotel, she stopped a moment to write a telegram before going up
for the vapor-bath, nap, and massage that were to precede dinner.
“Meyerbloom & Company, Furriers. Fifth Avenue, New York,” it was
addressed.
This is not a war-story except as it has to do with profiteering,
parlor-patriots, and the return of Gerald Fishback.
While Hester was living this tale, and the chinchilla coat was
enveloping her like an ineffably tender caress, three hundred thousand
of her country’s youths were at strangle-hold across three thousand
miles of sea, and on a notorious night when Hester walked, fully
dressed in a green gown of iridescent fish-scales, into the electric
fountain of a seaside cabaret, and Wheeler had to carry her to her car
wrapped in a sable rug, Gerald Fishback was lying with his face in
Flanders mud, and his eyesockets blackly deep and full of shrapnel, and
a lung-eating gas-cloud rolling at him across the vast bombarded dawn.
* * * * *
Hester read of him one morning, sitting up in bed against a mound of
lace-over-pink pillows, a masseur at the pink soles of her feet. It
was as if his name catapulted at her from a column she never troubled
to read. She remained quite still, looking at the name for a full five
minutes after it had pierced her full consciousness. Then, suddenly,
she swung out of bed, tilting over the masseur.
“Tessie,” she said, evenly enough, “that will do. I have to hurry to
Long Island to a base hospital. Go to that little telephone in the
hall--will you?--and call my car.”
But the visit was not so easy of execution. It required two days of red
tape and official dispensation before she finally reached the seaside
hospital that, by unpleasant coincidence, only a year before had been
the resort hotel of more than one dancing-orgy.