In which she goes to New York, and is very Happy indeed.
Mrs. Willing was twenty-four, handsome, expensive, lively, and intensely
fond of what she thought was pleasure. Willing was thirty-two, and had a
close-clipped mustache: there were ten thousand men in New York whom you
might have mistaken for him at twenty paces. He was assistant something
on a nineteenth story downtown, and his scale of living continually
crowded his income to the wall. The Willings--there were, of course, but
two of them--had the kind of home which farmers' daughters so envy the
heroines of "society" novels. They lived in a showy apartment hotel in
the West Fifties, kept a motor-car, and went out for dinner. In fact
"out" was the favorite word in the establishment: the Willings did
everything but sleep "out."
"I can't bear to stick at home," said Mrs. Willing to Carlisle. "I've
always _loved_ to go places."
And places they went from one end of Carlisle's visit to the other. The
shops in the morning, downtown on a rush to lunch with Willing, back to
Broadway for a matinee, back home at the double-quick to dress for
dinner, to the theatre after dinner, to supper after the theatre. There
was always hurry; there was never quite time to reach any of the places
at the hour agreed.
"That's the fun!" said Florrie Willing. "Rush, rush, rush from morning
to night. That's little old New York in a nutshell."
Carlisle had expected to be thoroughly diverted by the rattle, bang, and
glitter in which the Willings lived, but in this she was only partially
gratified. Pure restlessness, it seemed, had entered her blood: she was
no sooner fairly settled in the Wrexham than she began to wish herself
back home again. The vague thought pursued her, even at the places, that
she was missing something; that she had stepped aside from, not into,
the real current of her life. Dazzling indeed were some of the
dining-places to which the experienced Willings took their guest, but
somehow none of them seemed so really interesting, after all, as home.
What was happening away off there on Washington Street? Suppose Mr.
Canning should return ahead of time for his farewell visit--return and
find her not there?...
"You're changed somehow, Cally," cried Florrie Willing, on the third or
fourth day--"I can't just put my little patty on it, but I can see it
all the same."
They had just rushed up from breakfast, which the Willings took in the
apartment café, and were now dressing furiously to go shopping. Cally,
surprised with her mouth full of hatpins, said of course she had; she
was getting frightfully old.
"You never used to rest a cheek on a pensive hand, and stare five
minutes at a time into eternity. Out with it!" said Florrie. "You're
disappointed in love."
"That's it, too. I loved a tall pretty soldier, and he rode away."
"_We'll_ never ride away, at this rate. Get a _move_ on, Cally! We've
slews and slews of places to go to."
Cally, who considered that she already had a move on, did her best to
get on another one.
Young Mrs. Willing added: "Whatever became of the gay young thing with
the eyelashes you flirted so outrageously with, the time we were up at
Island Inn? What was his name--oh--Mr. Dalhousie?"
Carlisle winced a little in spite of herself.... Banquo could not have
been more impossible to forget than this.
"Oh--why, he and I had the worst kind of smash-up--and he went away
somewhere. I never like to think of him any more.... Let's fly!"
Fly they did, that morning and many others. It was all very different
from life at home. Born and bred in a town where social life is large,
constant, and gay, Carlisle could not help being struck by the fact that
the Willings, roughly speaking, had no friends. One other young couple
in the same hotel, the Jennisons, appeared to be about the limit of
their intimate circle: a phenomenon, no doubt at least partly explained
by the fact that the Willings moved every year, or sometimes twice a
year, "to get a change." Thus, in the huge rabbit-warren, they were
constantly cutting themselves off from their past.
"I can't endure to poke about in the same little spot year after year,"
said Florrie Willing. "If I don't have something new, I simply froth at
the mouth and die."
However, Mr. Willing of course had his connections downtown, and knowing
his duty in the premises, he would frequently "bring up" men in the
evening, brisk, lively, ambitious young fellows like himself. One of the
men so brought up fell abruptly and deeply in love with Carlisle, which
helped considerably to pass the time away.
"You'd better hold on to Pierce," said Florrie, talking seriously as a
married woman: "He's one of the coming men--dead certain to make a pile
of money some day."
Cally said she'd dearly love to hold on to Pierce, but to herself she
smiled, thinking if Florrie only knew. By this time she had been a
fortnight in New York, and had decided to leave at the end of another
week. Whatever else the visit was or was not, it had more than justified
itself by providing her with just the perspective she needed, to see
things once again in their true proportions. Distance seemed wonderfully
to soften away all the horridnesses. Nothing had really happened. On the
contrary, against this stimulating background it was reassuringly plain
that everything was agreeably settled at last, or very soon to be so
settled. More and more, as April drew steadily nearer, Mr. Canning
towered shiningly in the foreground of her thought.
The days passed quickly enough. She and Florrie spent many absorbing
mornings in the shops, Carlisle for the most part "just looking," under
the coldly disapproving eyes of the shop-ladies. But her intentions were
serious at bottom, in view of three hundred dollars which papa had
privately given her, at the last moment, companied by a defiant wink.
(The wink indicated collusion against mamma, whose design it had been to
cut her daughter off penniless for the trip.) After a great deal of
looking, for she was a thrifty buyer, Cally expended one hundred and
twenty-five dollars for a perfectly lovely two-colored dress,
bewitchingly draped, and seventy-five dollars for a little silk suit.
Both were dirt cheap, Florrie agreed. She looked four times at a dear of
a hat going begging for seventy dollars, but with only three hundred you
have to draw the line somewhere, so Cally simply purchased a plain gray
motor-coat lined with gray corduroy, which she really needed, at sixty
dollars. She also sought a gift for papa, in recognition of his
liberality, and finally selected a silver penknife as just the thing.
The knife, luckily enough, could be got for only $2.50.
The young broker who had fallen in love with Carlisle came up four times
with Willing, called five times in between, and became host at two of
the "out" evenings for the party of four. Carlisle forbore to give him
any encouragement, though she rather liked his eyes, and the way his
mouth slanted up at the right corner.
"I'm wild about you," said he, on her last evening,--his name, if it is
of the smallest interest, was Pierce Watkins, Jr.,--"I'll shoot myself
on your doorstep to-morrow if it'll give you even a moment of pleasure."
Carlisle assured him that she desired no suicidal attentions.
"You're the loveliest thing I ever looked at," said he, huskily. "God
bless you for that, anyway. And no matter what else happens to me, I'll
love you till I die."
"Don't look so glum, Mr. Watkins dear," said Cally.
They did not go to any matinee on the last afternoon, the reason being
that it was Monday and there weren't any, except the vaudevilles, which
were voted tiresome. Florrie and Carlisle lunched quietly at "home"; had
a rubber of bridge afterwards in the apartment of Edith Jennison (who
produced for the necessary fourth an acquaintance she had made last week
in the tea-room of the Waldorf-Astoria); and rushed from the table for
hats, veils, and a drive on the Avenue.
Carlisle was to leave at ten o'clock. Her trunks were packed; her
"reservations" lay in the heavy gold bag swinging from her side. Home,
somehow, beckoned to her as it had never done before. Besides, New York,
with its swarming population (mostly with palms up) and its ceaseless
quadruple lines of motor-cars, began to oppress her.
"It's too full of people," she laughed to Mrs. Willing as they shot down
in the lift. "It's too big. Some day it will swell up and burst."
"Why, that's the fun of it, rusticus! How I love the roar!"
"I like it, too," said Carlisle. "But I do think it's nice to live in a
city where you can _some_times cross Main Street without asking four
policemen, and then probably having your leg picked off, after all."
They dashed across the onyx lobby for the main entrance, as fast as they
could go, Mrs. Willing remarking that they were almost too late to catch
the crowds as it was. From the small blue-velvet parlor, across the
corridor from the clerk's desk, a tall man rose at the sight of them,
and came straight forward. For a moment Carlisle's heart stopped beating
as she saw that it was Hugo Canning.
He advanced with his eyes upon her, brought her to a halt before him. If
the imps of memory must have their little toll at this remeeting, the
flicker passed through her too quickly for her to take note of it. It
woke no palest ghost of rebellion, to walk now. The girl's heart, having
missed a beat, ran away in a wild flutter....
"Did my cards reach you?" said the remembered voice, without preface.
"They just went up, I believe. But I see you mean to go out."
He looked a little pale under the lobby's brilliant lights, but never
had he seemed so handsome and impressive. Carlisle looked up and looked
down, and the sight of him there was an exaltation and heavenly
fulfilment and a garland upon her brow.
"We must have passed them as we came down," said she. "How do you do? I
had no idea you were in this part of the world."
He said that he was just off the train. She presented him to Mrs.
Willing, who hardly repressed a start as she heard and identified
his name.
"Will you come with us for a little drive?" said Carlisle. "We were
just starting out to take the air. Or ..."
Florrie Willing looked intensely eager. Canning hesitated. The feminine
intuitions, of which we have heard so much, naturally divined the cause
of his hesitation, and Florrie rushed into the breach.
"You're excused from our engagement, Cally!" said she, with archness,
and some nobility, too. "I know Mr. Canning doesn't care to parade the
Avenue in our last year's model. You shall have the city to yourselves.
Why not go up to the apartment?"
Carlisle glanced at Canning, who said: "You are very nice and kind, Mrs.
Willing." Mrs. Willing looked at him as much as to say, "I can be five
times as nice as that, if you only knew...."