"I guess you've got to have the whole story now, though it ain't a very
pretty story to tell a girl," said Effie May wearily. "I don't know as
your papa would much want you to hear it, Joan...."
To the girl the whole episode seemed unreal, part of that strange day,
with the holiday crowds, the brief, hectic excitement of the races,
followed by the pistol-shot that meant the death of a ruined old woman.
She could not believe that she, Joan Darcy, convent-bred, the daughter
of reserved and fastidious people, could be actually participating in
this impossible melodrama.
"What my father would wish hardly matters now, I think," she said, more
frigidly than she realized. "Please say what you have to say."
All the way home her step-mother had wept, steadily and hopelessly, with
ugly snuffling noises that took away what dignity there might have been
in her grief. Joan, always helpless in the face of uncontrolled emotion,
made no effort to comfort her. Her impulse of pity had already died into
disgust. She could not look at that swollen, grayish face, of whose
careful complexion tears made strange havoc.
The woman sighed. "If only you weren't so young!--I suppose you think
I'm a bad lot--bad as they make 'em. But I'm not. I never was. Oh, I
know I've done things ladies don't do!--but then ladies ain't often
asked to do 'em, dearie. You got to remember that."
Joan shrugged, and resigned herself to hear what she was to hear.
"I guess you know I wasn't born a lady, nor raised like one, though I've
tried.... Well, never mind that!--Pa had a little cash-and-carry grocer
store over to Indianapolis, and we lived upstairs, all of us in two
rooms.... It was the dirt I couldn't stand, and the crowding. It ain't
_right_ for a whole lot of children to live like that, all mixed in so!
The others didn't seem to mind, but I was always sort of nice in my
ways. Maybe because I was born before Mom took to the coke."
"The what?"
"Coke--dope, you know. It was the only thing that seemed to keep her
going, poor Mom! and I'm glad she had it."
"Was your mother an invalid?" asked Joan, a little startled by this
breadth of tolerance.
"Oh, no. But kids come along once a year regular, and she wasn't ever,
so to speak, well. I made up my mind when I wasn't more than ten never
to get myself in the fix Ma was in!... My two older sisters felt that
way, too, I guess. They always had fellows, but not the sort that'd do
to marry. Men like Pa, you know. No 'count--One of the girls worked at a
dressmaker's, and sewed till her eyes were red all the time, and her
shoulders stooped and she coughed. The other--well, the other didn't
keep straight, dearie. Awful few of the girls I knew did keep straight.
But Mame went into one of those houses--you know?--and had a lot of
swell clothes, and jewelry and all. I remember all us younger ones used
to envy her. But she didn't last long at it, and she died--horrible."
Effie May's eyes were fixed on strange places, and the tragedy of the
world was in them.
"She used to be a pretty thing, Mame; and sweet, too.... Well, it seemed
to me there ought to be _something_ better for a girl than marrying a
man like Pa and slaving, or getting a good job like Jule's and slaving,
or going wrong like Mame and slaving worst of all! Once when I was out
delivering dresses for the dressmaker where Jule worked, I saw what I
was looking for. Society women. Ladies.
"That's what I'm going to be," I says to myself, "a Society woman! (I
was about twelve then.) You don't have to work, you live in a fine house
and wear swell clothes, and you can keep as straight as you like.
"The others used to laugh at me, but Mom never did. She was real
ambitious for her children, Mom was. 'You keep on thinkin' so and you'll
get there,' she used to say. 'You're smart and pretty enough for
anything!' And so I was, then!" Effie May gave a sigh.
"A fellow come along presently that looked pretty good to me. I met him
over to Casey's dance-hall, I remember, and from the first it was all up
with him. He was better than the fellows I'd been running with; a good
dresser, always flashing his roll--you know race-horse people used to
make good money before the Pari-Mutuels--And when he wanted me to come
over here to Louisville with him--well, it looked to be my
chance--Imagine starting out to be a lady, in company with Joe
Markheim!" said Effie May grimly.
Joan exclaimed, "Not that dreadful-looking creature you were talking
with to-day?"
The other nodded. "Only he wasn't dreadful-looking then. He was real
handsome--or he looked that way to me. You see I was only sixteen," she
sighed. "Almost anything in pants that'd take me away from home would
have looked good to me then, I guess!--But I talked to Mom about it, and
she thought I'd better take a chance, too. So I went."
The girl had begun to shiver a little. "You mean--you married him?"
Effie May gave her a queer look. "Well, yes. As near as I could. You see
he had a wife at the time."
"He--betrayed you, then?" gasped Joan.
"Oh, no, dearie, I knew. So did Ma. But we thought I'd better take a
chance.... You see, things like that depend on how you're raised. To us
it was almost the same as being married. Not like poor Mame, you know.
There's a whole lot of difference between a kept woman, and _her_ sort."
"Is there?" said Joan with stiff lips.
"My, yes! Sometimes if the man sees you're straight, he marries you
after a while.... But Joe didn't. I'm sure I don't know why I stuck to
him as long as I did, except, that I'm sort of an affectionate
disposition and don't like to change," she ruminated. "And then he began
to play in pretty bad luck, too, and that's not the time to leave a man,
when he's down and out. I guess I'd have been sticking yet, if he'd
acted decent--I ain't going to tell you what he asked me to do once when
he got on his uppers," she said, darkly flushing, "but it was something
no gentleman would have proposed to a woman who'd stuck to him through
thick and thin for years! That's when I left him for Calloway."
"Did--did Mr. Calloway marry you?" asked Joan faintly.
"Sure he did! Just before he died. He got religion, and the priest told
him he ought, so as he could leave me his money without any fuss. He was
a good old sport, that priest! And so was Calloway. Never turned a hair.
'Wish I'd done it before!' says he--Don't you think that's a pretty good
recommendation for a woman, when a man's willing to marry her after
living with her for fifteen years?" she asked wistfully.
"I suppose so," murmured Joan--The usual thing was happening to her. Old
standards receded. Inevitably, irresistibly, she was beginning to see
things through the other's eyes. This was Joan's great weakness--though
there were people who considered it her strength.
"Calloway was pretty near to being a gentleman--not a born one, like
your papa, dearie, but real genteel in his instincts, and he did a whole
lot to make a lady of me. He always insisted on us having the best of
everything, company especially. When he knew he had to die, poor
boy!"--her lips trembled--"he says to me, says he, 'Here's your chance,
old girl! Take the money, and go somewhere and make a fresh start,' he
says. 'You'll do! You're good as any of 'em.' His very words, dearie!
'You're good as any of 'em.'"--She wiped her eyes.
"And so you came here?" prompted the girl.
"Yes. I'd always liked the place. It seemed sort of friendly and
homelike, and it's small enough so that your money counts for something.
It wouldn't be lost, I thought, like in New York or Chicago--But I was
kind of lonesome at first--always been used to having a man around--and
I didn't know anybody. And then your mama died, and I saw my way clear.
You didn't know I knew your mama, did you, dearie?"
Joan was rather startled. She had not realized quite how early her life
and her father's had been swept into the stream of this woman's
ambition.
"Well, I did. Not to speak to, of course. But I used to watch her out of
my back windows, and think what a lady she was to be so poor, and wished
I knew how to scrape acquaintance with her. And once she caught me
watching her, and smiled up, just as sweet, as if she'd known me always
and liked me. (Sort of the way _you_ smile, dearie, when you're real
pleased.)--And when she died the idea came to me, all of a sudden, that
I was the person to look after them she'd left."
Suddenly she buried her face in her hands and began to weep again. "Oh,
Gawd! Think of where I'd got to, and look where I'm at now!"
Joan moved restlessly about the room, conscious of the ache of tears in
her own throat. She pictured that child of the streets and dancehalls,
poor little "Lightfoot Ef," as they called her, struggling to better her
condition, sturdily trying to find some tenable place of her own in
life, even as she, Joan, was trying--but under what hopeless handicaps!
She thought of the cocaine-drugged mother with ambitions; of the evil,
treacherous creature with whom the child had chosen to "take a chance";
and it began to seem almost a miracle that Effie May should be what she
was. Joan looked at her with something like respect.
"But I heard you tell my father you had buried two husbands!" she said
sharply. "If you really felt that you were 'good as any of them,'
that--that you had practically been married--why didn't you make a clean
breast of it all?"
"Because I'm no fool!" gulped Effie May. "There are some things a man
won't stand for--though God knows why _they_ should be so all-fired
particular! And it seemed the only chance I'd ever get to marry a real
gentleman. Besides, there was you."
"Me?"
"Why, yes, dearie. I'd never had any children, and I always thought if I
could have I'd like 'em all to be girls, that I could dress up, and do
for, and bring up nice.... Oh, Gawd, Gawd!" she moaned, suddenly
flinging herself across the bed, face down. "Here I am in a grand house,
with a limousine, and servants of my own, and a husband like a king, and
a young lady daughter in society, and me giving parties to the pick of
the land!... And now to go down again, back to the gutter!" She beat the
bed with her fists.
There was something appalling in the utter abandonment of this woman
whom Joan had never before seen otherwise than cheerful and poised.
"If I'd never gone to the races! Oh, Gawd! If I'd never gone! I had a
hunch. I knew I'd meet up with that skunk Joe again somewheres, and I'd
ought to have kept out of his way! There isn't a soul in this town could
'a' told on me unless it was that boy Blair."
"Archie?" repeated Joan, surprised.
"Yes," she sobbed. "He spotted me the first time he saw me--I don't know
how. But I could 'a' kept _his_ mouth shut all right!--I was fixing him
so he'd never tell...."
In her abandonment Effie May might have said rather more than she meant
to say, if at that moment a great honking of horns and shouting of gay
farewells had not announced the return of the tallyho from the Derby.
She sat erect with a gasp. "It's _him_! For goodness' sake don't let
your papa catch me like this!" She flew to her dressing-table, reaching
for cold cream, powder, rouge. "Keep him off," she besought the girl.
"Quick!--pull down those shades--there, that's better. Help me into a
negligee--no, no, not that green one, for heaven's sake!--a pink one.
Now some perfume. Tell him he must be very quiet because of my
headache--don't forget, that's why we came home. There!--how do I look?"
She leaned back languidly in a chaise-longue, with a handkerchief dipped
in cologne hiding her swollen eyes.
Joan, rather dazed, had assisted at these hasty rites, marveling at the
triviality of a mind which could turn in one second from the catastrophe
of a wrecked life to considerations of vanity. And then the sheer
desperation of the thing struck her. Effie May was not done yet. She
meant to go down fighting.
There was something in the girl that always responded to gallant effort.
"Good luck," she said queerly, and went to the door.
"Wait!" gasped the woman. "Joan! _Are you going to tell him right
away?_"
"Not--right away," said the girl slowly.
There came a little rush behind her. Effie May had caught up one of her
hands, and kissed it....