GIGOLO

In the first place, _gigolo_ is slang. In the second place (with no

desire to appear patronizing, but one's French conversation class does

not include the _argot_), it is French slang. In the third place, the

gig is pronounced zhig, and the whole is not a respectable word.

Finally, it is a term of utter contempt.

A gigolo, generally speaking, is a man who lives off women's money. In

the mad year 1922 A. W., a gigolo, definitely speaking, designated one

of those incredible and pathetic male creatures, born of the war, who,

for ten francs or more or even less, would dance with any woman wishing

to dance on the crowded floors of public tea rooms, dinner or supper

rooms in the cafés, hotels, and restaurants of France. Lean, sallow,

handsome, expert, and unwholesome, one saw them everywhere, their slim

waists and sleek heads in juxtaposition to plump, respectable American

matrons and slender, respectable American flappers. For that matter,

feminine respectability of almost every nationality (except the French)

yielded itself to the skilful guidance of the genus gigolo in the tango

or fox-trot. Naturally, no decent French girl would have been allowed

for a single moment to dance with a gigolo. But America, touring Europe

like mad after years of enforced absence, outnumbered all other nations

atravel ten to one.

By no feat of fancy could one imagine Gideon Gory, of the Winnebago,

Wisconsin, Gorys, employed daily and nightly as a gigolo in the gilt and

marble restaurants that try to outsparkle the Mediterranean along the

Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Gideon Gory, of Winnebago, Wisconsin! Why

any one knows that the Gorys were to Winnebago what the Romanoffs were

to Russia--royal, remote, omnipotent. Yet the Romanoffs went in the

cataclysm, and so, too, did the Gorys. To appreciate the depths to which

the boy Gideon had fallen one must have known the Gorys in their glory.

It happened something like this:

The Gorys lived for years in the great, ugly, sprawling, luxurious old

frame house on Cass Street. It was high up on the bluff overlooking the

Fox River and, incidentally, the huge pulp and paper mills across the

river in which the Gory money had been made. The Gorys were so rich and

influential (for Winnebago, Wisconsin) that they didn't bother to tear

down the old frame house and build a stone one, or to cover its faded

front with cosmetics of stucco. In most things the Gorys led where

Winnebago could not follow. They disdained to follow where Winnebago

led. The Gorys had an automobile when those vehicles were entered from

the rear and when Winnebago roads were a wallow of mud in the spring and

fall and a snow-lined trench in the winter. The family was of the town,

and yet apart from it. The Gorys knew about golf, and played it in far

foreign playgrounds when the rest of us thought of it, if we thought of

it at all, as something vaguely Scotch, like haggis. They had oriental

rugs and hardwood floors when the town still stepped on carpets; and by

the time the rest of the town had caught up on rugs the Gorys had gone

back to carpets, neutral tinted. They had fireplaces in bedrooms, and

used them, like characters in an English novel. Old Madame Gory had a

slim patent leather foot, with a buckle, and carried a sunshade when she

visited the flowers in the garden. Old Gideon was rumoured to have wine

with his dinner. Gideon Junior (father of Giddy) smoked cigarettes with

his monogram on them. Shroeder's grocery ordered endive for them, all

blanched and delicate in a wicker basket from France or Belgium, when we

had just become accustomed to head-lettuce.

Every prosperous small American town has its Gory family. Every small

town newspaper relishes the savoury tid-bits that fall from the rich

table of the family life. Thus you saw that Mr. and Mrs. Gideon Gory,

Jr., have returned from California where Mr. Gory had gone for the polo.

Mr. and Mrs. Gideon Gory, Jr., announce the birth, in New York, of a

son, Gideon III (our, in a manner of speaking, hero). Mr. and Mrs.

Gideon Gory, Jr., and son Gideon III, left to-day for England and the

continent. It is understood that Gideon III will be placed at school in

England. Mr. and Mrs. Gideon Gory, accompanied by Madame Gory, have gone

to Chicago for a week of the grand opera.

Born of all this, you would have thought that young Giddy would grow up

a somewhat objectionable young man; and so, in fact, he did, though not

nearly so objectionable as he might well have been, considering things

in general and his mother in particular. At sixteen, for example, Giddy

was driving his own car--a car so exaggerated and low-slung and with

such a long predatory and glittering nose that one marvelled at the

expertness with which he swung its slim length around the corners of our

narrow tree-shaded streets. He was a real Gory, was Giddy, with his

thick waving black hair (which he tried for vain years to train into

docility), his lean swart face, and his slightly hooked Gory nose. In

appearance Winnebago pronounced him foreign looking--an attribute which

he later turned into a doubtful asset in Nice. On the rare occasions

when Giddy graced Winnebago with his presence you were likely to find

him pursuing the pleasures that occupied other Winnebago boys of his

age, if not station. In some miraculous way he had escaped being a snob.

Still, training and travel combined to lead him into many innocent

errors. When he dropped into Fetzer's pool shack carrying a malacca

cane, for example. He had carried a cane every day for six months in

Paris, whence he had just returned. Now it was as much a part of his

street attire as his hat--more, to be exact, for the hatless head had

just then become the street mode. There was a good game of Kelly in

progress. Giddy, leaning slightly on his stick, stood watching it.

Suddenly he was aware that all about the dim smoky little room players

and loungers were standing in attitudes of exaggerated elegance. Each

was leaning on a cue, his elbow crooked in as near an imitation of

Giddy's position as the stick's length would permit. The figure was

curved so that it stuck out behind and before; the expression on each

face was as asinine as its owner's knowledge of the comic-weekly swell

could make it; the little finger of the free hand was extravagantly

bent. The players themselves walked with a mincing step about the table.

And: "My deah fellah, what a pretty play. Mean to say, neat, don't you

know," came incongruously from the lips of Reddy Lennigan, whose father

ran the Lennigan House on Outagamie Street. He spatted his large hands

delicately together in further expression of approval.

"Think so?" giggled his opponent, Mr. Dutchy Meisenberg. "_Aw_--fly

sweet of you to say so, old thing." He tucked his unspeakable

handkerchief up his cuff and coughed behind his palm. He turned to

Giddy. "Excuse my not having my coat on, deah boy."

Just here Giddy might have done a number of things, all wrong. The game

was ended. He walked to the table, and, using the offending stick as a

cue, made a rather pretty shot that he had learned from Benoit in

London. Then he ranged the cane neatly on the rack with the cues. He

even grinned a little boyishly. "You win," he said. "My treat. What'll

you have?"

Which was pretty sporting for a boy whose American training had been

what Giddy's had been.

Giddy's father, on the death of old Gideon, proved himself much more

expert at dispensing the paper mill money than at accumulating it. After

old Madame Gory's death just one year following that of her husband,

Winnebago saw less and less of the three remaining members of the royal

family. The frame house on the river bluff would be closed for a year

or more at a time. Giddy's father rather liked Winnebago and would have

been content to spend six months of the year in the old Gory house, but

Giddy's mother, who had been a Leyden, of New York, put that idea out of

his head pretty effectively.

"Don't talk to me," she said, "about your duty toward the town that gave

you your money and all that kind of feudal rot because you know you

don't mean it. It bores you worse than it does me, really, but you like

to think that the villagers are pulling a forelock when you walk down

Normal Avenue. As a matter of fact they're not doing anything of the

kind. They've got their thumbs to their noses, more likely."

Her husband protested rather weakly. "I don't care. I like the old

shack. I know the heating apparatus is bum and that we get the smoke

from the paper mills, but--I don't know--last year, when we had that

punk pink palace at Cannes I kept thinking----"

Mrs. Gideon Gory raised the Leyden eyebrow. "Don't get sentimental, Gid,

for God's sake! It's a shanty, and you know it. And you know that it

needs everything from plumbing to linen. I don't see any sense in

sinking thousands in making it livable when we don't want to live in

it."

"But I do want to live in it--once in a while. I'm used to it. I was

brought up in it. So was the kid. He likes it, too. Don't you, Giddy?"

The boy was present, as usual, at this particular scene.

The boy worshipped his mother. But, also, he was honest. So, "Yeh, I

like the ol' barn all right," he confessed.

Encouraged, his father went on: "Yesterday the kid was standing out

there on the bluff-edge breathing like a whale, weren't you, Giddy? And

when I asked him what he was puffing about he said he liked the smell of

the sulphur and chemicals and stuff from the paper mills, didn't you,

kid?"

Shame-facedly, "Yeh," said Giddy.

Betrayed thus by husband and adored son, the Leyden did battle. "You can

both stay here, then," she retorted with more spleen than elegance, "and

sniff sulphur until you're black in the face. I'm going to London in

May."

They, too, went to London in May, of course, as she had known they

would. She had not known, though, that in leading her husband to England

in May she was leading him to his death as well.

"All Winnebago will be shocked and grieved to learn," said the Winnebago

_Courier_ to the extent of two columns and a cut, "of the sudden and

violent death in England of her foremost citizen, Gideon Gory. Death was

due to his being thrown from his horse while hunting."

... To being thrown from his horse while hunting. Shocked and grieved

though it might or might not be, Winnebago still had the fortitude to

savour this with relish. Winnebago had died deaths natural and

unnatural. It had been run over by automobiles, and had its skull

fractured at football, and been drowned in Lake Winnebago, and struck by

lightning, and poisoned by mushrooms, and shot by burglars. But never

had Winnebago citizen had the distinction of meeting death by being

thrown from his horse while hunting. While hunting. Scarlet coats.

Hounds in full cry. Baronial halls. Hunt breakfasts. _Vogue._ _Vanity

Fair._

Well! Winnebago was almost grateful for this final and most picturesque

gesture of Gideon Gory the second.

The widowed Leyden did not even take the trouble personally to

superintend the selling of the Gory place on the river bluff. It was

sold by an agent while she and Giddy were in Italy, and if she was ever

aware that the papers in the transaction stated that the house had been

bought by Orson J. Hubbell she soon forgot the fact and the name. Giddy,

leaning over her shoulder while she handled the papers, and signing on

the line indicated by a legal forefinger, may have remarked:

"Hubbell. That's old Hubbell, the dray man. Must be money in the draying

line."

Which was pretty stupid of him, because he should have known that the

draying business was now developed into the motor truck business with

great vans roaring their way between Winnebago and Kaukauna, Winnebago

and Neenah, and even Winnebago and Oshkosh. He learned that later.

Just now Giddy wasn't learning much of anything, and, to do him credit,

the fact distressed him not a little. His mother insisted that she

needed him, and developed a bad heart whenever he rebelled and

threatened to sever the apron-strings. They lived abroad entirely now.

Mrs. Gory showed a talent for spending the Gory gold that must have set

old Gideon to whirling in his Winnebago grave. Her spending of it was

foolish enough, but her handling of it was criminal. She loved Europe.

America bored her. She wanted to identify herself with foreigners, with

foreign life. Against advice she sold her large and lucrative interest

in the Winnebago paper mills and invested great sums in French stocks,

in Russian enterprises, in German shares.

She liked to be mistaken for a French woman.

She and Gideon spoke the language like natives--or nearly.

She was vain of Gideon's un-American looks, and cross with him when, on

their rare and brief visits to New York, he insisted that he liked

American tailoring and American-made shoes. Once or twice, soon after

his father's death, he had said, casually, "You didn't like Winnebago,

did you? Living in it, I mean."

"_Like_ it!"

"Well, these English, I mean, and French--they sort of grow up in a

place, and stay with it and belong to it, see what I mean? and it gives

you a kind of permanent feeling. Not patriotic, exactly, but solid and

native heathy and Scots-wha-hae-wi'-Wallace and all that kind of slop."

"Giddy darling, don't be silly."

Occasionally, too, he said, "Look here, Julia"--she liked this modern

method of address--"look here, Julia, I ought to be getting busy. Doing

something. Here I am, nineteen, and I can't do a thing except dance

pretty well, but not as well as that South American eel we met last

week; mix a cocktail pretty well, but not as good a one as Benny the

bartender turns out at Voyot's; ride pretty well, but not as well as the

English chaps; drive a car----"

She interrupted him there. "Drive a car better than even an Italian

chauffeur. Had you there, Giddy darling."

She undoubtedly had Giddy darling there. His driving was little short of

miraculous, and his feeling for the intricate inside of a motor engine

was as delicate and unerring as that of a professional pianist for his

pet pianoforte. They motored a good deal, with France as a permanent

background and all Europe as a playground. They flitted about the

continent, a whirl of glittering blue-and-cream enamel, tan leather

coating, fur robes, air cushions, gold-topped flasks, and petrol. Giddy

knew Como and Villa D'Este as the place where that pretty Hungarian

widow had borrowed a thousand lires from him at the Casino roulette

table and never paid him back; London as a pleasing potpourri of briar

pipes, smart leather gloves, music-hall revues, and night clubs; Berlin

as a rather stuffy hole where they tried to ape Paris and failed, but

you had to hand it to Charlotte when it came to the skating at the Eis

Palast. A pleasing existence, but unprofitable. No one saw the cloud

gathering because of cloud there was none, even of the man's-hand size

so often discerned as a portent.

When the storm broke (this must be hurriedly passed over because of the

let's-not-talk-about-the-war-I'm-so-sick-of-it-aren't-you feeling) Giddy

promptly went into the Lafayette Escadrille. Later he learned never to

mention this to an American because the American was so likely to say,

"There must have been about eleven million scrappers in that outfit.

Every fella you meet's been in the Lafayette Escadrille. If all the guys

were in it that say they were they could have licked the Germans the

first day out. That outfit's worse than the old Floradora Sextette."

Mrs. Gory was tremendously proud of him, and not as worried as she

should have been. She thought it all a rather smart game, and not at all

serious. She wasn't even properly alarmed about her European money, at

first. Giddy looked thrillingly distinguished and handsome in his

aviation uniform. When she walked in the Paris streets with him she

glowed like a girl with her lover. But after the first six months of it

Mrs. Gory, grown rather drawn and haggard, didn't think the whole affair

quite so delightful. She scarcely ever saw Giddy. She never heard the

drum of an airplane without getting a sick, gone feeling at the pit of

her stomach. She knew, now, that there was more to the air service than

a becoming uniform. She was doing some war work herself in an

incompetent, frenzied sort of way. With Giddy soaring high and her

foreign stocks and bonds falling low she might well be excused for the

panic that shook her from the time she opened her eyes in the morning

until she tardily closed them at night.

"Let's go home, Giddy darling," like a scared child.

"Where's that?"

"Don't be cruel. America's the only safe place now."

"Too darned safe!" This was 1915.

By 1917 she was actually in need of money. But Giddy did not know much

about this because Giddy had, roughly speaking, got his. He had the

habit of soaring up into the sunset and sitting around in a large pink

cloud like a kid bouncing on a feather bed. Then, one day, he soared

higher and farther than he knew, having, perhaps, grown careless through

over-confidence. He heard nothing above the roar of his own engine, and

the two planes were upon him almost before he knew it. They were not

French, or English, or American planes. He got one of them and would

have got clean away if the other had not caught him in the arm. The

right arm. His mechanician lay limp. Even then he might have managed a

landing but the pursuing plane got in a final shot. There followed a

period of time that seemed to cover, say, six years but that was

actually only a matter of seconds. At the end of that period Giddy,

together with a tangle of wire, silk, wood, and something that had been

the mechanician, lay inside the German lines, and you would hardly have

thought him worth the disentangling.

They did disentangle him, though, and even patched him up pretty

expertly, but not so expertly, perhaps, as they might have, being enemy

surgeons and rather busy with the patching of their own injured. The

bone, for example, in the lower right arm, knitted promptly and

properly, being a young and healthy bone, but they rather over-looked

the matter of arm nerves and muscles, so that later, though it looked a

perfectly proper arm, it couldn't lift four pounds. His head had emerged

slowly, month by month, from swathings of gauze. What had been quite a

crevasse in his skull became only a scarlet scar that his hair pretty

well hid when he brushed it over the bad place. But the surgeon, perhaps

being overly busy, or having no real way of knowing that Giddy's nose

had been a distinguished and aristocratically hooked Gory nose, had

remoulded that wrecked feature into a pure Greek line at first sight of

which Giddy stood staring weakly into the mirror; reeling a little with

surprise and horror and unbelief and general misery. "Can this be I?" he

thought, feeling like the old man of the bramble bush in the Mother

Goose rhyme. A well-made and becoming nose, but not so fine looking as

the original feature had been, as worn by Giddy.

"Look here!" he protested to the surgeon, months too late. "Look here,

this isn't my nose."

"Be glad," replied that practical Prussian person, "that you have any."

With his knowledge of French and English and German Giddy acted as

interpreter during the months of his invalidism and later internment,

and things were not so bad with him. He had no news of his mother,

though, and no way of knowing whether she had news of him. With 1918,

and the Armistice and his release, he hurried to Paris and there got the

full impact of the past year's events.

Julia Gory was dead and the Gory money nonexistent.

Out of the ruins--a jewel or two and some paper not quite worthless--he

managed a few thousand francs and went to Nice. There he walked in the

sunshine, and sat in the sunshine, and even danced in the sunshine, a

dazed young thing together with hundreds of other dazed young things,

not thinking, not planning, not hoping. Existing only in a state of

semi-consciousness like one recovering from a blinding blow. The francs

dribbled away. Sometimes he played baccarat and won; oftener he played

baccarat and lost. He moved in a sort of trance, feeling nothing.

Vaguely he knew that there was a sort of Conference going on in Paris.

Sometimes he thought of Winnebago, recalling it remotely, dimly, as one

is occasionally conscious of a former unknown existence. Twice he went

to Paris for periods of some months, but he was unhappy there and even

strangely bewildered, like a child. He was still sick in mind and body,

though he did not know it. Driftwood, like thousands of others, tossed

up on the shore after the storm; lying there bleached and useless and

battered.

Then, one day in Nice, there was no money. Not a franc. Not a centime.

He knew hunger. He knew terror. He knew desperation. It was out of this

period that there emerged Giddy, the gigolo. Now, though, the name

bristled with accent marks, thus: Gédéon Goré.

This Gédéon Goré, of the Nice dansants, did not even remotely resemble

Gideon Gory of Winnebago, Wisconsin. This Gédéon Goré wore French

clothes of the kind that Giddy Gory had always despised. A slim, sallow,

sleek, sad-eyed gigolo in tight French garments, the pants rather flappy

at the ankle; effeminate French shoes with fawn-coloured uppers and

patent-leather eyelets and vamps, most despicable; a slim cane; hair

with a magnificent natural wave that looked artificially marcelled and

that was worn with a strip growing down from the temples on either side

in the sort of cut used only by French dandies and English stage

butlers. No, this was not Giddy Gory. The real Giddy Gory lay in a smart

but battered suitcase under the narrow bed in his lodgings. The suitcase

contained:

Item; one grey tweed suit with name of a London tailor inside.

Item; one pair Russia calf oxfords of American make.

Item; one French aviation uniform with leather coat, helmet, and gloves

all bearing stiff and curious splotches of brown or rust-colour which

you might not recognize as dried blood stains.

Item; one handful assorted medals, ribbons, orders, etc.

All Europe was dancing. It seemed a death dance, grotesque, convulsive,

hideous. Paris, Nice, Berlin, Budapest, Rome, Vienna, London writhed and

twisted and turned and jiggled. St. Vitus himself never imagined

contortions such as these. In the narrow side-street dance rooms of

Florence, and in the great avenue restaurants of Paris they were

performing exactly the same gyrations--wiggle, squirm, shake. And over

all the American jazz music boomed and whanged its syncopation. On the

music racks of violinists who had meant to be Elmans or Kreislers were

sheets entitled Jazz Baby Fox Trot. Drums, horns, cymbals, castanets,

sandpaper. So the mannequins and marionettes of Europe tried to whirl

themselves into forgetfulness.

The Americans thought Giddy was a Frenchman. The French knew him for an

American, dress as he would. Dancing became with him a profession--no, a

trade. He danced flawlessly, holding and guiding his partner

impersonally, firmly, expertly in spite of the weak right arm--it served

well enough. Gideon Gory had always been a naturally rhythmic dancer.

Then, too, he had been fond of dancing. Years of practise had perfected

him. He adopted now the manner and position of the professional. As he

danced he held his head rather stiffly to one side, and a little down,

the chin jutting out just a trifle. The effect was at the same time

stiff and chic. His footwork was infallible. The intricate and imbecilic

steps of the day he performed in flawless sequence. Under his masterly

guidance the feet of the least rhythmic were suddenly endowed with

deftness and grace. One swayed with him as naturally as with an

elemental force. He danced politely and almost wordlessly unless first

addressed, according to the code of his kind. His touch was firm, yet

remote. The dance concluded, he conducted his partner to her seat, bowed

stiffly from the waist, heels together, and departed. For these services

he was handed ten francs, twenty francs, thirty francs, or more, if

lucky, depending on the number of times he was called upon to dance with

a partner during the evening. Thus was dancing, the most spontaneous and

unartificial of the Muses, vulgarized, commercialized, prostituted.

Lower than Gideon Gory, of Winnebago, Wisconsin, had fallen, could no

man fall.

Sometimes he danced in Paris. During the high season he danced in Nice.

Afternoon and evening found him busy in the hot, perfumed, overcrowded

dance salons. The Negresco, the Ruhl, Maxim's, Belle Meunière, the

Casina Municipale. He learned to make his face go a perfect

blank--pale, cryptic, expressionless. Between himself and the other boys

of his ilk there was little or no professional comradeship. A weird lot

they were, young, though their faces were strangely lacking in the look

of youth. All of them had been in the war. Most of them had been

injured. There was Aubin, the Frenchman. The right side of Aubin's face

was rather startlingly handsome in its Greek perfection. It was like a

profile chiselled. The left side was another face--the same, and yet not

the same. It was as though you saw the left side out of drawing, or

blurred, or out of focus. It puzzled you--shocked you. The left side of

Aubin's face had been done over by an army surgeon who, though deft and

scientific, had not had a hand expert as that of the Original Sculptor.

Then there was Mazzetti, the Roman. He parted his hair on the wrong

side, and under the black wing of it was a deep groove into which you

could lay a forefinger. A piece of shell had plowed it neatly. The

Russian boy who called himself Orloff had the look in his eyes of one

who has seen things upon which eyes never should have looked. He smoked

constantly and ate, apparently, not at all. Among these there existed a

certain unwritten code and certain unwritten signals.

You did not take away the paying partner of a fellow gigolo. If in too

great demand you turned your surplus partners over to gigolos

unemployed. You did not accept less than ten francs (they all broke this

rule). Sometimes Gédéon Goré made ten francs a day, sometimes twenty,

sometimes fifty, infrequently a hundred. Sometimes not enough to pay for

his one decent meal a day. At first he tried to keep fit by walking a

certain number of miles daily along the ocean front. But usually he was

too weary to persist in this. He did not think at all. He felt nothing.

Sometimes, down deep, deep in a long-forgotten part of his being a voice

called feebly, plaintively to the man who had been Giddy Gory. But he

shut his ears and mind and consciousness and would not listen.

The American girls were best, the gigolos all agreed, and they paid

well, though they talked too much. Gédéon Goré was a favourite among

them. They thought he was so foreign looking, and kind of sad and stern

and everything. His French, fluent, colloquial, and bewildering, awed

them. They would attempt to speak to him in halting and hackneyed

phrases acquired during three years at Miss Pence's Select School at

Hastings-on-the-Hudson. At the cost of about a thousand dollars a word

they would enunciate, painfully:

"_Je pense que_--um--_que Nice est le plus belle_--uh--_ville de

France_."

Giddy, listening courteously, his head inclined as though unwilling to

miss one conversational pearl falling from the pretty American's lips,

would appear to consider this gravely. Then, sometimes in an unexpected

burst of pure mischief, he would answer:

"You said something! _Some_ burg, I'm telling the world."

The girl, startled, would almost leap back from the confines of his arms

only to find his face stern, immobile, his eyes sombre and reflective.

"Why! Where did you pick that up?"

His eyebrows would go up. His face would express complete lack of

comprehension. "_Pardon?_"

Afterward, at home, in Toledo or Kansas City or Los Angeles, the girl

would tell about it. "I suppose some American girl taught it to him,

just for fun. It sounded too queer--because his French was so wonderful.

He danced divinely. A Frenchman, and so aristocratic! Think of his being

a professional partner. They have them over there, you know. Everybody's

dancing in Europe. And gay! Why, you'd never know there'd been a war."

Mary Hubbell, of the Winnebago Hubbells, did not find it so altogether

gay. Mary Hubbell, with her father, Orson J. Hubbell, and her mother,

Bee Hubbell, together with what appeared to be practically the entire

white population of the United States, came to Europe early in 1922,

there to travel, to play, to rest, to behold, and to turn their good

hard American dollars into cordwood-size bundles of German marks,

Austrian kronen, Italian lires, and French francs. Most of the men

regarded Europe as a wine list. In their mental geography Rheims, Rhine,

Moselle, Bordeaux, Champagne, or Würzburg were not localities but

libations. The women, for the most part, went in for tortoise-shell

combs, fringed silk shawls, jade earrings, beaded bags, and coral neck

chains. Up and down the famous thoroughfare of Europe went the absurd

pale blue tweed tailleurs and the lavender tweed cape suits of America's

wives and daughters. Usually, after the first month or two, they shed

these respectable, middle-class habiliments for what they fondly

believed to be smart Paris costumes; and you could almost invariably

tell a good, moral, church-going matron of the Middle West by the fact

that she was got up like a demimondaine of the second class, in the

naïve belief that she looked French and chic.

The three Hubbells were thoroughly nice people. Mary Hubbell was more

than thoroughly nice. She was a darb. She had done a completely good job

during the 1918-1918 period, including the expert driving of a wild and

unbroken Ford up and down the shell-torn roads of France. One of those

small-town girls with a big-town outlook, a well-trained mind, a slim

boyish body, a good clear skin, and a steady eye that saw. Mary Hubbell

wasn't a beauty by a good many measurements, but she had her points, as

witness the number of bouquets, bundles, books, and bon-bons piled in

her cabin when she sailed.

The well-trained mind and the steady seeing eye enabled Mary Hubbell to

discover that Europe wasn't so gay as it seemed to the blind; and she

didn't write home to the effect that you'd never know there'd been war.

The Hubbells had the best that Europe could afford. Orson J. Hubbell, a

mild-mannered, grey-haired man with a nice flat waist-line and a good

keen eye (hence Mary's) adored his women-folk and spoiled them. During

the first years of his married life he had been Hubbell, the drayman, as

Giddy Gory had said. He had driven one of his three drays himself,

standing sturdily in the front of the red-painted wooden two-horse wagon

as it rattled up and down the main business thoroughfare of Winnebago.

But the war and the soaring freight-rates had dealt generously with

Orson Hubbell. As railroad and shipping difficulties increased the

Hubbell draying business waxed prosperous. Factories, warehouses, and

wholesale business firms could be assured that their goods would arrive

promptly, safely, and cheaply when conveyed by a Hubbell van. So now

the three red-painted wooden horse-driven drays were magically

transformed into a great fleet of monster motor vans that plied up and

down the state of Wisconsin and even into Michigan and Illinois and

Indiana. The Orson J. Hubbell Transportation Company, you read. And

below, in yellow lettering on the red background:

Have HUBBELL Do Your HAULING.

There was actually a million in it, and more to come. The buying of the

old Gory house on the river bluff had been one of the least of Orson's

feats. And now that house was honeycombed with sleeping porches and

linen closets and enamel fittings and bathrooms white and glittering as

an operating auditorium. And there were shower baths, and blue rugs, and

great soft fuzzy bath towels and little white innocent guest towels

embroidered with curly H's whose tails writhed at you from all corners.

Orson J. and Mrs. Hubbell had never been in Europe before, and they

enjoyed themselves enormously. That is to say, Mrs. Orson J. did, and

Orson, seeing her happy, enjoyed himself vicariously. His hand slid in

and out of his inexhaustible pocket almost automatically now. And "How

much?" was his favourite locution. They went everywhere, did everything.

Mary boasted a pretty fair French. Mrs. Hubbell conversed in the

various languages of Europe by speaking pidgin English very loud, and

omitting all verbs, articles, adverbs, and other cumbersome

superfluities. Thus, to the _fille de chambre_.

"Me out now you beds." The red-cheeked one from the provinces

understood, in some miraculous way, that Mrs. Hubbell was now going out

and that the beds could be made and the rooms tidied.

They reached Nice in February and plunged into its gaieties. "Just

think!" exclaimed Mrs. Hubbell rapturously, "only three francs for a

facial or a manicure and two for a marcel. It's like finding them."

"If the Mediterranean gets any bluer," said Mary, "I don't think I can

stand it, it's so lovely."

Mrs. Hubbell, at tea, expressed a desire to dance. Mary, at tea, desired

to dance but didn't express it. Orson J. loathed tea; and the early

draying business had somewhat unfitted his sturdy legs for the lighter

movements of the dance. But he wanted only their happiness. So he looked

about a bit, and asked some questions, and came back.

"Seems there's a lot of young chaps who make a business of dancing with

the women-folks who haven't dancing men along. Hotel hires 'em. Funny to

us but I guess it's all right, and quite the thing around here. You pay

'em so much a dance, or so much an afternoon. You girls want to try

it?"

"I do," said Mrs. Orson J. Hubbell. "It doesn't sound respectable. Then

that's what all those thin little chaps are who have been dancing with

those pretty American girls. They're sort of ratty looking, aren't they?

What do they call 'em? That's a nice-looking one, over there--no,

no!--dancing with the girl in grey, I mean. If that's one I'd like to

dance with him, Orson. Good land, what would the Winnebago ladies say!

What do they call 'em, I wonder."

Mary had been gazing very intently at the nice-looking one over there

who was dancing with the girl in grey. She answered her mother's

question, still gazing at him. "They call them gigolos," she said,

slowly. Then, "Get that one Dad, will you, if you can? You dance with

him first, Mother, and then I'll----"

"I can get two," volunteered Orson J.

"No," said Mary Hubbell, sharply.

The nice-looking gigolo seemed to be in great demand, but Orson J.

succeeded in capturing him after the third dance. It turned out to be a

tango, and though Mrs. Hubbell, pretty well scared, declared that she

didn't know it and couldn't dance it, the nice-looking gigolo assured

her, through the medium of Mary's interpretation, that Mrs. Hubbell had

only to follow his guidance. It was quite simple. He did not seem to

look directly at Mary, or at Orson J. or at Mrs. Hubbell, as he spoke.

The dance concluded, Mrs. Hubbell came back breathless, but enchanted.

"He has beautiful manners," she said, aloud, in English. "And dance! You

feel like a swan when you're dancing with him. Try him, Mary." The

gigolo's face, as he bowed before her, was impassive, inscrutable.

But, "Sh!" said Mary.

"Nonsense! Doesn't understand a word."

Mary danced the next dance with him. They danced wordlessly until the

dance was half over. Then, abruptly, Mary said in English, "What's your

name?"

Close against him she felt a sudden little sharp contraction of the

gigolo's diaphragm--the contraction that reacts to surprise or alarm.

But he said, in French, "_Pardon?_"

So, "What's your name?" said Mary, in French this time.

The gigolo with the beautiful manners hesitated longer than really

beautiful manners should permit. But finally, "Je m'appelle Gédéon

Goré." He pronounced it in his most nasal, perfect Paris French. It

didn't sound even remotely like Gideon Gory.

"My name's Hubbell," said Mary, in her pretty fair French. "Mary

Hubbell. I come from a little town called Winnebago."

The Goré eyebrow expressed polite disinterestedness.

"That's in Wisconsin," continued Mary, "and I love it."

"_Naturellement_," agreed the gigolo, stiffly.

They finished the dance without further conversation. Mrs. Hubbell had

the next dance. Mary the next. They spent the afternoon dancing, until

dinner time. Orson J.'s fee, as he handed it to the gigolo, was the kind

that mounted grandly into dollars instead of mere francs. The gigolo's

face, as he took it, was not more inscrutable than Mary's as she watched

him take it.

From that afternoon, throughout the next two weeks, if any girl as

thoroughly fine as Mary Hubbell could be said to run after any man, Mary

ran after that gigolo. At the same time one could almost have said that

he tried to avoid her. Mary took a course of tango lessons, and urged

her mother to do the same. Even Orson J. noticed it.

"Look here," he said, in kindly protest. "Aren't you getting pretty

thick with this jigger?"

"Sociological study, Dad. I'm all right."

"Yeh, you're all right. But how about him?"

"He's all right, too."

The gigolo resisted Mary's unmaidenly advances, and yet, when he was

with her, he seemed sometimes to forget to look sombre and blank and

remote. They seemed to have a lot to say to each other. Mary talked

about America a good deal. About her home town ... "and big elms and

maples and oaks in the yard ... the Fox River valley ... Middle West ...

Normal Avenue ... Cass Street ... Fox River paper mills...."

She talked in French and English. The gigolo confessed, one day, to

understanding some English, though he seemed to speak none. After that

Mary, when very much in earnest, or when enthusiastic, spoke in her

native tongue altogether. She claimed an intense interest in European

after-war conditions, in reconstruction, in the attitude toward life of

those millions of young men who had actually participated in the

conflict. She asked questions that might have been considered

impertinent, not to say nervy.

"Now you," she said, brutally, "are a person of some education,

refinement, and background. Yet you are content to dance around in

these--these--well, back home a chap might wash dishes in a cheap

restaurant or run an elevator in an east side New York loft building,

but he'd never----"

A very faint dull red crept suddenly over the pallor of the gigolo's

face. They were sitting out on a bench on the promenade, facing the

ocean (in direct defiance on Mary's part of all rules of conduct of

respectable girls toward gigolos). Mary Hubbell had said rather brusque

things before. But now, for the first time, the young man defended

himself faintly.

"For us," he replied in his exquisite French, "it is finished. For us

there is nothing. This generation, it is no good. I am no good. They are

no good." He waved a hand in a gesture that included the promenaders,

the musicians in the cafés, the dancers, the crowds eating and drinking

at the little tables lining the walk.

"What rot!" said Mary Hubbell, briskly. "They probably said exactly the

same thing in Asia after Alexander had got through with 'em. I suppose

there was such dancing and general devilment in Macedonia that every one

said the younger generation had gone to the dogs since the war, and the

world would never amount to anything again. But it seemed to pick up,

didn't it?"

The boy turned and looked at her squarely for the first time, his eyes

meeting hers. Mary looked at him. She even swayed toward him a little,

her lips parted. There was about her a breathlessness, an expectancy. So

they sat for a moment, and between them the air was electric, vibrant.

Then, slowly, he relaxed, sat back, slumped a little on the bench. Over

his face, that for a moment had been alight with something vital, there

crept again the look of defeat, of sombre indifference. At sight of that

look Mary Hubbell's jaw set. She leaned forward. She clasped her fine

large hands tight. She did not look at the gigolo, but out, across the

blue Mediterranean, and beyond it. Her voice was low and a little

tremulous and she spoke in English only.

"It isn't finished here--here in Europe. But it's sick. Back home, in

America, though, it's alive. Alive! And growing. I wish I could make you

understand what it's like there. It's all new, and crude, maybe, and

ugly, but it's so darned healthy and sort of clean. I love it. I love

every bit of it. I know I sound like a flag-waver but I don't care. I

mean it. And I know it's sentimental, but I'm proud of it. The kind of

thing I feel about the United States is the kind of thing Mencken sneers

at. You don't know who Mencken is. He's a critic who pretends to despise

everything because he's really a sentimentalist and afraid somebody'll

find it out. I don't say I don't appreciate the beauty of all this Italy

and France and England and Germany. But it doesn't get me the way just

the mention of a name will get me back home. This trip, for example.

Why, last summer four of us--three other girls and I--motored from

Wisconsin to California, and we drove every inch of the way ourselves.

The Santa Fé Trail! The Ocean-to-Ocean Highway! The Lincoln Highway!

The Dixie Highway! The Yellowstone Trail! The very sound of those words

gives me a sort of prickly feeling. They mean something so big and vital

and new. I get a thrill out of them that I haven't had once over here.

Why even this," she threw out a hand that included and dismissed the

whole sparkling panorama before her, "this doesn't begin to give the

jolt that I got out of Walla Walla, and Butte, and Missoula, and

Spokane, and Seattle, and Albuquerque. We drove all day, and ate ham and

eggs at some little hotel or lunch-counter at night, and outside the

hotel the drummers would be sitting, talking and smoking; and there were

Western men, very tanned and tall and lean, in those big two-gallon hats

and khaki pants and puttees. And there were sunsets, and sand, and

cactus and mountains, and campers and Fords. I can smell the Kansas corn

fields and I can see the Iowa farms and the ugly little raw American

towns, and the big thin American men, and the grain elevators near the

railroad stations, and I know those towns weren't the way towns ought to

look. They were ugly and crude and new. Maybe it wasn't all beautiful,

but gosh! it was real, and growing, and big and alive! Alive!"

Mary Hubbell was crying. There, on the bench along the promenade in the

sunshine at Nice, she was crying.

The boy beside her suddenly rose, uttered a little inarticulate sound,

and left her there on the bench in the sunshine. Vanished, completely,

in the crowd.

For three days the Orson J. Hubbells did not see their favourite gigolo.

If Mary was disturbed she did not look it, though her eye was alert in

the throng. During the three days of their gigolo's absence Mrs. Hubbell

and Mary availed themselves of the professional services of the Italian

gigolo Mazzetti. Mrs. Hubbell said she thought his dancing was, if

anything, more nearly perfect than that What's-his-name, but his manner

wasn't so nice and she didn't like his eyes. Sort of sneaky. Mary said

she thought so, too.

Nevertheless she was undoubtedly affable toward him, and talked (in

French) and laughed and even walked with him, apparently in complete

ignorance of the fact that these things were not done. Mazzetti spoke

frequently of his colleague, Goré, and always in terms of disparagement.

A low fellow. A clumsy dancer. One unworthy of Mary's swanlike grace.

Unfit to receive Orson J. Hubbell's generous fees.

Late one evening, during the mid-week after-dinner dance, Goré appeared

suddenly in the doorway. It was ten o'clock. The Hubbells were dallying

with their after-dinner coffee at one of the small tables about the

dance floor.

Mary, keen-eyed, saw him first. She beckoned Mazzetti who stood in

attendance beside Mrs. Hubbell's chair. She snatched up the wrap that

lay at hand and rose. "It's stifling in here. I'm going out on the

Promenade for a breath of air. Come on." She plucked at Mazzetti's

sleeve and actually propelled him through the crowd and out of the room.

She saw Goré's startled eyes follow them.

She even saw him crossing swiftly to where her mother and father sat.

Then she vanished into the darkness with Mazzetti. And the Mazzettis put

but one interpretation upon a young woman who strolls into the soft

darkness of the Promenade with a gigolo.

And Mary Hubbell knew this.

Gédéon Goré stood before Mr. and Mrs. Orson J. Hubbell. "Where is your

daughter?" he demanded, in French.

"Oh, howdy-do," chirped Mrs. Hubbell. "Well, it's Mr. Goré! We missed

you. I hope you haven't been sick."

"Where is your daughter?" demanded Gédéon Goré, in French. "Where is

Mary?"

Mrs. Hubbell caught the word Mary. "Oh, Mary. Why, she's gone out for a

walk with Mr. Mazzetti."

"Good God!" said Gédéon Goré, in perfectly plain English. And vanished.

Orson J. Hubbell sat a moment, thinking. Then, "Why, say, he talked

English. That young French fella talked English."

The young French fella, hatless, was skimming down the Promenade des

Anglais, looking intently ahead, and behind, and to the side, and all

around in the darkness. He seemed to be following a certain trail,

however. At one side of the great wide walk, facing the ocean, was a

canopied bandstand. In its dim shadow, he discerned a wisp of white. He

made for it, swiftly, silently. Mazzetti's voice low, eager, insistent.

Mazzetti's voice hoarse, ugly, importunate. The figure in white rose.

Goré stood before the two. The girl took a step toward him, but Mazzetti

took two steps and snarled like a villain in a movie, if a villain in a

movie could be heard to snarl.

"Get out of here!" said Mazzetti, in French, to Goré. "You pig! Swine!

To intrude when I talk with a lady. You are finished. Now she belongs to

me."

"The hell she does!" said Giddy Gory in perfectly plain American and

swung for Mazzetti with his bad right arm. Mazzetti, after the fashion

of his kind, let fly in most unsportsmanlike fashion with his feet,

kicking at Giddy's stomach and trying to bite with his small sharp

yellow teeth. And then Giddy's left, that had learned some neat tricks

of boxing in the days of the Gory greatness, landed fairly on the

Mazzetti nose. And with a howl of pain and rage and terror the

Mazzetti, a hand clapped to that bleeding feature, fled in the darkness.