“Say, Joy, can’t you practice your trilling with the door shut?”
Sarah and Joy had met in the kitchenette, about four-thirty in the
afternoon. Their encounters were always a matter of routine, and to-day
they both happened to strike the same time to search for “afternoon
tea.” Sarah had just come to light, and was yawning about in a wrinkled
kimono, her hair done up in curlers, her face pettishly grey. There was
something positively undressed about Sarah’s face at times like these.
Joy had been uptown all day, first at Pa’s, then at her French and
Italian lessons. Returning, she had been practicing a trill exercise,
not aware that Sarah was arising a little later than usual.
“I’m sorry,” she said now, and chewed a cold English muffin—the kind
one buys at the corner delicatessen. “I usually close the door when I
practice, anyway. I didn’t think anyone was home.”
“It certainly is nerve-racking to live in the house with a singer,”
Sarah complained. She had caught sight of her face in a mirror, which
added to the drag of her voice. “Of course I know you have to practice
and all that, Joy, but now that your voice has gotten so much bigger it
carries everywhere—simply everywhere!”
“Glad to hear it, that’s what I’m after,” snapped Joy, and bit into
another discouraged muffin. “It’s hard enough to work all the time
without being picked on for it. To hear you talk, you’d think I sang all
day.”
“Now you’re getting cross. I suppose singers have to be temperamental,
though.” Receiving no response to this, Sarah twirled her infinitesimal
braid and tried again: “It’s funny to see you try to be so earnest. No
girl with the looks you know you have can stand the strain of the
student’s life without weakening and breaking away once in a while. And
you can’t tell me that you and that Jim Dalton go to concerts every time
you leave here.”
“We never have gotten along well together, have we, Sarah? I think the
best way for us to do is not to talk when we’re around each other,
unless we can’t avoid it.”
Sarah stared at Joy, incredulous that the mist over the animosity of the
two had at last blown away.
“I mean it,” said Joy, “I need every bit of my energy for my work. I
can’t waste any of it on you. I’m sure you feel the same way about me.
So, let’s not—waste any energy.”
Sarah, regarding her beneath incendiary brows, was just taking on
energy. “It’s true we’ve never gotten on together. It started the first
day you came and put Packy away in your reticule. You walked away with
him, reticule and all. Packy was one of the best playmates I ever
had—his hand and his pocket-book had well oiled connections. And now
through you he’s queered himself, and will never blow around here
again.”
“I always felt Packy was at the bottom of it. But I don’t care. I’ve
done my next-best to get along with you, and you too have made somewhat
of an effort, but we can’t get along—so let’s not waste any more
energy.”
She walked out of the kitchenette, trembling. After a day of
unmitigated, although varied, work, her nerves were rigid, and had given
away at the first little jab.
So far, the fall had been one of steady labour, punctuated only by
Sarah’s jeers and by the music to which she had listened with Jim.
Galli-Curci had come, a marvel and a thrill.
And then, a little after that, they went to hear Frieda Hempel. If
Galli-Curci’s voice was silver, Hempel’s was a rainbow shot with colours
that danced or remained steadfast at will. Joy was powerless to compare
the shimmering of her Proch’s Variations with the crystal joy of
Galli-Curci in the same song. And the roguish dance of her “Fêtes
Galantes,” where by winking she upset the Bostonians to such an extent
that they made her repeat it. The stark tragedy of “The Linden Tree,”
and “Home, Sweet Home,” at the end. Galli-Curci had played it for
herself, and sung it gingerly, with such changes that Jim remarked: “Do
you like ‘Home Sweet Home au naturel or maître d’hôtel?’” “I don’t like
it at all,” Joy had said; “I wish people wouldn’t keep singing it—it’ll
fly to pieces any minute, it’s so used up.” But when Frieda Hempel sang
it, it took the aspect of a new song—new in its charm, old in its
universal appeal——Joy looked around her at the faces turned to the
blue-velvet figure pouring forth the hackneyed words; there was not a
face that did not have a tense, strained expression—hardly a person who
was not winking back a tear or letting them come unashamed. “Home, Sweet
Home,” at which the critics groaned. . . .
She and Jim did not look at each other until they were making their way
out. Then Jim spoke. “Made you think—that the only important thing in
life—was something we both are missing—didn’t it?”
“Oh, to move people like that!” said Joy.
The fall concerts set her to work more furiously than ever. She had not
had the opportunity to compare her voice with others, to gain a proper
perspective, before. Pa remarked that she was actually becoming musical
in leaps and bounds; every week now showed a gain in voice, technique
and musical understanding.
But little incidents like Sarah pricked; and when one was bending every
part of one’s self to work, one had to be perfectly frank about elbowing
little incidents aside. So she justified herself, the remainder of that
day, for taking the stand on which she had walked out of the
kitchenette. Sarah went out for the evening before Jerry had come back
to the apartment, and did not come to tell Joy where she was going
before she started, as had been the desultory custom. Joy was relieved.
Then Sarah had accepted her suggestion. It would really be better for
both of them.
The next morning she was out before there were any signs of life in the
apartment, which was quite customary. She stayed long uptown, as she
attended an afternoon concert and then ate dinner alone at a cafeteria
on Huntington Avenue. It was late when she finally let herself into the
apartment. Jerry darted at her in the hall—a wild looking Jerry, hair
roughed up until her head was one bristle.
‘Joy—for God’s sake—I thought you’d never come back. _Do you know
where Sal is?_”
“Why, no, of course not. She hasn’t been with me. What’s the mat——”
“When did you see her last?”
“Why—yesterday afternoon.”
“She didn’t say where she was going?”
“No. I didn’t see her when she went out. What——”
“You didn’t even see her?” Jerry collapsed on the hall table, leaning
against it with every sagging muscle, her freckles starting out
hurriedly on her white face. “Listen—When I got in this A.M. I looked
in her room to see if she was in yet. She wasn’t. It was pretty late,
but I didn’t think anything about it and went to bed and slept like a
fool. Went there when I woke up at nine-thirty and—she wasn’t there.
Bed, room, everything just the same way it was last night. Her American
Beauty evening dress the only one of her clothes gone—I looked last
night to see what she’d worn, and that was missing—and now—it still
is. _Where is she?_”
“You are sure she hadn’t come in—and gone out again——”
“In her American Beauty evening dress? That would mean she came in at
three A.M. the soonest she could have come and I not heard her—and
gotten up at nine at the latest she could have and I not heard her—and
gone out in evening dress and not come back yet! It’s nearly nine now.”
Joy considered, putting down her music roll. “You don’t know who she
went out with last night?”
Jerry shook her head. “If I’d only been home when she started——”
The shriek of the telephone scared them both out of their positions.
“You answer,” said Joy, and together they shivered to the closet down
the hall in whose privacy they had their telephone conversations. Jerry
lifted up the receiver. “Hello, oh, hello, Davy. She isn’t here just
now. Oh, that’s all right, we _were_ going to that dance to-night. Do
you know by any chance who Sal went out with last night? You do?” She
wound the telephone cord around one finger and then watched it tighten
as she pulled until the finger grew livid. “Oh, will they be around at
the dance to-night? Oh, well—you needn’t bother. Oh, all right, only I
haven’t put on my gingham yet, so don’t make the poor kid race all the
way. See you later.”
She slammed down the receiver and turned to Joy. “That was Davy—he and
Wigs were taking us to that Tech dance to-night, you know. He called up
to say they were sending a Freshman who has a car, over to get us—they
have to bone for some nine o’clock exam to-morrow till the last minute.
Come on into my room till I get into something.”
“But what—who——” stuttered Joy as she followed her into the
wilderness of clothes that was Jerry’s room, and watched her pull a
glittering green sequin dress from the collection—“What did he tell you
about——”
“He said he knew that Sal was going to the Toast and Jam last
night—there was some big celebration there—with Crawf Harris and
Dum-Dum Barnes, because they had asked him to come along too with a girl
he had a date with, but he had theatre tickets and so they didn’t——”
“And now what are you going to do?”
Jerry raked her hair smooth with two military brushes, her latest idea.
“Do? Why, go to that dance and get those damn little rounders to tell me
what went on, where they left Sal, and so on—and believe me, there’ll
have to be some fluent explaining!”
“I don’t understand.” Joy moved about around the debris of the room, too
nervous to sit down. “But I—I can’t stay here, Jerry, while you——”
She vanished from the room. When she returned some minutes later, she
wore hat and coat. Jerry, who was swiftly puckering up a split in a silk
stocking made by putting her foot in it too abruptly, jerked an
inquiring eyebrow. “What in——”
“Jerry—I know you can look after yourself and do everything and always
have; but nevertheless there are times—if we are unlucky enough to have
those times—when a man is absolutely necessary—a man we can trust. I
think this is one of those times—and I’ve telephoned Jim Dalton to come
out here as quickly as possible.”
Jerry nodded. “I’m glad you did. It—it does look like one of those
times—and Wigs and Davy wouldn’t be even up to zero on a proposition
like this.”
The two girls sat waiting in a silence broken only once or twice.
“Of course—it may come to nothing.” This from Jerry. “There must be all
sorts of reasons——”
“Oh, there must be reasons. But——” Joy could not throw off the horror
that was settling upon her. “But—where else could she be, and why? She
has no other girl friends—oh, _Jerry_! Why, of course—there’s Félicie
Durant!”
“I called her up at noontime,” Jerry droned. “She hadn’t seen her for a
week or so.”
The bell rang finally.
“Bet it’s the freshman; freshmen always are early”; from Jerry.
But it was Jim. Just the sight of him made Joy a little more calm. He
was the sort of person to whom one turned naturally; he gave out that
“quiet strength” which is too often imposed upon to carry the burdens of
others. A few swift questions, more or less hysterical answers, and the
story was before him. A moment, and Jerry found the generalship taken
away from her as Jim gave orders of procedure. He had not completed
mapping out their line of action when the freshman arrived, a freshman
who looked rather stunned to find instead of the described pair of girls
in evening dress, a girl in street clothes, with a man, and one lone
girl with pale face, fiery eyes, and bobbed hair, who was wrapped in a
velvet cloak from which protruded a peacock fan—a girl who treated him,
doggone it! like a regular chauffeur. She might at least have come in
front with him and left the two street-clads by themselves; but no, they
all sat in back, whispering until he hauled his car into place at the
end of a moderately long line in a narrow Boston street. Then, and then
only, did the girl with the bobbed hair condescend to speak to him.
“Do you happen to be familiar with Dum-Dum Barnes and Crawf Harris?”
“Not too familiar,” he replied cautiously. “They’re Seniors.” Then, as
they made no move to disembark: “Aren’t you coming in?”
“That’s as might be,” drawled that bobbed-haired girl. “You can go in
and see if Crawf and Dum-Dum are there. If they are, you can tell ’em to
come out here Q. E. D.—if not, come out and tell _us_ Q. E. D. As for
Wigs and Davy—if they’ve got there yet, why, you can tell ’em I’m
located here.”
He went off, muttering “Gotcha,” more than ever convinced that she
thought he was a chauffeur. When he returned five minutes later, the
three were in the same rigid expectancy in which he had left them, with
that continued stillness which denotes an uninterrupted absence of
conversation. The freshman cleared his throat. Decidedly there was
something very cagey about this whole affair.
“I—well, I can’t locate Crawf and Dum-Dum,” he said. “They’re Seniors,
you know; I don’t know them very well; and everyone’s dancing in the
dark in there, so I can’t make out. Wigs and Dave don’t seem to have
gotten there yet——”
“Then we’ll come in—I can see in the dark better than any other way,”
and one by one the three climbed from the car. The freckled faced girl
turned to him with a sudden, grandiloquent sweep. “Thank you very much
for the use of your car, sir. I shall mention you favourably in my next
letter to the _Transcript_.”
The three were gone, and the freshman, after a bewildered grunt, drove
off to the Copley, where a party of his own kind awaited him. Not for
him as yet the Tech fraternity dances.
As they entered the hall, Joy caught her breath. Never before had she
seen such a spectacle. Three wide rooms were given up to dancing—the
orchestra playing in the hall—sole illumination, the dim one that
filtered from the hall into two of the rooms, and as for the third, it
remained in blackness relieved only by ghostly dresses clasped to white
shirtfronts. The three stared from the doorway for a moment of silent
fascination. It was like some hazy, voluptuous dream—feverish music,
quickening the throbbing of desire—the little sigh of figures
interlocked, moving in time to the throb, in the dripping black velvet
of the dark. It was something one might have imagined in the days of
Nebuchadnezzar.
“Barbaric,” Joy murmured as she caught Jim’s eye and knew she was
flushing—flushing under the music, which quickened the uneven pulse of
memory.
“No—not barbaric,” said Jim. “Barbarians are—more direct.” He turned
to Jerry. “Do you see them yet?” She shook her head, eyes straining
after the dancers. “That freshman had no initiative. He ought to
have——” He strode over to the orchestra, spoke to the boy at the
piano. A few more bars, and the music stopped, the pianist tapping on
the drum for quiet.
“I am asked to announce,” he said shrilly, “that Mr. Barnes and Mr.
Harris are wanted in the hall.”
The music took up its beat, and the dancers in the dark, who had barely
stopped, began again.
“I should have thought of paging them, only I’m so rattled,” said Jerry.
“Thank God for Jim.”
He came back to them; through another opening into the hall charged two
lads with question and not much else on their wide young faces. Jerry
stepped forward and spread her fan in front of them, an excellent
substitute for buttonholing, as they drew up with a start.
“Hullo, Jerry,” said one. The other said nothing; he was presumably
Dum-Dum.
“This is them,” said Jerry, with a jerk of the fan. “You two, this is
Miss Nelson and Mr. Dalton. And we want to know right now where Sal
Saunders is.”
Dum-Dum opened his mouth and closed it.
“Did—didn’t she get back?” Crawf demanded, jaw hanging loosely. “You
aren’t stringing us, Jerry? Trying to get a rise?”
“Nix!” Jerry snarled, her wide lips curling back from her teeth. “Where
did you leave her?”
Crawf looked at Dum-Dum, whose speechless countenance gave forth no
help. “Why—why—we—I——Haven’t you heard a word from her? Don’t you
know where she is?”
“We do not,” said Jim. “And you two, since you are the last two known to
be with her, are responsible.”
“Jesus!” said Dum-Dum, and collapsed upon the stairway.
“I’ll swear—I’ll swear—if she’s gotten into anything, it’s her own
fault!” Crawf’s sagged jaw did not close with this chivalrous utterance.
“Buzz on with the tale, you little gnat!” Jerry cried, threatening him
with her fan. He retreated, a few steps.
“I—I—well, we went down to the Toast and Jam.”
“We know that—go on.”
“And—and I suppose we did get pretty fuzzy. You know Sal—you know she
never can hold it. We told her to cut down, but you know how much effect
that has on her; pretty soon she was so blotto she was making eyes at a
couple of old boys in the corner. Isn’t that so, Dum-Dum? Wasn’t she
blotto?”
Dum-Dum nodded.
“The old boys got fresh and we were feeling good, so—well, I guess we
got mixed up pretty well. Well, then we thought we’d come away, in fact
the head waiter or some such stuff requested our departure, all of us,
so we eased out. Got out to the car and the old boys’ was next. Of
course Dum-Dum couldn’t start it.”
“The old boys’ car?”
“Nope; ours. Sal got sore right off—said we were doing it on purpose.
The old boys stayed in their car and watched the fun. Dum-Dum got under
the car, but that didn’t do any good. Finally I got under too. Dunno how
long we were fooling around there—my pocket lamp burnt out—but we
heard Sal talking. Thought she was talking to us, so we didn’t listen.
Then all of a sudden we heard some brakes grinding a tune, and Sal
yelling she’d never get back to town with us so she was going with them.
I rolled out from under and saw the tail-lights of the old boys’ car
spinning away.” He stopped and looked at them appealingly. “What could
we do? We couldn’t speed up and follow after. All we could do was sit
around and cuss Sal—which we did, complete. Then we worked on the car
some more till somehow Dum-Dum slipped a cog and fixed it.”
“Let me get this straight,” said Jim. “You take a girl down to a road
house, get her drunk, and then let her sail off with two strange men,
having no other objection than cussing?”
“What else could we do? We couldn’t get a taxi and follow them up—it
was no free garage.”
“But there were other cars, and owners who could be made to understand.”
“Whadyoumean, understand?” Crawf had been regarding Jim with increasing
objection. “Perhaps you’re in the habit of stealing cars from
understanding owners. I don’t get that way.”
“And seeing her go off, you thought no more of the matter—didn’t even
call up to-day to see if she had reached home safely.”
“We’re having exams——” began Dum-Dum defensively, still on the
staircase.
“I’ll admit—it did occur to me to call up, but we’ve been so busy——”
“Busy dancing,” Jerry supplemented.
“And honestly, it never for a minute entered my head but what Sal would
get back; she’s a girl who takes darn good care of herself——”
“We are living in strange times indeed if a man thinks a girl can take
care of herself under such circumstances,” said Jim.
“What did the old boys look like?” Jerry snapped.
Again Crawf looked at Dum-Dum for aid, but Dum-Dum closed his eyes with
a weary air.
“I—I swear I don’t remember. They were about fifty—or maybe forty, or
thirty-eight——”
“Or even seventy——” Jerry bit in.
“Hang it, no! They had teeth and hair and things. Grey hair or getting
grey—that sort of stuff. One of ’em wore glasses and one of ’em smoked
rotten cigars.”
Jim squared off, looking at them in unhurried, but imperative fashion.
“Have you two got your car here? Well, get your evening wraps and come
along with us while we use it. We’re going to the Toast and Jam—to see
if the people there know anything more, or can remember better than you,
about these two men. And on the way down you can try to call back a
better description of them.”
Jim was of compact build, although so thin that he had not an ounce of
flesh that could be trained down. There was something about him that
looked very forceful as he faced the two boys.
“I—we both have girls at this dance——” Crawf began, while Dum-Dum
looked wildly around from four corners of his eyes.
“Well, get two stags to take ’em, if you feel any responsibility about
’em—tell ’em anything—but come as quickly as you can.”
The two boys vanished through the opening.
“They’re still dancing in the dark,” said Joy monotonously.
Jim consulted his watch. “We’ve only been here a little over six
minutes.”
“I never saw anything like it—whole dances in the dark. Do they keep it
that way all evening?”
“Oh, no.” Jerry was weaving with her fan an accompaniment to the music,
unconsciously swaying back and forth in rhythm as she did so. “They turn
’em on after awhile. It gives you a new sensation, anyway——That’s good
jazz, I’ll tell anyone.”
That was it. Dancers in the dark—in search of a new sensation. Jerry
was beckoning to a man who had come out to speak to the orchestra. “Oh,
Fred,” she said, easily: “do me a favor? When Wigs and Davy see fit to
blow in, will you tell them that we got sick of waiting and have gone
out with Crawf and Dum-Dum?”
“I’ll do that little thing for you; but they’ll be fit to be tied,” Fred
responded with a grin. He stayed carrying on a light badinage with Jerry
until the two boys reappeared, coats over their arms, their broad, mild
countenances for once overrun with emotions, which were added to as Fred
thrust them parting darts about how Wigs and Davy would pay them out for
playing the fresh young Lochinvars.
The two boys sat in front, and the trio sat together in back as before.
Jerry was still humming the tune that the orchestra had been playing—
“All the knowledge learned at College
Still that don’t explain——”
Jerry had found time to wish that she might have been among the dancers;
Jerry, the excitement-eater. They had passed a movie palace letting out
crowds from its first show. Excitement-eaters all . . . who for want of
excitement of their own, had gone to swallow down excitement in
reels—of indiscriminate kinds. Indiscriminate excitement by
proxy—excitement that exhausted or stimulated, but created the appetite
for excitement at first hand.
Jerry stopped humming. “If only this hadn’t happened at the time of the
police-strike. But what can those Home Guard birds do?”
“It may not have to come to that,” said Jim.
They veered away from the city outskirts, and started pounding down the
State Road towards the South Shore. It was cold, and the boys in front
drove with sullen swiftness.
“I feel somehow—as if this were the end of the world,” said Joy
miserably. Such awful things are happening that the world’s just got to
topple over sometime—and to-night feels just like it.”
“I wonder what _is_ going to happen to the world,” said Jim. “Every year
since I can remember people have been saying we’ve been going from bad
to worse, and I used to think they were old fogies; but I can see the
descent myself, it’s getting so rapid—and I can’t be an old fogy—not
at twenty-four.”
“Funny how we’ve all gone back on the way we used to feel during the
war,” said Jerry. “It’s just as if the world had turned a double back
somersault.”
“Everyone admits that the world is turning around too fast, and that
everyone’s got their eyes turned in upon themselves too hard, but then
they go right on,” said Joy somewhat pointedly. The memory of Jerry’s
evident reluctance to leave the music was still repugnant.
The three lapsed into a silence supported by the sucking gasps of the
tires as they slid along over the well oiled highway. After fifteen
minutes had passed in quiet travel, their progress became slower, the
boys in front casting uncertain eyes up each side road they passed.
“What’s wrong?” Jim called to them.
“Why—I’ve forgotten just where we turn,” Crawf responded. “Sal pointed
out the way last night—we’d never been down before, you know——”
Dum-Dum put on the brakes and came to a stop. There was a lone man
wandering along the road, coming into the spotlight with which the front
lamps were cleaving ahead.
“Where do you turn off to get to the Toast and Jam?”
The wayfarer jerked his thumb. “Next to your right, an’ straight through
the cross roads. But you won’t find no toast nor no jam there!”
The echoes of his cackling appreciation of his own wit followed them
even through the cross roads.
The “Toast and Jam” proved to be a large, rambling white farmhouse,
nestled on a hill, with a dense thicket of automobiles flanking the
barn. Riotous music surged from the windows, and a man’s loud voice
singing.
“You girls stay out here,” said Jim, “Mr. Barnes will stay with you.”
“Not a prayer!” Jerry cried, leaping out. “I want to ask a few little
questions myself. If I don’t look in on this, what was the sense of my
cutting the dance?”
“True,” said Jim, and met Joy’s eyes for a moment as he helped her
descend. Jerry had joined the two boys, and Joy and Jim brought up the
rear.
“It’s just that if you saw anyone you knew here, they’d wonder what you
were doing in a place like this,” Jim said suddenly.
“They’d be here, too,” she retorted, “And although I may not have been
to this particular place, the first of the summer I thought I took in
every road house there was. Goodness knows that I long ago stopped
worrying about appearances!”
This was the sort of speech that would have made Grant’s hair rise, she
reflected, the minute she spoke; Grant would have thrown back some icy
remark that would only have goaded her on. But Jim looked down at her
without speaking, and something in his keen eyes made her feel very
wriggly.
They entered the Toast and Jam. A low-ceilinged white hallway through
which they looked in to a long, cozily gotten-up dining-room, with
tables thrust along the sides. A colored orchestra at one end with a
negro bawling out the words of the selection, and a piebald mass of
dancers, exercise of contact whipping their blood higher and higher, the
heat from the low-studded room growing with motion, so that they had to
cling but stickily; but they clung. An assortment of all ages, having a
preponderance of older men with more or less younger women whose general
get-ups were equivocal.
“Do you remember your waiter? And find whoever it was who requested you
to leave last night,” said Jim to Crawf, who slid into the dining room.
Jerry streaked after him, her fan waving in determination, and Jim
followed, with a request that Dum-Dum stay with Joy.
They waited in a silence that grew so appalling, with nothing to watch
but the shivering of the dancers to the syncopated shriek of the
orchestra, that Joy finally said in a tone as nearly ferocious as she
could make it: “Do they call you Dum-Dum after the bullet or because
you’re just plain _dumb_?” At his amazement, she hurled on; “It must be
because you’re dumb—otherwise I don’t understand—how you could have
been so careless—of a nice girl!”
He opened his mouth and closed it. His silence had suddenly changed
colour. It was almost as if he had; and she read it as easily as if he
had spoken. They were not so—careful—with Sarah as they might have
been with “nice” girls. Jerry had diagnosed it—the key of their
relationship with men was that the men acted as if they were among
themselves. There had been just that careless oblivion, that utter lack
of the protective instinct toward Sarah; and the idea of it was so
horribly perverted that she gave a little shiver.
“Aha, shimmying?” said Dum-Dum, finding speech at last. “Music too much
for you? Come on, let’s dance till the others get through.”
She looked at him so strangely that his inviting pose disintegrated and
he toppled back. “That’s—_the first thing I’ve heard you say_. Must I
take that—as the keynote to your character?”
He was regarding her with alarm and now spoke soothingly. “Oh all right;
but it’s darn good music!”
“_Good music!_” She checked herself. After all, silence was preferable
to talking in different tongues.
Jerry came back to them on feet that no longer lilted to the music, her
face sagging white against the painted masks of the girls on the floor.
Crawf followed with a defiant expression, and Jim came last.
“They don’t remember a thing,” said Jerry; “they’re perfect nitwits, the
whole nest of ’em. Every waiter spilled a different description—the
head waiter doesn’t even remember whether they were old or young.”
“It seems to be the custom here,” said Jim, “to forget things like
that!”
“But the cash you forked out would have tickled their memory if there
had been anything to tickle,” said Jerry.
“What can we do now?” Joy asked limply. Somehow she had felt that coming
down here would solve everything—that it was going to end up smoothly,
things would explain themselves and roll into place, just like the
ending of a story.
The five stood in an indecisive little group, looking at each other. A
waiter who had been darting his head around a corner to survey them at
intervals now darted himself around and approached them with a
velvet-covered but none the less insistent air. “If your party is not
coming inside——?”
They left as indecisively, and drove home in amazement. It had not
occurred to them that they would not be able to read the dark pages of
this affair. The sensation of utter futility is new to youth, and
momentarily stuns. Until they had followed up every avenue of
investigation left them, they had evaded the wings of horror that had
been hovering ahead. Now there was room for all that awfulness. They
spoke in low tones, the situation becoming more hopeless as they
discussed it. Jim said the publicity of the police was not to be
desired; Crawf and Dum-Dum, abject almost to cringing by now, said that
of course they would finance investigation through a private detective
agency, which proposition was speedily approved by Jerry. Joy sat in the
tentacles of a memory that added horror. _What were the last words she
had ever said to Sarah?_ A practical request to keep out of her life,
and she, Joy, would do the same. Under the calcium ray of this dreadful
evening’s events, her words were conceited, selfish,
ill-tempered—self-sufficient. If one only knew, when words were flying
around, that those were the last words that person would ever hear from
one’s mouth—how many things would remain unsaid!
A repressed goodnight to the two guilty youths, and leaving Jim, who was
to go straight to the detective office. She and Jerry went to Sarah’s
room of one accord, then wandered aimlessly through the empty-seeming
apartment before going to bed. . . .
“She’ll turn up,” said Jerry; but her voice hung fire.
She did not turn up. Days thickened into weeks, with the detective
bringing steady reports of investigation along a blank wall. Something
that he had said on undertaking the case quivered in Joy’s memory.
“A missing-girl proposition is almost hopeless, you know, when twelve
thousand disappear every year.”
“Twelve thousand a year—in this country!” she cried, and he nodded.
“So you see—it gets pretty difficult.”
It was a strange thing—this voidness that had been Sarah. When Sarah
had been there, their lives were as separate as if they had been two
strange boarders in the same boarding house. She had never found
anything in common with Sarah; she had never tried to. She had disliked
her, and not done her best to conceal this dislike. Now Sarah was gone,
and her absence made no ripple in Joy’s life. How could she miss her
absence, having never really felt her presence—having even suggested
that they ignore each other’s presence? But her going left Joy with a
queer feeling of self-hatred. Sarah had been a lonely figure, a drifter
on the churning waters of excitement; a drifter with nothing upon which
to cling, knowing no more than to keep her head above the rising tide.
And Joy had faithfully imitated the performance related of certain
people, who, some nineteen hundred years ago, had passed by on the other
side.
Passing by on the other side was glossed over nowadays as: “It isn’t any
of my business.” Everyone did it about everyone. In this new analysis
she wondered—-if she had not been passing Jerry by on the other side
also. The answer rose automatically to her throat: “It isn’t any of my
business.”