“I didn’t know I had more cousins that I hadn’t heard about,” she said
heavily, thinking of no better way to bring back the subject.
“Oh, yes, there’s Phil! Older than I, and getting to be a more
hard-and-fast bachelor every year. It’s even difficult to get him to
dine with us, so you really must come to-night!” As Joy still hesitated,
plunging for another setting to bring about what she wished, Mabel went
on: “I know it’s awfully last minute-y, but it isn’t a dinner party, or
anything but just an informal gathering—and as long as we are
cousins——”
“Oh, I should love to,” said Joy, “but it would mean leaving the girl
with whom I came over, all alone——”
“Bring her too, then! That settles it!” Mabel laughed. “I’ll send the
car back for you at seven-fifteen. You’re a nice child, Joy!” She paused
in her exit, and lifted a black-gloved finger. “So you and she are
staying alone at an hotel in the wicked city. Dear me—these New England
cousins!”
Joy went slowly back to the room where Jerry stared out of the window at
a New York that had grown barren to her. She had made an
opportunity—given Jerry her fighting chance. And now she was
overwhelmed by misgivings. It did not seem possible that a love could
have endured so long upon so little. And how could Jerry hold her own in
the house of Mabel Lancaster Drew? She—Mabel—had all but raised her
eyebrows—at their being alone in New York together. What would she
think, when she saw Jerry—— But Joy put away that thought.
What should she tell Jerry? It was hard not to tell her the incredible
truth; it was the fair, square way that Jerry would have taken. But it
might be better for Jerry to be unprepared. She debated; and since she
could not decide, did not tell her. Jerry showed no enthusiasm at the
thought of dining with Joy’s cousins.
“You say you don’t know them at all, yet you’re passing up a wonderful
chance for us to go along to some awful little joint while Félicie isn’t
here to clamp down on dirty food!”
“We might as well get a meal paid for,” said Joy, watching Jerry’s
preparations with ill-concealed suspense. Jerry, always sensitive to
waves of feeling, dropped the bright green dinner gown she had taken up
and laughed. “Why did you make ’em throw me in with the invitation, Joy,
if you’re going to feel cross-eyed about my get-up?”
“Haven’t you brought anything—darker?” Joy asked feebly.
“Not in the dinner line. Never mind. Here’s a black velvet of
Félicie’s.”
“It will hang on you in folds.”
“Oh, no, it won’t.” Jerry had wriggled in and out of the velvet, pinned
a few bunches in the luscious material, then sat down with her
sewing-kit in her favourite cross-legged position. Inside of six
minutes, she put away her thimble, stuck her needle on the outside of
the kit and threw it on the bed, and put on the velvet, which fell about
her in full, majestic lines, but looked as if it had been built for her.
Joy thought with a spurt of hope that she had never seen Jerry look so
well. The black toned her down; the velvet softened her. She felt
ashamed of her momentary qualms, and tried to make up for it by talking
effusively on the way over, and jesting about the way cars were being
sent for them. However, her efforts only evoked a puzzled look from
Jerry, who did not know Joy in a talkative vein.
The car drew up in front of a large red sandstone house just off Fifth
Avenue in the fifties, which brought a whistle from Jerry. “Say,
Joy—what are you getting us into? The nearest I’ve been to this sort of
stuff is the movies!”
It did not add to their composure to have a butler admit them, to be
elevatored to one floor to take off their wraps and elevatored to
another floor to meet Mabel. They were ushered into a drawing-room,
which seemed to Joy’s eyes full of people whose faces were obscured in
the candlelight which was the only illumination affected. Mabel came
forward to greet them, a little overplump without the coat and
glossing-over sables, but very attractive in warm rose, her only jewelry
a single pink pearl hanging at the end of a platinum and diamond chain.
Joy noticed these details automatically, her attention focussed on
Jerry, who, since she had entered the room, had taken on a manner
entirely foreign to her make-up as Joy knew it. She was the easy,
gracious grande dame from the lilt of her walk and assured poise to the
cultured cadences of the voice that Joy had often likened to rough
plush. She had slipped into it as readily as one slips into another
garment.
Joy could not know, as the East-Side gamin answered Mabel’s friendly
greeting with a few well-chosen words of appreciation at her inclusion
in the dinner, that poor little Jerry had assumed the atmosphere of the
successful designer at Charlette’s, when she was conferring with a
desirable patron. She only marvelled, then looked beyond. A man nearing
forty, and plumpness; a girl with a complexion of peachdown, pleasantly
irregular features, brown hair folded back straight without a crinkle or
wave from a high white forehead; and behind these two—a taller man,
whose face was above the range of the candlelight.
“Miss Dalrymple, Miss Nelson—and my husband, Mr. Drew—” The two who
barred the way fell apart, and Joy was facing the man who had given
Jerry the power to dream. “Phil, this is your new cousin.”
Weary blue eyes that settled on her without interest; a dark, beautiful
face with hard lines carving manliness into it and softer marks etching
bitternesses around the eyes and mouth; a man who, even Joy could sense,
had been too inquisitive of life and found nothing worthy of his young
curiosity. She fell aside and looked back at Jerry, still the grande
dame, exchanging greetings with the first two. Jerry was never pretty;
she could not sink to that level; and to-night she was at the height of
her fascination. No one could wear bobbed hair quite like Jerry; it
fluffed around her face, adding to the shimmering lights of expression;
those lights that always seemed dancing to the surface, yet which by not
being transmuted into speech and action, lent her subtlety, which is the
essence of charm.
She came through to them, stately, gracious, with always that moonshine
of charm flickering in her face. “My brother, Mr. Lancaster,” said Mabel
at her elbow. Jerry looked up—and vivid colour, moonbeams, grande dame
and all, were struck from her face as if an artist had wiped everything
from his painting but the formless features. A long moment she hung
thus, one thin hand which she had put out before lifting her head,
fluttering without volition. Then with a gasp almost heard in the
suspended quiet, she took shape again. Star-shine lurked itself into her
face, and she threw back her head, bringing on the grand dame again in
double-barreled force. Valiant! Joy thought; valiant! And stole a look
at him. There she had the great surprise of the evening. He was taking
Jerry’s hand, a bit lingeringly; smiling at her with interest—but
without recognition!
“You look very much like someone I met a long time ago,” he said.
“A very long time ago?” murmured Jerry in the richest of her plush
tones.
“Oh, very. At least two years—which means it was war times, and those
times seem hundreds of years behind us now.”
“There you go, Old Crow’s-feet!” Mabel was hanging on his arm and
smiling up at him. She brought the others into it with an explanatory
quirk: “These returned war heroes think everyone forgets pretty quickly,
but we don’t, do we?”
“Returned war hero!” Joy cried, her mind a suspended blank to be written
over with wonder. Jerry said nothing with fierce intensity of question.
“Why, yes,” said Mabel. “Stop nudging me, Phil, I will if I want to!—He
was over for a long time, and brought back millions of those little
citation ribbons which he gave me with instructions to bury—stop,
Phil!”
Another man-servant—did they have _two_ butlers?—announced dinner at
this moment, and Mabel gave Joy to her brother, leading the way with
Jerry and leaving her husband to the girl with the white forehead, who
so far had said nothing of any irrelevance, and so had made little
impression on the party.
As they settled themselves behind the fruit cocktails, Joy watched Phil
Lancaster, who kept his eyes fixed on Jerry across the table.
“Is—is the resemblance so very striking?” she probed gently.
“Not so very, after the first look.” He took his eyes away from Jerry
with a jolt and landed them on Joy for one perfunctory second. “Your
friend is quite a different type.” His eyes found Jerry again; and
Jerry’s short, thick lashes quivered as she raised her chin higher and
looked determinedly at Mabel, who was stretching out a large fund of
small talk.
“That girl with the brown hair and white forehead—is she another
cousin?” asked Joy, still quietly insistent that he should talk to her.
He drew his eyes back to Joy. “No; she’s a Bryn Mawr girl, one of
Mabel’s protégés. Mabel’s awfully keen on younger girls.”
“You don’t like ‘younger girls,’ do you?” His tone had been descriptive.
“Why—has Mabel been getting biographic?”
“No; she didn’t say anything about you to me; I just guessed. And as
long as I have guessed, I think you ought to tell me why.”
There was a pause as a third man in livery came between them with the
soup, an opportunity he enriched by looking at Jerry; then he said: “To
tell you why—would not make dinner conversation. But a young girl
flaunting her conscious beauty and youth does not interest me, any more
than I would give other than a passing look to a large coloured
advertisement on a billboard.”
“And how about older women?” she asked, letting his statement pass
without battle.
“Oh—they have either lost interest in life and are only pretending, or
their minds are one-track affairs.”
“My——” said Joy thoughtfully. “It must be awful to be a bachelor.”
They both laughed then, and Jerry looked across the table with an
answering gleam. His eyes caught hers for an intimate moment; then she
turned back to Mabel and he to Joy.
“I admit it sounded humourous,” he said. “But I told you, the rest would
not be dinner conversation.”
“When did you go across?” she asked abruptly. Her words carried across
the table, and Jerry’s polite attention to Mabel took on another tin.
“In the fall of ’17.”
So she had been right in her random suggestion! Mabel, hearing a
fragment of their conversation through Jerry’s silence, proudly
contributed the fact that Phil had just been promoted to the rank of
major when the armistice was signed. The girl with the white forehead
and Mabel’s husband were deep in a steady stream of discussion which
flowed on during the pauses of the rest of the dinner party.
So he did not remember Jerry. And yet he must, or why did he look at her
so? Many times she reviled fashion of ceremony, as courses were brought
on and taken off and dinner slowly rolled by with always the balancing
of his and Jerry’s gaze across the table, while he talked vaguely and
diffusely to Joy. It was when they were having coffee—Mabel had
declared the men were too few to be left alone—that he seemed to give
his attention to Joy for the first time. She had not been lessening her
contemplative gaze, and he suddenly broke into it. “I’m sorry—I’ve
rattled on so. I don’t know what’s in the air to-night—I’m not
generally talkative. Are you of those awful ones who ‘draw people out,’
young cousin?”
He was almost boyish now. She had been noting one or two grey hairs
sparkling in his ruddy crop.
“I don’t think—I’ve drawn you out at all,” she said, and her glance
travelled to Jerry. He did not look this time, but his eyes were well
distanced by now.
“I am glad you brought her with you,” he said simply.
The remark was so direct, after his circuitous discourse throughout the
meal, that she was left in surprise without a response. Mabel, sensitive
to Jerry’s aloofness, Phil’s apparent boredom and Joy’s non-registering
silence, rose and wafted them into the drawing room. “Eustace, you can
play the Victrola or do something entertaining while I show Joy the
babies,” she demanded. “She doesn’t know she has some more cousins to
meet!”
They left the four, for another elevator trip. “You have—_children_?”
said Joy in awe.
Mabel nodded. “Three,” she said, with the first pride she had shown.
Three children—in as many years of marriage. Small wonder Mabel looked
a little faded, in spite of every aura wealth could cast. The nursery
was a long, wide room, into which they tiptoed, Mabel turning on the
light of a small rose-shaded lamp. Three little white beds, with tiny,
slumbering faces pressed hard against the pillows—faces beautiful with
the unearthly beauty of babyhood on which all of life’s beauty is yet to
be written. A moment while Joy gazed, and Mabel, going from one room to
another, murmured ecstatic nothings. Then Mabel turned off the light,
and they went to the door shivering in the cold from the open windows
that they had not felt while looking at the children.
On the other side of the door Joy stammered her enchantment of
eternity’s marvel. Mabel smiled, her hand on the knob, lingering as if
she could not bear to leave that hold upon the nursery.
“You will never know—until you have them,” she said. “The greatest
happiness in all the world, Joy. If only people realized! I myself
didn’t know. I thought I had come to the crown of my life when I
married. To have the love of the one you love—that is surely the
greatest honour and happiness that life can bring. But this—this brings
so infinitely much more—that you think you could only have barely
existed, before!” She relinquished the knob, turning it gently so that
the catch would hold. “All the happiness in the world, Joy, transmutes
itself into this great one. After all, everything speaks in terms of
love.” She laughed, half apologetically. “It’s true—we married people
pity everyone who doesn’t go and do likewise!”
Joy was thinking of the phrases she had heard bandied with such
assurance—yes, that she herself had bandied in her own mind; “the risks
and sacrifices of marriage,” “marriage clipping the wings.” In the
nursery—and now, with Mabel’s suddenly iridescent love spreading beauty
in her face—a career with all its gilt glory seemed very far away and
unreal. But they came back to a room which was echoing to great music
filtered through a sounding-box; and nursery and Mabel’s face sank away.
Different hearts, different loves—and what could one love one-half so
satisfying as music?
Eustace Drew and the college girl were selecting other records from the
cabinet—Jerry and Phil Lancaster were on the other side of the room,
beyond the candles, talking. Jerry was sitting on the window-seat; he
was standing looking down upon her, his back to the room. Joy
frantically wished that she were a pane in that window, then sat down
beside the college girl, who turned a smiling face to her with some
comment on the music. Joy answered it without impetus, and in the
ensuing conversation was surprised to find that Miss Dalrymple was
actually interesting on the subject. Besides being well-read, as Joy
innocently supposed all college girls to be, she was evidently
well-heard. She decided that Miss Dalrymple added up to a very
attractive girl. She wasn’t the type that a man would ask to a Prom to
cut a wide swath and impress the other fellows with looks and jazz, but
she was very attractive just the same. She had beauty of an unobtrusive
sort; her clothes were quietly right; and she had a responsive glow that
was most winning. Joy continued the conversation in an investigating
frame of mind. This girl must be several years older than she was. She
seemed older, in some few ways, but on the whole, so much younger. . . .
After a long conversation Joy again looked at the two at the end of the
room. It was so maddening to sit through an evening in ignorance of all
that was passing. Mabel followed her look.
“Your friend seems to have bewitched my brother, Joy,” she said lightly.
“She must be a sorceress, and cast a spell—he hasn’t even been polite
to a girl for so long.”
Joy stole a glance at her watch. Quarter of ten—it was surely already
too late to stay after a dinner in a butlered house such as this,—even
if Jerry did show no signs of desiring to leave the window seat. She was
stopped in her preliminary motions of departure by the insistence of the
Drews. Why, they were scarcely acquainted with their new cousin yet!
They did not even know what she was doing—what school she was
attending, or if she was just being a butterfly this year. Somehow, she
drew back from telling them about her studying and its aspirations. It
sounded so out of place in that atmosphere—so hectic after what she had
seen upstairs. So she evaded the subject with a careless, “Oh, I’m not
doing much of anything just now,” and this time succeeded in saying her
farewells uninterrupted. Somehow Jerry saw her rise, and strolled over
to them. Phil following with objecting footsteps. Jerry was palpably
nervous. What she had done in allowing herself to be monopolized in a
corner at such a small dinner-party where she had been a stranger, had
been in bad taste; but it was the sort of thing that was being done
continually by yearlings belonging to what is known as “the best
families,” and she had not sinned against precedent.
Mabel bade Joy an affectionate good-bye, adjuring her not to forget that
the next time she visited New York she must stay with her cousins, and
the Bryn Mawr girl shook hands warmly, hoping-to-see-her-again in a
really genuine tone. Joy found her voice returning a like remark in as
genuine a tone.
Eustace Drew joined Phil as they went to the door, and the two men rode
to the Belmont with Joy and Jerry in an easy volleying of general
conversation carried on mainly by Mr. Drew. Jerry, back in the gloom of
the car, was inscrutable; Phil more so. They left them at the elevator,
where the two girls turned to each other as the door closed and they
shot upwards.
“Anchor me down, Joy,” Jerry whispered; “anchor me down, or I’ll float
away!”
“Jerry! What was he saying?”
An interim while they got off at their floor, passed a maid in the
corridor, and gained their room. Jerry threw off her coat and went to
the mirror. “Can you believe it, Joy?” she asked, in luxurious wonder,
falling into all angles of pose; “he doesn’t know me! I’ve changed so
much he doesn’t know me!”
“What did he _say_?” Joy demanded. “I saw he didn’t know you!”
“Well, I’ve changed since then. Funny I hadn’t thought of it that way.
My hair’s bobbed now, of course—and I used to dress a lot more so, and
this black velvet changes me more yet—and my make-up was different——”
“Will you tell me what he said—or won’t you?”
She whirled around from the mirror, and with a jump, seated herself on
the bureau top. “After you went out, I slumped down on the window seat.
My legs had caved in—I couldn’t stand any longer. And he came over to
me and looked down at me—which he kept on doing, by the way. Joy, he
_likes_ to look at me. Did you notice it? Didn’t you? And then he
said—he said—‘Do you believe in love at first sight?’ I was knocked
loggy for a minute. Did I? Hadn’t I! Then I passed back to him: ‘Not
necessarily.’ ‘It is the only love which is formed without analysis,’ he
said, ‘and analysis is death to love.’ ‘Maybe, with some people,’ I
said. ‘You can’t generalize about those things—though I suppose love is
one of the things that is most generalized about.’
“‘Do you want me to come down to particulars?’ he said. ‘Or is it safer
to go on—generalizing?’” Jerry clenched her hands, smiling softly the
while. “I laughed at that. I had to laugh or yell—it was all so like
I’d been dreaming for so long—I can’t believe yet it’s all really
happened—and I said: ‘Please don’t put it up to me.’ ‘Let us both waive
the responsibility, then,’ he said. ‘If what I say sounds like sheer
madness, forget it. You look as if you could forget, and had forgotten,
much. But—I have fallen in love twice in my life. The second time was
this evening, when I saw you come walking down the room to meet me, a
spirit embodied from a dream.’ Joy, he said that! Was there ever
anything like it under Heaven?”
“No!” cried Joy, hysterical with conflicting emotions. “Go on!”
Jerry jumped down from the bureau to look into the mirror again. “Jerry,
your luck,” she cried to her triumphant reflection. “Your luck!” She
turned to Joy. “I was so scared I got to shaking. ‘A dream,’ I said.
‘Yes, that’s what it was, a dream all right.’ I thought it was, too.
‘You do not understand,’ he said. ‘How could I expect it—there will
never be another Brushwood Boy.’ That was one of the things he had given
me to read, Joy. I guess I registered a recognition on that, for he went
on:
“‘Oh, you’ve read it? You remember the Brushwood boy saw a little girl
in the theatre, and afterwards he built an image of her in his dreams.
His image grew in his dreams to womanhood, and bye and bye he met her in
the flesh—a spirit embodied from the dream. Two years ago, in those
fleeting, hectic days of war, at a time when no dreams were being left
to me, I met a little girl who somehow brought me back to interest in
life and—dreams. Our relationship was of the most casual; I only saw
her a few times before I was suddenly put in command of a company that
was sailing. She was not the sort to mean anything in my life, and I
almost forgot her as herself. But her image stayed with me, always
growing in little ways. She herself was so unfinished an image—she was
of a type that could not change its atmosphere and environment—yet
there was that in her which made me build, until the image grew to
womanhood in my dreams. Am I boring you with details of a girl you never
knew? But you see—the image grew to womanhood—and then I met you in
the flesh, the embodiment of that dream.’ I hadn’t stopped shaking. ‘I
don’t understand, except that I remind you of someone you once knew,’ I
said. ‘Nor do I understand,’ he said. ‘It’s of the realm of—dreams.
It’s not to be believed. What is this that makes me sure you are the
complement to my existence, the one woman with everything I want, the
sum total of a man’s fatuous dream that is generally too impossible to
find realization?’ ‘You’d better not spread words around so,’ I said.
‘It isn’t wise to talk freely about anything you only know by sight. If
I were anyone else, I’d think you were crazy.’ He snapped me up on that.
‘If you were anyone else! I must descend to the supreme idiocy and
say—But you are you—and I knew you were when you came walking down the
room to-night.’ ‘You must be a Southern man,’ I said. ‘I’ve always heard
that they swung this line.’ He never blinked at that. ‘Do you feel
nothing?’ he said. ‘If you tell me you felt nothing when your eyes met
mine—if you did not feel that we had been a long time finding each
other—if you tell me that—why then,—I will start in and make you
realize what I know to be true.’”
She stopped, and ran to the window with a trembling laugh. “Look at old
New York—that I couldn’t look at this afternoon! Joy—to think of his
saying that! Asking me if I didn’t feel that we had been a long time
finding each other! Joy—I was so scared I’d slip a cog and come through
with some pithy talk! I spoke slow and thought twice between each word.
‘I—I really—these flashes that seem to go between two people—I never
analyze them—which you seem to be doing, after all.’
“By this time you’d come back, but he didn’t even turn though I kept my
off-eye alive on you. ‘That is—admission,’ he said, talking very low
now. ‘We have started at the end, and defeated all the weary
preliminaries.’ ‘Doesn’t it all amount to the same, though?’ I said;
‘for we’ll have to work back.’ ‘No, it’s not the same,’ he said, ‘for at
the end I do not greatly care to turn back for my sake. I shall for
yours, if you will; but I somehow feel, that to work back is something
for which you, too, do not greatly care.’”
“What did he mean?” Joy interrupted. “How could you follow all this,
Jerry?”
“Follow what he says? I’d get his drift if he made love to me in Latin!
He was taking me at my face value, Joy—which wasn’t right, God
knows—and dropping the remark in passing that he wouldn’t expect me to
do the same thing with him, although he sort of thought that I would
anyhow!”
“It’s so—so strange.”
“Strange! It’s—as he says—a dream! How did he happen to be your
cousin, anyway? Didn’t you ever know he was?”
Joy explained, and the two fell into a silent labyrinth of wonder. Jerry
walked restlessly about the room. “And he’s still unmarried, though
every woman that passed his way must have made a grab for him!”
“He looks to me like a man who has always had his way—with women,” said
Joy, trembling to break in upon Jerry’s exultation, but fearful memory
driving the words out of her. “What if he was—just bandying words,
Jerry? And thought you were too? Or didn’t care—what you thought? The
last kind I know——You admitted too much, right off like that, it seems
to me.”
Jerry laughed, running her fingers through her hair with a satisfied
sigh. “Don’t you think I’ve been through enough sieges of men and their
lines, in my life, not to be able to tell a real thing from a line? The
real thing just thumps out. You never can mistake it. A line can be
finely spun, but it can’t thump. The real thing and a line can have the
same words—that’s where we women get fooled—it’s manner and looks
you’ve got to watch.”
“He’s awfully cynical about women,” said Joy. “And his face, Jerry—it’s
so full of—so—experienced.”
“Can you imagine me getting along well with anyone who was—not?” Jerry
questioned; and then smiled again. Joy started. Her smile held in it an
echo of Mabel’s peculiar radiance. “Cynical! His face looks like a kid’s
who has asked for a stick of candy and been stuffed with the whole candy
store.”
She began to slide out of her clothes. “And he doesn’t know—that I’m
Galatea! Can you tie that?”
“You—don’t have to tell him,” and Joy watched her from the corner of
one eye as she brushed her hair. “He doesn’t care about working
back—he’s said so—you never have to tell him a—thing.”
Jerry shrugged her shoulders into the purple kimono. “He’s going to
lunch with me to-morrow. He’ll see me in broad daylight without candles
and the black velvet dress. It’ll be my turn to talk—in which case I
can’t keep up my stride, and will have to slide into the American
language. And I’m going to tell him—of course I’m going to tell him.
Don’t you see my really being both things—starting the dream, and
finishing it—makes it—better than ever? If he doesn’t see it that
way—— But he will! I can’t wait to tell him.”
Joy crawled into bed with misgivings which grew faint in the face of
Jerry’s firm faith. “It was just as we doped it, wasn’t it, Joy? You
said he went across—and I said that I was too small and casual a matter
for him to waste pains on—when it got inconvenient for him to do so.
They sent him over sooner than he expected—so he simply knocked out of
my life. But now! Those years were worth it—I’d go through ’em over
again if I were sure this was coming at the end.”
“And he thinks he’s started at the end,” said Joy, “and ‘defeated all
the weary preliminaries.’”
Jerry had snapped out the light, opened the windows and jumped into bed,
but her head reared up again at this. “You think he’s had an easy time
of it—compared to me—that I made it too easy for him, right off—don’t
you? I—I didn’t want to make it any harder for _myself_! And look at
his face, Joy—does he look as if _he_ had had an especially satisfying
time along the way—before he found me?”
“Forgive me, Jerry,” said Joy after a silence. “He was right, these
things should not be analyzed.”
But Jerry did not even hear her. “We have been a long time finding each
other. But the finding trims everything on heaven and earth tied
together, to a finish!”
And Joy was conscious of an overpowering loneliness. It was a barren
feeling; she had never really loved. She had not known Mabel’s radiance
or Jerry’s ecstatic fireworks, in the disturbing thrills that had been
hers in the past which now seemed so far removed it was as if it
belonged to another life. And now, with Jerry silent but not asleep by
her side, she felt suddenly, horribly alone. Jerry was her best friend,
and save for Jim, her only friend. Yet how that friendship sank into
insignificance now. Jerry’s world was full; all her world and life were
but one man; and Joy was outside. She lost herself in sleep, where she
dreamed that the only person remaining in her world who spelled anything
in life to her, had left her. She woke up sobbing bitterly, with “Jim!”
on her lips. All was toneless dark, that breathless hour of earliest
morning when vitality is at its lowest ebb yet sometimes the heart may
beat at its highest. Things are seen at that hour with uninfluenced
clarity of vision. And Joy gasped in the shock of the knowledge that was
rising within her. Jim Dalton was the only person left—who spelled
anything in life to her. Jerry was sleeping quietly; her tears fell
unconsoled. “Jim!” she sobbed again; and with his name trembling through
the black fringe of dawn, she fell asleep.
X
The next day was Saturday, and Félicie returned around noon just as
Jerry left Joy in a whirlwind of breathless anticipation. Félicie was
pale and sulky from dancing all night and having to come back to New
York the next morning.
“I missed a dance this afternoon and a wonderful one this evening,” she
crabbed, taking off her outer raiment and donning a kimono, before lying
on the bed to recuperate. At Joy’s question of why she hadn’t stayed the
house-party through, she batted an injured brown velvet orb. “How could
I, with Greg here and acting so awfully just because I wanted to go to
Princeton for one day. He needn’t think I’d give up every evening to
him—especially after the way he talked Thursday. I tell you, Joy, it’s
awful to be in love. I never did such an inconvenient thing as I did
when I fell in love with Greg.”
Joy stifled her laughter. “Did you have a good time?”
“Marvelous—simply marvelous. Princeton is the house-party girl’s Mecca.
It’s mean of Greg to act so—it isn’t as if I could be asked to
Princeton for many more years.”
Joy ran a scale, poising it neatly through the air and listening to the
smoothness of tone. In the morning sun, music was more alive and
satisfactory, even with no piano near. It was part of her—and little
fluctuations of feeling were to be ignored, when she knew that all her
being was absorbed in one great purpose. It had been silly of her to
grow sentimental just because she had been doused in the atmosphere of
sentiment. Inconsistently, she felt angry at Félicie.
“I can’t imagine being in love with a man and going off skating with a
dozen others.”
“Oh, Joy, if you’re going to take Jerry’s side I shall just pass out!”
wailed the lovely thing on the bed. “Being in love doesn’t stop you from
wanting something new once in awhile.”
“Nothing seems to prevent anyone nowadays from going after a new
sensation! Excitement-chasing! That’s what everyone’s doing!”
“It’s all very well for those who aren’t in love to theorize about what
those who are in love should do. For all Jerry’s talk, I can’t see her
giving up _her_ ‘excitement-chasing’ for any man. Can you?”
The thought was a new one. What would happen if Jerry was given the
opportunity to know this man so that the novelty would wear off? How
would the Excitement-Eater stand a sustained love? She was silent in
conjecture, and Félicie, too lazy to voice the triumph she felt, closed
her eyes and worked her face down into the pillow.
Joy and Jerry had tickets for an Æolian Hall concert that afternoon, and
now Joy went alone. The throngs always pressing ahead on the streets,
exhilarated her, and she watched the faces of the people that urged
themselves along; faces with success or failure written more or less
plainly upon them. Most women, she supposed, succeeded or failed by
proxy, as their husbands rose or fell in the foaming rapids of struggle.
But there would be no such vicarious state for her! She was plunging
directly into the rapids for herself, and some day she would walk in her
own success.
She returned to the hotel in a fine enthusiasm, humming under her
breath; the concert had been perfect. Her spirits were dashed, however,
by the empty room. Félicie had gone out with Greg; Jerry had not
returned. She would probably be alone until they assembled to take the
midnight; they had decided when they came over, to go back Saturday
night. To eat dinner all alone in New York! She was doing her hair
without enthusiasm when the telephone bell rang. It was Jerry’s voice,
eager and exultant: “That you, Joy? I’m downstairs—— Thought I was
going to desert you for dinner, did you? Just wanted to see if you were
back yet. Be right up.”
She finished setting in her hairpins with a lightening of spirits, as
the door rattled open and Jerry came dancing in.
“Was the concert good?” she cried. Spots of colour flaunted joy from
either cheek; her lips were tremulous, crinkled into softness; her eyes
were a battlefield of colour.
“Very good,” said Joy, and waited.
Jerry pulled off her hat and suit, and in her customary whirlwind was
making preparations for an evening toilette. “Put on your best calico,
Joy; we’re dining in state. Phil’s gone to get into his
cocktail-and-demitasse, too.”
“Phil!”
“Yes, of course, Phil. Do you want to hear what happened, or don’t you?
Are you keeping still because I’m shooting off my mouth, or——”
“I want to hear,” Joy said; “and when people want to hear, they
generally keep still.”
And then it came, with the generosity that was Jerry’s.
“Well, it seems I always tell you everything from the pop of the pistol
on through. When we went down in the lobby, he asked me where I wanted
to go; and I said, ‘Hanley’s.’ He looked at me queerly on that. ‘What
made you pick that out?’ he wanted to know.”
She was caressing her hair with the military brushes, not raking it as
was her custom.
“‘Let’s walk over,’ I said. ‘I want to stop at a place on the Avenue.’
As we went down Forty-Second Street, I rained a loose line of chatter
along. I told you to-day would be my turn to talk. We got to Charlette’s
before I had stuck in any background. When I saw the good old
grey-silk-curtained windows, I began to get a bit shaky. But I turned to
him and said: ‘We got to the end—rather sudden, last night. Men don’t
like to work back, but you know—and intimated as much—that women are
different that way.’ He opened the door for me, looking sort of at sea,
and we came in. ‘All I ask of you,’ I said, ‘is to stand here and watch
me.’ ‘The last part is something I can never omit,’ he said.
“You know Charlette’s—never many customers floating around, but oh, how
they do bleed ’em when they come! I breezed forward, and the first
person I ran into was Fanchon O’Brien. She tucked me into her flesh
Georgette waist with a few motherly kisses, and the next minute somebody
had passed the glad word and cutters, basters, fitters and designers
came out and fell around me. I won’t go into details of Old Home Week at
Charlette’s. When I broke away, Phil followed me to the door and on the
other side I didn’t give him a chance to speak.
“‘Did you see all the poor little rats hailing me as a kindred soul?’ I
said. ‘I worked in that place from twelve years old up, from
messenger-girl to designer. I was a poor little rat when I started—but
when I finished, I was pretty proud of myself.’ I looked up at him, and
he was looking at me, sort of scowling, as if to make everything add up
right,—but not one bit _changed_. ‘I should think you would be proud,’
he said. ‘I am proud of you—I shall be prouder when I can realise it
more fully.’ He didn’t say anything till we got over to Hanley’s. Then
he took in the name again as we went in. ‘Hanley’s!’ he said.
‘Funny——’ He didn’t say anything more and I let him look at me till we
got put in our places by a waiter. Then I said: ‘You’ve forgotten what
was to me one of the most important points in the Brushwood Boy. The
little kid he met in the theatre who supplied the foundation of his
dreams—was the same person as the woman he found. The girl had grown
up; but she was the same one; she had been the kid.’
“Joy, he said nothing for two or three minutes steady, till the waiter
came and he told him to bring anything, but get out. Then he
said—‘I—see now! The valiance and potential beauty I saw in the spirit
of the little girl who brought me back to myself—the shining hardness
of the cabaret singer, whom I pitied as drawn in and around by her past
and inevitable future environment—I discarded that hardness, and all
that went with it, and built on the valiance and beauty. And you were
discarding and building in reality—as I, with all the idiotic finality
of a man, never thought you could!’
“Joy—I didn’t think I’d built. Before—he thought I was worse than I
was. Last night, seeing me ooze around his sister’s drawing room, he
thought I was better than I am. I began to tell him this, and he stopped
me.
“When I first knew you—I knew you were better than I,’ he said. ‘As I
see you now, you have all but put yourself beyond me. I have led a life
of which I am ashamed; the dusty corners of which no one shall ever
know, or try to sweep out. You have led a life of which you can say you
are not ashamed; a life of striving against odds, from which you came
out on top; a life of which to be proud.
“Joy—I was ashamed at that. For since the war—you know how I’ve
been—Building, he thought! When I’d just been growing into the ways of
his world. Excitement-Eating! That was the main thing I’d been growing
on. I began to tell him—and he wouldn’t let me. ‘What has happened is
not mine now. It is for what is to be that I plead. With your future
mine, and mine yours, you can help me to forget the years we might not
have esteemed so lightly.’”
Jerry had finished, at the same time that she had snapped the last catch
together in her green evening gown—the same green sequin affair that
she had worn that terrible night they had looked for Sarah. . . .
“Well—and then what happened the rest of the afternoon?” Joy drew out
from lungs that had been deserted of breath.
“I’ve told you more than I shall ever tell anybody. The rest is
mine—that and—_this_!”
Jerry flaunted her left hand before her. On the third finger was a tiny
platinum circlet, so small that it had melted into the white of her hand
at a distance, as gold could not have done. “I’ve tried to thrust it
down your throat a thousand ways, but you would keep looking at my face
and a thousand other unimportant things!”
Joy sank back upon the bed, her whole being a rag of dumfounderment.
“Jerry!”
“Mrs. Philip Lancaster—and hurry up and put on some rouge! I don’t want
to keep my husband waiting!”
“But—but why—how—where——”
“We tossed the subject back and forth at luncheon. We figured we’d been
without each other long enough. After lunch we walked up to the nearest
jewelry store and got this ring. I wouldn’t let him get a big one, or
anything but this one. He’s poor, you know, Joy—the Lancasters are all
poor. That is, he calls it poor, but now that he’s got me he’s going to
work—you know he’s supposed to be a lawyer—and that combined with his
income and my little Charlette block ought to keep us passing the buck
along. We got married with a special license, at the Little Church
Around the Corner——” Jerry spoke with the calmness of excitement at
white heat—“and before going off on our honeymoon—we thought we’d take
you to our wedding dinner. You see, if it hadn’t been for you I’d have
still been excitement-eating—and he’d still be cynicing it around.”
The telephone rang, and Jerry darted to it. “Yes! Yes, this is Mrs.
Lancaster! Yes, we’re coming, Phil!” The name was all endearments shaped
in one. Jerry turned to hurry Joy with her last touches, and Joy, in a
state of coma almost bordering on collapse, followed Jerry’s eager
footsteps to the elevator and down into the lobby. Jerry’s husband was
waiting for them, fierily handsome in evening dress, and at least ten
years younger than he had seemed last night. Last night!—It seemed so
far away. Joy could not even stammer much, but Jerry and Phil did not
notice lack of anything, and swept her into the dining room.
“Let me see,” said Phil; “it’s the first time I’ve seen my wife in
evening dress.”
“Second!” said Jerry swiftly. “I wore one at Hanley’s, two years ago!”
“Oh, but that was a _costume_!”
Their words were stupid, inconsequential, in the face of Joy sitting
there. Their eyes were speaking to each other, saying so much that Joy
dared not look. And just last night——
“I wonder what Mabel will say,” she ventured. They paid to her remark
the tribute of polite inattention.
“I owe Jerry to you,” said Jerry’s husband; “but I don’t intend to pay
you.”
Of course—Jerry was leaving her now! Leaving her and the
apartment—alone! She considered this bleak fact, all through the
course. At last, breaking in upon the conversation of eyes, she said:
“What will you do with the apartment, Jerry?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jerry. “The lease will be up in July. Why don’t
you stay in it till then? Phil and I are going to live in his apartment
here, until we get a house in the suburbs, so I shan’t be moving out my
stuff for some time.”
To stay in the apartment—with the ghost of Sarah in curl-papers and
wrapper whining through the kitchenette—and the purple kimono and pink
mules gone from everywhere. . . . She did not bring the thought to the
surface of the table. “You two in the suburbs!” she exclaimed instead,
in faint derision.
Jerry hardly smiled. People in love always lost their sense of humour,
but you wouldn’t think Jerry——
“Apartment life would merely be existing for us,” said Phil. “We are
going to live.”
Their eyes trembled together in close embrace. . . . Joy hurried through
her dessert; the others had made no pretense of eating. Their appetite
was as if they had just come in from luncheon. All three were regarding
the meal as a more or less disagreeable formality to be gotten through
with as quickly as possible. But when they had finished, they grew
embarrassed at their haste, and everyone tried to be jovial, lingering
over the coffee.
“Last night at this time,” said Phil, “I was telling our cousin just why
I didn’t like younger or older women.”
“And looking at Jerry,” added Joy.
“And looking at Jerry,” he said gravely, repeating the performance.
“If you don’t like younger or older women, where do I come in?” Jerry
demanded.
“You don’t,” he told her; “you are neither young nor old; you are
immortal.”
At length they rose, and Joy went with Jerry while Jerry threw
everything into her suitcase and crushed it shut.
“It won’t be anything but so-long,” said Jerry; “I’ll be coming over to
Boston soon to get the rest of my wardrobe.”
“I’ll send it to you.”
“No—I’ll want to come. . . . Joy—you’ve been the only real girl friend
I ever had—and now you’ve given me everything that there is to hang
onto in this world.”
She said good-bye to them by the elevator downstairs, and watched them
vanish through the same revolving doors that Jerry had helped speed
around so merrily—was it only two days ago? They walked together as if
they were still in an expectant dream . . . in a sort of awed
breathlessness.
Joy suddenly knew that, of all lots in life, the lot of the looker-on,
the passive spectator, was the hardest. To see worlds of glory pass,
which she had to tell herself were not for her. She packed her bag,
checked out and climbed on the midnight as soon as it was open. Félicie
came at the last minute, with Greg carrying her suitcase into the train
and then stopping for a prolonged farewell while the train was moving.
The three girls had engaged a section, one to sleep in the upper and two
on the lower, and she was astonished to find Joy alone in the lower with
the upper pushed back out of the way.
“Hello,” said Joy sourly. Félicie’s but-lately-kissed beauty was
annoying. . . . “Where’s Jerry?” Félicie demanded, crawling inside and
emptying her suitcase over Joy in the process.
“Married!” Joy snapped, and turned over to look out of the window at the
lights of New York they were leaving behind.
“_Married!_” Félicie sank down in the midst of the out-heaval of
hairpins and lingerie, cold cream jars and silk stockings. Then weakly
she articulated Jerry’s epitaph: “I always said that girl would do
_anything_!”