“Je ris—de me voir—
Si belle—”
Her voice limped into silence. . . .
She left the piano. This loneliness was getting on her nerves. She would
see Félicie to-morrow. Yes, to-morrow was coming—and she could not wait
to have Pa hear that trill!
On hearing Joy’s proposition, Félicie consulted her great-aunt, but
neither of them wished to leave their eminently satisfactory lodgings in
Brighton.
“It’s awful for you to be alone, though, Joy,” she said. “Auntie
suggested that you come and stay with us—she’s deaf, you know, so she
won’t mind your practicing, if you don’t mind living in the little room
off the kitchen——I’d take you in with me, but there’s really no room,
the way everything’s fixed.”
Having decided to accept this enthusiastic invitation before it had been
issued, Joy surprised Félicie by being pleased with the offer of the
little room near the kitchen. “Of course, I’d pay board,” she said, “and
take my meals out.”
“Well, all right,” said Félicie, “only auntie will be annoyed if you
don’t eat with her. She’s lonely, now that I go out so much of the
time.”
They left the situation to be fought out with “auntie,” and Joy wrote
Jerry of her decision to leave the apartment as soon as she could get
her things together.
Jerry replied by bursting in upon Joy one morning in the first chill
days of April, while Joy was poaching a dejected egg in the kitchenette.
A new radiant Jerry, all softness and winsome, assured charm that is the
gain of those who are exorbitantly loved in return for their own great
love. She danced over the apartment in pretended high spirits at being
back, and then packed her clothes in a rush of concentration that
betrayed her haste.
“This is the first time I’ve been away from him—and I didn’t know I was
going to feel like this!” she confessed.
“There’s just one thing, though. You have no use for the wine-closet, I
take it?”
Joy had not taken a drink since the night she watched the effect of it
from the sofa, with Wigs and Davy babbling in her ear.
“Then,” said Jerry briskly, “we might just as well do a little
government-agent work.” At Joy’s look of astonishment: “Oh, I never
drink now. There’s—too much else to think about. Phil and I smoke
together—but that’s as far as we go. Seems funny when I think in idle
moments how I’ve taken it down all my life and now have just dropped it
off without—much—effort. But somehow, you don’t feel like the good old
stuff when you’re in love. There’s something about it——”
They took the liquor case by case to the bathroom where they became
carried away by an orgy of opening bottles and watching their contents
gurgle into the tub.
“We could bathe in champagne now, if we felt like it,” said Jerry
reflectively. “I’ve often thought I would, but I guess I was pretty well
doused on the inside when I had the little idea.”
Joy watched it gurgle down the pipe and thought of the inferno that
innocent-looking liquid could cause. . . . What it had caused in her own
experience. . . . In the lights and shades of the mixture tumbling to
the sewers where it belonged, she saw Jack Barnett’s face for a fleeting
horror, that shifted to Packy’s, quite as terrible. And she saw
Sarah. . . . And then they all blended together in a whirling mass, and
flickered away. The bathtub was empty. . . .
“I’ve got to admit,” Jerry was saying, in rather an artificial voice,
“that in spite of everything it makes me feel sort of ill to see all
that joy-getter spilling itself away in such a casual fashion.”
Joy looked at her, and saw that her mouth was slightly twisted, her eyes
bearing a strained expression. It had evidently been more of an effort
for her than Joy had realized.
That Jerry could have stopped drinking altogether! Even to her
inexperienced knowledge it seemed an impossibility. Jerry was staring
into the bathtub again, with the hungry look of the street-gamin. . . .
Joy turned away, and with her old-time quick sensitiveness, Jerry
laughed and joined her.
“I don’t deny it isn’t hard at times and harder at others, old girl,”
she said; “but there are things in everyone’s life that are hard not to
do, and all the same one simply can’t do ’em!”
The day was unlike their old times together. On the surface, both girls
were affectionate, and delighted to be with one another again; but below
the surface everywhere intruded the man who had come between their
friendship, changing everything irrevocably. Jerry was changed. For the
better, one could not doubt; but nevertheless she was not the Jerry that
Joy had known and loved. She was softer, with that new glow within her
lighting everything she did or said. Her speech already showed
meditation, her manner was more reposeful. Content and love were fast
enfolding her into serenity—and, Joy thought, who wanted a serene
Jerry?
Their conversation was strained, although voluble. Jerry’s bristled with
mention of Phil, directly or indirectly. This stimulated Joy’s desire to
talk of Jim; and the realization that she could not, that she had not
Jerry’s excuse or right, brought effort into her responses.
They telephoned Félicie, and Jerry took them both to the Copley for
dinner, over which they lingered. Félicie was wearing her usual look of
unbroken loveliness, and arrayed for a Sixty Club dance in Brookline.
Her attitude towards Jerry was frankly pitying, which abated none the
less when she saw that Jerry’s attitude duplicated hers.
“It’s all right to act as if you’d pulled the moon down to earth, for a
while,” she said tolerantly. “I know how these things come out. Pretty
soon this one-man stuff will get monotonous. Monotony! Sooner or later
you see it in all married life! And you’ll get monotonous to him, too!
Husbands always get so _husband-like_ when their wives begin getting
always the same!”
Jerry laughed. “Better take the plunge like a shot the way I did,
Félicie. Then you’ll have no time to think up objections. Monotony! The
way I used to live—the way you’re living now—is the real monotony.
Continually seeing one side only of large numbers of young men—one
party after another—oh well, there’s no use wasting my flow of English
on the subject.”
There was no use. A youth with an attitude of cultivated boredom and
repressed correctness, came in for her, and she left them “wishing she
could stay, but you see how it is.”
“She never looks eager,” said Joy; “you wouldn’t think she valued a good
time so highly.”
“No, not eager; just smug,” said Jerry tersely, and they talked of other
things.
Jerry the excitement-eater was dead, that was plain. Joy had always
wished to see that side of her dispensed with. Then why did this change,
this miraculous, softening change, stir irritation within her, throw a
breach between them?
She could not fathom the reason until she took Jerry to the eleven
o’clock and told her good-bye. There, with a farewell look at Jerry’s
brilliant face, enhanced by the beloved freckles, it came to her in a
rush. She was jealous—jealous both ways! Before, she had been jealous
of Phil Lancaster only for taking Jerry from her; now, she was jealous
of Jerry herself, for the world in which she lived, the world upon which
Joy had turned her back. . . .
She did not sleep well that night. Disturbing thoughts pressed urgently
about her, and would not postpone their hearing.
It was a powerful force that had led Jerry to stop drinking, to drop her
Excitement-Eating ways without regret. To pit oneself against such a
force—to eliminate it from one’s life—was an undertaking at the
mysterious door of which Joy paused and shivered. . . .