minutes before, from the very lapel against which her cheek lay pressed,
he had unpinned a white carnation.
BACK PAY
I set out to write a love story, and for the purpose sharpened a
bright-pink pencil with a glass ruby frivolously at the eraser end.
Something sweet. Something dainty. A candied rose leaf after all the
bitter war lozenges. A miss. A kiss. A golf stick. A motor car. Or, if
need be, a bit of khaki, but without one single spot of blood or mud,
and nicely pressed as to those fetching peg-top trouser effects where
they wing out just below the skirt-coat. The oldest story in the world
told newly. No wear out to it. Editors know. It's as staple as eggs
or printed lawn or ipecac. The good old-fashioned love story with the
above-mentioned miss, kiss, and, if need be for the sake of timeliness,
the bit of khaki, pressed.
Just my luck that, with one of these modish tales at the tip of my pink
pencil, Hester Bevins should come pounding and clamoring at the door of
my mental reservation, quite drowning out the rather high, the lipsy,
and, if I do say it myself, distinctly musical patter of Arline. That
was to have been her name. Arline Kildane. Sweet, don't you think, and
with just a bit of wild Irish rose in it?
But Hester Bevins would not let herself be gainsaid, sobbing a little,
elbowing her way through the group of mental unborns, and leaving me to
blow my pitch pipe for a minor key.
Not that Hester's isn't one of the oldest stories in the world, too. No
matter how newly told, she is as old as sin, and sin is but a few weeks
younger than love--and how often the two are interchangeable!
If it be a fact that the true lady is, in theory, either a virgin or
a lawful wife, then Hester Bevins stands immediately convicted on two
charges.
She was neither. The most that can be said for her is that she was
honestly what she was.
"If the wages of sin is death," she said to a roadhouse party of
roysterers one dawn, "then I've quite a bit of back pay coming to me."
And joined in the shout that rose off the table.
I can sketch her in for you rather simply because of the hackneyed
lines of her very, very old story. Whose pasts so quickly mold and
disintegrate as those of women of Hester's stripe? Their yesterdays are
entirely soluble in the easy waters of their to-days.
For the first seventeen years of her life she lived in what we might
call Any American Town of, say, fifteen or twenty thousand inhabitants.
Her particular one was in Ohio. Demopolis, I think. One of those
change-engine-and-take-on-water stops with a stucco art-nouveau station,
a roof drooping all round it, as if it needed to be shaved off like
edges of a pie, and the name of the town writ in conch shells on a
green slant of terrace. You know--the kind that first establishes a
ten-o'clock curfew for its young, its dance halls and motion-picture
theaters, and then sends in a hurry call for a social-service expert
from one of the large Eastern cities to come and diagnose its malignant
vice undergrowth.
Hester Bevins, of a mother who died bearing her and one of those
disappearing fathers who can speed away after the accident without even
stopping to pick up the child or leave a license number, was reared--no,
grew up, is better--in the home of an aunt. A blond aunt with many gold
teeth and many pink and blue wrappers.
Whatever Hester knew of the kind of home that fostered her, it left
apparently no welt across her sensibilities. It was a rather poor house,
an unpainted frame in a poor street, but there was never a lack of
gayety or, for that matter, any pinching lack of funds. It was an actual
fact that, at thirteen, cotton or lisle stockings brought out a
little irritated rash on Hester's slim young legs, and she wore silk.
Abominations, it is true, at three pair for a dollar, that sprang runs
and would not hold a darn, but, just the same, they were silk. There was
an air of easy _camaraderie_ and easy money about that house. It was
not unusual for her to come home from school at high noon and find a
front-room group of one, two, three, or four guests, almost invariably
men. Frequently these guests handed her out as much as half a dollar
for candy money, and not another child in school reckoned in more than
pennies.
Once a guest, for reasons of odd change, I suppose, handed her out
thirteen cents. Outraged, at the meanness of the sum, and with an early
and deep-dyed superstition of thirteen, she dashed the coins out of his
hand and to the four corners of the room, escaping in the guffaw of
laughter that went up.
Often her childish sleep in a small top room with slanting sides would
be broken upon by loud ribaldry that lasted into dawn, but never by
word, and certainly not by deed, was she to know from her aunt any of
its sordid significance.
Literally, Hester Bevins was left to feather her own nest. There were
no demands made upon her. Once, in the little atrocious front parlor of
horsehair and chromo, one of the guests, the town baggage-master, to
be exact, made to embrace her, receiving from the left rear a sounding
smack across cheek and ear from the aunt.
"Cut that! Hester, go out and play! Whatever she's got to learn from
life, she can't say she learned it in my house."
There were even two years of high school, and at sixteen, when she went,
at her own volition, to clerk in Finley's two-story department store on
High Street, she was still innocent, although she and Gerald Fishback
were openly sweethearts.
Gerald was a Thor. Of course, you are not to take that literally; but if
ever there was a carnification of the great god himself, then Gerald was
in his image. A wide streak of the Scandinavian ran through his make-up,
although he had been born in Middletown, and from there had come
recently to the Finley Dry Goods Company as an accountant.
He was so the viking in his bigness that once, on a picnic, he had
carried two girls, screaming their fun, across twenty feet of stream.
Hester was one of them.
It was at this picnic, the Finley annual, that he asked Hester, then
seventeen, to marry him. She was darkly, wildly pretty, as a rambler
rose tugging at its stem is restlessly pretty, as a pointed little
gazelle smelling up at the moon is whimsically pretty, as a runaway
stream from off the flank of a river is naughtily pretty, and she wore
a crisp percale shirt waist with a saucy bow at the collar, fifty-cent
silk stockings, and already she had almond incarnadine nails with points
to them.
They were in the very heart of Wallach's Grove, under a natural
cathedral of trees, the noises of the revelers and the small explosions
of soda-water and beer bottles almost remote enough for perfect quiet.
He was stretched his full and splendid length at the picknickers'
immemorial business of plucking and sucking grass blades, and she seated
very trimly, her little blue-serge skirt crawling up ever so slightly to
reveal the silken ankle, on a rock beside him.
"Tickle-tickle!" she cried, with some of that irrepressible animal
spirit of hers, and leaning to brush his ear with a twig.
He caught at her hand.
"Hester," he said, "marry me."
She felt a foaming through her until her finger tips sang.
"Well, I like that!" was what she said, though, and flung up a pointed
profile that was like that same gazelle's smelling the moon.
He was very darkly red, and rose to his knees to clasp her about the
waist. She felt like relaxing back against his blondness and feeling her
fingers plow through the great double wave of his hair. But she did not.
"You're too poor," she said.
He sat back without speaking for a long minute.
"Money isn't everything," he said, finally, and with something gone from
his voice.
"I know," she said, looking off; "but it's a great deal if you happen to
want it more than anything else in the world."
"Then, if that's how you feel about it, Hester, next to wanting you, I
want it, too, more than anything else in the world."
"There's no future in bookkeeping."
"I know a fellow in Cincinnati who's a hundred-and-fifty-dollar man.
Hester? Dear?"
"A week?"
"Why, of course not, dear--a month!"
"Faugh!" she said, still looking off.
He felt out for her hand, at the touch of her reddening up again.
"Hester," he said, "you're the most beautiful, the most exciting, the
most maddening, the most--the most everything girl in the world!
You're not going to have an easy time of it, Hester, with your--your
environment and your dangerousness, if you don't settle down--quick,
with some strong fellow to take care of you. A fellow who loves you.
That's me, Hester. I want to make a little home for you and protect you.
I can't promise you the money--right off, but I can promise you the
bigger something from the very start, Hester. Dear?"
She would not let her hand relax to his.
"I hate this town," she said.
"There's Cincinnati. Maybe my friend could find an opening there."
"Faugh!"
"Cincinnati, dear, is a metropolis."
"No, no! You don't understand. I hate littleness. Even little
metropolises. Cheapness. I hate little towns and little spenders
and mercerized stockings and cotton lisle next to my skin, and
machine-stitched nightgowns. Ugh! it scratches!"
"And I--I just love you in those starchy white shirt waists, Hester.
You're beautiful."
"That's just the trouble. It satisfies you, but it suffocates me. I've
got a pink-crêpe-de-Chine soul. Pink crêpe de Chine--you hear?"
He sat back on his heels.
"It--Is it true, then, Hester that--that you're making up with that
salesman from New York?"
"Why," she said, coloring--"why, I've only met him twice walking up High
Street, evenings!"
"But it _is_ true, isn't it, Hester?"
"Say, who was answering your questions this time last year?"
"But it _is_ true, isn't it, Hester? Isn't it?"
"Well, of all the nerve!"
But it was.
* * * * *
The rest tells glibly. The salesman, who wore blue-and-white-striped
soft collars with a bar pin across the front, does not even enter the
story. He was only a stepping-stone. From him the ascent or descent, or
whatever you choose to call it, was quick and sheer.
Five years later Hester was the very private, the very exotic,
manicured, coiffured, scented, svelted, and strictly _de-luxe_ chattel
of one Charles G. Wheeler, of New York City and Rosencranz, Long Island,
vice-president of the Standard Tractor Company, a member of no clubs but
of the Rosencranz church, three lodges, and several corporations.
You see, there is no obvious detail lacking. Yes, there was an
apartment. "Flat" it becomes under their kind of tenancy, situated on
the windiest bend of Riverside Drive and minutely true to type from
the pale-blue and brocade vernis-Martin parlor of talking-machine,
mechanical piano, and cellarette built to simulate a music cabinet, to
the pink-brocaded bedroom with a _chaise-longue_ piled high with a
small mountain of lace pillowettes that were liberally interlarded with
paper-bound novels, and a spacious, white-marble adjoining bathroom with
a sunken tub, rubber-sheeted shower, white-enamel weighing scales,
and overloaded medicine chest of cosmetic array in frosted bottles,
sleeping-, headache-, sedative powders, _et al_. There were also a negro
maid, two Pomeranian dogs, and last, but by no means least, a private
telephone inclosed in a hall closet and lighted by an electric bulb that
turned on automatically to the opening of the door.
There was nothing sinister about Wheeler. He was a rather fair exponent
of that amazing genus known as "typical New-Yorker," a roll of money in
his pocket, and a roll of fat at the back of his neck. He went in for
light checked suits, wore a platinum-and-Oriental-pearl chain across his
waistcoat, and slept at a Turkish bath once a week; was once named in a
large corporation scandal, escaping indictment only after violent and
expensive skirmishes; could be either savage or familiar with waiters;
wore highly manicured nails, which he regarded frequently in public,
white-silk socks only; and maintained, on a twenty-thousand-a-year
scale in the decorous suburb of Rosencranz, a decorous wife and three
children, and, like all men of his code, his ethics were strictly double
decked. He would not permit his nineteen-year-old daughter Marion so
much as a shopping tour to the city without the chaperonage of her
mother or a friend, forbade in his wife, a comely enough woman with a
white unmarcelled coiffure and upper arms a bit baggy with withering
flesh, even the slightest of shirtwaist V's unless filled in with
net, and kept up, at an expense of no less than fifteen thousand a
year--thirty the war year that tractors jumped into the war-industry
class--the very high-priced, -tempered, -handed, and -stepping Hester of
wild-gazelle charm.
Not that Hester stepped much. There were a long underslung roadster
and a great tan limousine with yellow-silk curtains at the call of her
private telephone.
The Wheeler family used, not without complaint, a large open car of very
early vintage, which in winter was shut in with flapping curtains with
isinglass peepers, and leaked cold air badly.
On more than one occasion they passed on the road--these cars. The
long tan limousine with the shock absorbers, foot warmers, two brown
Pomeranian dogs, little case of enamel-top bottles, fresh flowers, and
outside this little jewel-case interior, smartly exposed, so that the
blast hit him from all sides, a chauffeur in uniform that harmonized
nicely with the tans and yellows. And then the grotesque caravan of the
Azoic motor age, with its flapping curtains and ununiformed youth in
visored cap at the wheel.
There is undoubtedly an unsavory aspect to this story. For purpose of
fiction, it is neither fragrant nor easily digested. But it is not so
unsavory as the social scheme which made it possible for those two cars
to pass thus on the road, and, at the same time, Charles G. Wheeler to
remain the unchallenged member of the three lodges, the corporations,
and the Rosencranz church, with a memorial window in his name on the
left side as you enter, and again his name spelled out on a brass plate
at the end of a front pew.
No one but God and Mrs. Wheeler knew what was in her heart. It is
possible that she did not know what the world knew, but hardly. That she
endured it is not admirable, but then there were the three children,
and, besides, she lived in a world that let it go at that. And so she
continued to hold up her head in her rather poor, mute way, rode beside
her husband to funerals, weddings, and to the college Commencement of
their son at Yale. Scrimped a little, cried a little, prayed a little in
private, but outwardly lived the life of the smug in body and soul.
But the Wheelers' is another story, also a running social sore; but it
was Hester, you remember, who came sobbing and clamoring to be told.
As Wheeler once said of her, she was a darn fine clothes horse. There
was no pushed-up line of flesh across the middle of her back, as
the corsets did it to Mrs. Wheeler. She was honed to the ounce. The
white-enameled weighing scales, the sweet oils, the flexible fingers of
her masseur, the dumb-bells, the cabinet, salt-water, needle-spray,
and vapor baths saw to that. Her skin, unlike Marion Wheeler's, was
unfreckled, and as heavily and tropically white as a magnolia leaf, and,
of course, she reddened her lips, and the moonlike pallor came out more
than ever.
As I said, she was frankly what she was. No man looked at her more than
once without knowing it. To use an awkward metaphor, it was before her
face like an overtone; it was an invisible caul. The wells of her eyes
were muddy with it.
But withal, she commanded something of a manner, even from Wheeler. He
had no key to the apartment. He never entered her room without knocking.
There were certain of his friends she would not tolerate, from one or
another aversion, to be party to their not infrequent carousals. Men
did not always rise from their chairs when she entered a room, but she
suffered few liberties from them. She was absolutely indomitable in her
demands.
"Lord!" ventured Wheeler, upon occasion, across a Sunday-noon,
lace-spread breakfast table, when she was slim and cool fingered in
orchid-colored draperies, and his newest gift of a six-carat,
pear-shaped diamond blazing away on her right hand. "Say, aren't these
Yvette bills pretty steep?
"One midnight-blue-and-silver gown . . . . . . . . . $485.00
One blue-and-silver head bandeau . . . . . . . . . . 50.00
One serge-and-satin trotteur gown . . . . . . . . . 275.00
One ciel-blue tea gown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280.00
"Is that the cheapest you can drink tea? Whew!"
She put down her coffee cup, which she usually held with one little
finger poised elegantly outward as if for flight.
"You've got a nerve!" she said, rising and pushing back her chair. "Over
whose ticker are you getting quotations that I come cheap?"
He was immediately conciliatory, rising also to enfold her in an embrace
that easily held her slightness.
"Go on," he said. "You could work me for the Woolworth Building in
diamonds if you wanted it badly enough."
"Funny way of showing it! I may be a lot of things, Wheeler, but I'm not
cheap. You're darn lucky that the war is on and I'm not asking for a
French car."
He crushed his lips to hers.
"You devil!" he said.
There were frequent parties. Dancing at Broadway cabarets, all-night joy
rides, punctuated with road-house stop-overs, and not infrequently, in
groups of three or four couples, ten-day pilgrimages to showy American
spas.
"Getting boiled out," they called it. It was part of Hester's scheme for
keeping her sveltness.
Her friendships were necessarily rather confined to a definite
circle--within her own apartment house, in fact. On the floor above,
also in large, bright rooms of high rental, and so that they were
exchanging visits frequently during the day, often _en déshabillé_,
using the stairway that wound up round the elevator shaft, lived a
certain Mrs. Kitty Drew, I believe she called herself. She was plump and
blond, and so very scented that her aroma lay on a hallway for an hour
after she had scurried through it. She was well known and chiefly
distinguished by a large court-plaster crescent which she wore on her
left shoulder blade. She enjoyed the bounty of a Wall Street broker
who for one day had attained the conspicuousness of cornering the egg
market.
There were two or three others within this group. A Mrs. Denison, half
French, and a younger girl called Babe. But Mrs. Drew and Hester were
intimates. They dwaddled daily in one or the other's apartment, usually
lazy and lacy with negligée, lounging about on the mounds of lingerie
pillows over chocolates, cigarettes, novels, Pomeranians, and always the
headache powders, nerve sedatives, or smelling salts, a running line of:
"Lord! I've a head!" "I need a good cry for the blues!" "Talk about a
dark-brown taste!" or, "There was some kick to those cocktails last
night," through their conversation.
KITTY: "Br-r-r! I'm as nervous as a cat to-day."
HESTER: "Naughty, naughty bad doggie to bite muvver's diamond ring."
KITTY: "Leave it to you to land a pear-shaped diamond on your hooks."
HESTER: "He fell for it, just like that!"
KITTY: "You could milk a billiard ball."
HESTER: "I don't see any 'quality of mercy' to spare around your flat."
There were the two years of high school, you see.
"Ed's going out to Geyser Springs next month for the cure. I told him he
could not go without me unless over my dead body, he could not."
"Geyser Springs. That's thirty miles from my home town."
"Your home town? Nighty-night! I thought you was born on the corner of
Forty-second Street and Broadway with a lobster claw in your mouth."
"Demopolis, Ohio."
"What is that--a skin disease?"
"My last relation in the world died out there two years ago. An aunt.
Wouldn't mind some Geyser Springs myself if I could get some of this
stiffness out of my joints."
"Come on! I dare you! May Denison and Chris will come in on it, and Babe
can always find somebody. Make it three or four cars full and let's
motor out. We all need a good boiling, anyways. Wheeler looks about
ready for spontaneous combustion, and I got a twinge in my left little
toe. You on?"
"I am, if he is."
"If he is!' He'd fall for life in an Igorrote village with a ring in his
nose if you wanted it."
And truly enough, it did come about that on a height-of-the-season
evening a highly cosmopolitan party of four couples trooped into the
solid-marble foyer of the Geyser Springs Hotel, motor coated, goggled,
veiled; a whole litter of pigskin and patent-leather bags, hampers,
and hat boxes, two golf bags, two Pomeranians, a bull in spiked collar,
furs, leather coats, monogrammed rugs, thermos bottles, air pillows,
robes, and an _ensemble_ of fourteen wardrobe trunks sent by express.
They took the "cure." Rode horseback, motored, played roulette at the
casino for big stakes, and scorned the American plan of service for the
smarter European idea, with a special _à la carte_ menu for each meal.
Extraordinary-looking mixed drinks, strictly against the mandates of
the "cure," appeared at their table. Strange midnight goings-on were
reported by the more conservative hotel guests, and the privacy of their
circle was allowed full integrity by the little veranda groups of gouty
ladies or middle-aged husbands with liver spots on their faces. The bath
attendants reveled in the largest tips of the season. When Hester walked
down the large dining room evenings, she was a signal for the craning of
necks for the newest shock of her newest extreme toilette. The kinds of
toilettes that shocked the women into envy and mental notes of how the
underarm was cut, and the men into covert delight. Wheeler liked to sit
back and put her through her paces like a high-strung filly.
"Make 'em sit up, girl! You got them all looking like dimes around
here."
One night she descended to the dining room in a black evening gown so
daringly lacking in back, and yet, withal, so slimly perfect an elegant
thing, that an actual breathlessness hung over the hall, the clatter of
dishes pausing.
There was a gold bird of paradise dipped down her hair over one
shoulder, trailing its smoothness like fingers of lace. She defied with
it as she walked.
"Take it from me," said Kitty, who felt fat in lavender that night,
"she's going it one too strong."
Another evening she descended, always last, in a cloth of silver with a
tiny, an absurd, an impeccably tight silver turban dipped down over one
eye, and absolutely devoid of jewels except the pear-shaped diamond on
her left forefinger.
They were a noisy, a spending, a cosmopolitan crowd of too-well-fed men
and too-well-groomed women, ignored by the veranda groups of wives and
mothers, openly dazzling and arousing a tremendous curiosity in the
younger set, and quite obviously sought after by their own kind.
But Hester's world, too, is all run through with sharply defined social
schisms.
"I wish that Irwin woman wouldn't always hang round our crowd," she
said, one morning, as she and Kitty lay side by side in the cooling room
after their baths, massages, manicures, and shampoos. "I don't want to
be seen running with her."
"Did you see the square emerald she wore last night?"
"Fake. I know the clerk at the Synthetic Jewelry Company had it made up
for her. She's cheap, I tell you. Promiscuous. Who ever heard of anybody
standing back of her? She knocks around. She sells her old clothes to
Tessie, my manicurist. I've got a line on her. She's cheap."
Kitty, who lay with her face under a white mud of cold cream and her
little mouth merely a hole, turned on her elbow.
"We can't all be top-notchers, Hester," she said. "You're hard as
nails."
"I guess I am, but you've got to be to play this game. The ones who
aren't end up by stuffing the keyhole and turning on the gas. You've got
to play it hard or not at all. If you've got the name, you might as well
have the game."
"If I had it to do over again--well, there would be one more
wife-and-mother role being played in this little old world, even if I
had to play it on a South Dakota farm."