copy book. Well, that's the way I feel about this. To me, anything is
worth doing to escape the cotton stockings and lisle next to your skin.
I admit I never sit down and _think_. You know, sit down and take stock
of myself. What's the use thinking? Live! Yes," mused Hester, her arms
in a wreath over her head, "I think I'd do it all over again. There's
not been so many, at that. Three. The first was a salesman. He'd have
married me, but I couldn't see it on six thousand a year. Nice fellow,
too--an easy spender in a small way, but I couldn't see a future to
ladies' neckwear. I hear he made good later in munitions. Al was a
pretty good sort, too, but tight. How I hate tightness! I've been pretty
lucky in the long run, I guess."
"Did I say 'hard as nails'?" said Kitty, grotesquely fitting a cigarette
in the aperture of her mouth. "I apologize. Why, alongside of you a
piece of flint is morning cereal. Haven't you ever had a love affair?
I've been married twice--that's how chicken hearted I can be. Haven't
you ever pumped a little faster just because a certain some one walked
into the room?"
"Once."
"Once what?"
"I liked a fellow. Pretty much. A blond. Say, he was blond! I always
think to myself, Kit, next to Gerald, you've got the bluest eyes under
heaven. Only, his didn't have any dregs."
"Thanks, dearie."
"I sometimes wonder about Gerald. I ought to drive over while we're out
here. Poor old Gerald Fishback!"
"Sweet name--'Fishback.' No wonder you went wrong, dearie."
"Oh, I'm not getting soft. I saw my bed and made it, nice and soft and
comfy, and I'm lying on it without a whimper."
"You just bet your life you made it up nice and comfy! You've the right
idea; I have to hand that to you. You command respect from them. Lord!
Ed would as soon fire a teacup at me as not. But, with me, it pays. The
last one he broke he made up to me with my opal-and-diamond beetle."
"Wouldn't wear an opal if it was set next to the Hope diamond."
"Superstitious, dearie?"
"Unlucky. Never knew it to fail."
"Not a superstition in my bones. I don't believe in walking under
ladders or opening an umbrella in the house or sitting down with
thirteen, but, Lordy! never saw the like with you! Thought you'd have
the hysterics over that little old vanity mirror you broke that day out
at the races."
"Br-r-r! I hated it."
"Lay easy, dearie. Nothing can touch you the way he's raking in the war
contracts."
"Great--isn't it?"
"Play for a country home, dearie. I always say real estate and jewelry
are something in the hand. Look ahead in this game, I always say."
"You just bet I've looked ahead."
"So have I, but not enough."
"Somehow, I never feel afraid. I could get a job to-morrow if I had to."
"Say, dearie, if it comes to that, with twenty pounds off me, there's
not a chorus I couldn't land back in."
"I worked once, you know, in Lichtig's import shop."
"Fifth Avenue?"
"Yes. It was in between the salesman and Al. I sold two thousand five
hundred dollars' worth of gowns the first week."
"Sure enough?"
"'Girl,' old man Lichtig said to me the day I quit--'girl,' he said, 'if
ever you need this job again, comeback; it's waiting.'"
"Fine chance!"
"I've got the last twenty-five dollars I earned pinned away this minute
in the pocket of the little dark-blue suit I wore to work. I paid for
that suit with my first month's savings. A little dark-blue Norfolk,
Lichtig let me have out of stock for twenty-seven fifty."
"Were they giving them away with a pound of tea?"
"Honest, Kitty, it was neat. Little white shirt waist, tan shoes, and
one of those slick little five-dollar sailors, and every cent paid out
of my salary. I could step into that outfit to-morrow, look the part,
and land back that job or any other. I had a way with the trade, even
back at Finley's."
"Here, hold my jewel bag, honey; I'm going to die of cold-cream
suffocation if she don't soon come back and unsmear me."
"Opal beetle in it?"
"Yes, dearie; but it won't bite. It's muzzled with my diamond
horseshoe."
"Nothing doing, Kit. Put it under your pillow."
"You better watch out. There's a thirteenth letter in the alphabet; you
might accidentally use it some day. You're going to have a sweet time
to-night, you are!"
"Why?"
"The boys have engaged De Butera to come up to the rooms."
"You mean the fortune teller over at the Stag Hotel?"
"She's not a fortune teller, you poor nervous wreck. She's the
highest-priced spiritualist in the world. Moving tables--spooks--woof!"
"Faugh!" said Hester, rising from her couch and feeling with her little
bare feet for the daintiest of pink-silk mules. "I could make tables
move, too, at forty dollars an hour. Where's my attendant? I want an
alcohol rub."
They did hold séance that night in a fine spirit of lark, huddled
together in the _de-luxe_ sitting room of one of their suites, and
little half-hysterical shrieks and much promiscuous ribaldry under cover
of darkness.
Madame de Butera was of a distinctly fat and earthy blondness, with a
coarse-lace waist over pink, and short hands covered with turquoise
rings of many shapes and blues.
Tables moved. A dead sister of Wheeler's spoke in thin, high voice. Why
is it the dead are always so vocally thin and high?
A chair tilted itself on hind legs, eliciting squeals from the women.
Babe spoke with a gentleman friend long since passed on, and Kitty with
a deceased husband, and began to cry quite sobbily and took little sips
of highball quite gulpily. May Denison, who was openly defiant, allowed
herself to be hypnotized and lay rigid between two chairs, and
Kitty went off into rampant hysteria until Wheeler finally placed a
hundred-dollar bill over the closed eyes, and whether under it, or to
the legerdemain of madam's manipulating hands, the tight eyes opened,
May, amid riots of laughter, claiming for herself the hundred-dollar
bill, and Kitty, quite resuscitated, jumping up for a table cancan, her
yellow hair tumbling, and her china-blue eyes with the dregs in them
inclined to water.
All but Hester. She sat off by herself in a peacock-colored gown that
wrapped her body suavity as if the fabric were soaking wet, a band of
smoky-blue about her forehead. Never intoxicated, a slight amount of
alcohol had a tendency to make her morose.
"What's the matter, Cleo?" asked Wheeler, sitting down beside her and
lifting her cool fingers one by one, and, by reason of some remote
analogy that must have stirred within him, seeing in her a Nile queen.
"What's the matter Cleo? Does the spook stuff get your goat?"
She turned on him eyes that were all troubled up, like waters suddenly
wind-blown.
"God!" she said, her fingers, nails inward, closing about his arm.
"Wheeler--can--can the--dead--speak?"
But fleeting as the hours themselves were the moods of them all, and
the following morning there they were, the eight of them, light with
laughter and caparisoned again as to hampers, veils, coats, dogs, off
for a day's motoring through the springtime countryside.
"Where to?" shouted Wheeler, twisting from where he and Hester sat in
the first of the cars to call to the two motor-loads behind.
"I thought Crystal Cave was the spot"--from May Denison in the last of
the cars, winding her head in a scarlet veil.
"Crystal Cave it is, then."
"Is that through Demopolis?"
Followed a scanning of maps.
"Sure! Here it is! See! Granite City. Mitchell. Demopolis. Crystal
Cave."
"Good Lord! Hester, you're not going to spend any time in that dump?"
"It's my home town," she replied, coldly. "The only relation I had is
buried there. It's nothing out of your way to drop me on the court-house
steps and pick me up as you drive back, I've been wanting to get there
ever since we're down here. Wanting to stop by your home town you
haven't seen in five years isn't unreasonable, is it?"
He admitted it wasn't, leaning to kiss her.
She turned to him a face soft, with one of the pouts he usually found
irresistible.
"Honey," she said, "what do you think?"
"What?"
"Chris is buying May that chinchilla coat I showed you in Meyerbloom's
window the day before we left."
"The deuce he is!" he said, letting go of her hand, but hers immediately
covering his.
"She's wiring her sister in the 'Girlie Revue' to go in and buy it for
her."
"Outrage--fifteen thousand dollars to cover a woman's back! Look at the
beautiful scenery, honey! You're always prating about views. Look at
those hills over there! Great--isn't it?"
"I wouldn't expect it, Wheeler, if it wasn't war year and you landing
one big contract after another. I'd hate to see May show herself in
that chinchilla coat when we could beat her to it by a wire. I could
telegraph Meyerbloom himself. I bought the sable rug of him. I'd hate
it, Wheeler, to see her and Chris beat us to it. So would you. What's
fifteen thousand when one of your contracts alone runs into the hundred
thousands? Honey?"
"Wire," he said, sourly, but not withdrawing his hand from hers.
* * * * *
They left her at the shady court-house steps in Demopolis, but with
pleasantry and gibe.
"Give my love to the town pump."
"Rush the old oaken growler for me."
"So long!" she called, eager to be rid of them. "Pick me up at six
sharp."
She walked slowly up High Street. Passers-by turned to stare, but
otherwise she was unrecognized. There was a new five-and-ten-cent store,
and Finley Brothers had added an ell. High Street was paved. She made a
foray down into the little side street where she had spent those queerly
remote first seventeen years of her life. How dim her aunt seemed! The
little unpainted frame house was gone. There was a lumber yard on the
site. Everything seemed to have shrunk. The street was narrower and
dirtier than she recalled it.
She made one stop, at the house of Maggie Simms, a high-school chum. It
was a frame house, too, and she remembered that the front door opened
directly into the parlor and the side entrance was popularly used
instead. But a strange sister-in-law opened the side door. Maggie was
married and living in Cincinnati. Oh, fine--a master mechanic, and there
were twins. She started back toward Finley's, thinking of Gerald, and
halfway she changed her mind.
Maggie Simms married and living in Cincinnati. Twins! Heigh-ho! What a
world! The visit was hardly a success. At half after five she was on her
way back to the court-house steps. Stupid to have made it six!
And then, of course, and quite as you would have it, Gerald Fishback
came along. She recognized his blondness long before he saw her. He was
bigger and more tanned, and, as of old, carried his hat in his hand. She
noticed that there were no creases down the front of his trousers, but
the tweed was good and he gave off that intangible aroma of well-being.
She was surprised at the old thrill racing over her. Seeing him was like
a stab of quick steel through the very pit of her being. She reached
out, touching him, before he saw her.
"Gerald," she said, soft and teasingly.
It was actually as if he had been waiting for that touch, because before
he could possibly have perceived her her name was on his lips.
"Hester!" he said, the blueness of his eyes flashing between blinks.
"Not Hester?"
"Yes, Hester," she said, smiling up at him.
He grasped both her hands, stammering for words that wanted to come
quicker than he could articulate.
"Hester!" he kept repeating. "Hester!"
"To think you knew me, Gerald!"
"Know you! I'd know you blindfolded. And how--I--You're beautiful,
Hester! I think you've grown five years younger."
"You've got on, Gerald. You look it."
"Yes; I'm general manager now at Finley's."
"I'm so glad. Married?"
"Not while there's a Hester Bevins on earth."
She started at her own name.
"How do you know I'm not married?"
"I--I know--" he said, reddening up.
"Isn't there some place we can talk, Gerald? I've thirty minutes before
my friends call for me."
"'Thirty minutes?'"
"Your rooms? Haven't you rooms or a room where we could go and sit
down?"
"Why--why, no, Hester," he said, still red. "I'd rather you didn't
go there. But here. Let's stop in at the St. James Hotel. There's a
parlor."
To her surprise, she felt herself color up and was pleasantly conscious
of her finger tips.
"You darling!" She smiled up at him.
They were seated presently in the unaired plush-and-cherry,
Nottingham-and-Axminster parlor of a small-town hotel.
"Hester," he said, "you're like a vision come to earth."
"I'm a bad durl," she said, challenging his eyes for what he knew.
"You're a little saint walked down and leaving an empty pedestal in my
dreams."
She placed her forefinger over his mouth.
"Sh-h!" she said. "I'm not a saint, Gerald; you know that."
"Yes," he said, with a great deal of boyishness in his defiance, "I do
know it, Hester, but it is those who have been through the fire who can
sometimes come out--new. It was your early environment."
"My aunt died on the town, Gerald, I heard. I could have saved her all
that if I had only known. She was cheap, aunt was. Poor soul! She never
looked ahead."
"It was your early environment, Hester. I've explained that often enough
to them here. I'd bank on you, Hester--swear by you."
She patted him.
"I'm a pretty bad egg, Gerald. According to the standards of a town
like this, I'm rotten, and they're about right. For five years, Gerald,
I've--"
"The real _you_ is ahead of--and not behind you, Hester."
"How wonderful," she said, "for you to feel that way, but--"
"Hester," he said, more and more the big boy, and his big blond head
nearing hers, "I don't care about anything that's past; I only know
that, for me, you are the--"
"Gerald," she said, "for God's sake!"
"I'm a two hundred-a-month man now, Hester. I want to build you the
prettiest, the whitest little house in this town. Out in the Briarwood
section. I'll make them kowtow to you, Hester; I--"
"Why," she said, slowly, and looking at him with a certain sadness, "you
couldn't keep me in stockings, Gerald! The aigrettes on this hat cost
more than one month of your salary."
"Good God!" he said.
"You're a dear, sweet boy just the same; but you remember what I told
you about my crêpe-de-Chine soul."
"Just the same, I love you best in those crispy white shirt waists you
used to wear and the little blue suits and sailor hats. You remember
that day at Finleys' picnic, Hester, that day, dear, that you--you--"
"You dear boy!"
"But it--your mistake--it--it's all over. You work now, don't you,
Hester?"
Somehow, looking into the blueness of his eyes and their entreaty for
her affirmative, she did what you or I might have done. She half lied,
regretting it while the words still smoked on her lips.
"Why, yes, Gerald; I've held a fine position in Lichtig Brothers, New
York importers. Those places sometimes pay as high as seventy-five a
week. But I don't make any bones, Gerald; I've not been an angel."
"The--the salesman, Hester?"--his lips quivering with a nausea for the
question.
"I haven't seen him in four years," she answered, truthfully.
He laid his cheek on her hand.
"I knew you'd come through. It was your environment. I'll marry you
to-morrow--to-day, Hester. I love you."
"You darling boy!" she said, her lips back tight against her teeth. "You
darling, darling boy!"
"Please, Hester! We'll forget what has been."
"Let me go," she said, rising and pinning on her hat; "let me go--or--or
I'll cry, and--and I don't want to cry."
"Hester," he called, rushing after her and wanting to fold her back into
his arms, "let me prove my trust--my love--"
"Don't! Let me go! Let me go!"
At slightly after six the ultra cavalcade drew up at the court-house
steps. She was greeted with the pleasantries and the gibes.
"Have a good time, sweetness?" asked Wheeler, arranging her rugs.
"Yes," she said, lying back and letting her lids droop; "but
tired--very, very tired."
At the hotel, she stopped a moment to write a telegram before going up
for the vapor bath, nap, and massage that were to precede dinner.
"Meyerbloom & Co., Furriers. Fifth Avenue, New York," it was addressed.
* * * * *
This is not a war story except that it has to do with profiteering,
parlor patriots, and the return of Gerald Fishback.
While Hester was living this tale, and the chinchilla coat was
enveloping her like an ineffably tender caress, three hundred thousand
of her country's youths were at strangle hold across three thousand
miles of sea, and on a notorious night when Hester walked, fully dressed
in a green gown of iridescent fish scales, into the electric fountain of
a seaside cabaret, and Wheeler had to carry her to her car wrapped in a
sable rug, Gerald Fishback was lying with his face in Flanders mud, and
his eye sockets blackly deep and full of shrapnel, and a lung-eating gas
cloud rolling at him across the vast bombarded dawn.
* * * * *
Hester read of him one morning, sitting up in bed against a mound of
lace-over-pink pillows, a masseuse at the pink soles of her feet. It was
as if his name catapulted at her from a column she never troubled to
read. She remained quite still, looking at the name for a full five
minutes after it had pierced her full consciousness. Then, suddenly, she
swung out of bed, tilting over the masseuse.
"Tessie," she said, evenly enough, "that will do. I have to hurry to
Long Island to a base hospital. Go to that little telephone in the
hall--will you?--and call my car."
But the visit was not so easy of execution. It required two days of red
tape and official dispensation before she finally reached the seaside
hospital that, by unpleasant coincidence, only a year before had been
the resort hotel of more than one dancing orgy.
She thought she would faint when she saw him, jerking herself back with
a straining of all her faculties. The blood seemed to drain away
from her body, leaving her ready to sink, and only the watchful and
threatening eye of a man nurse sustained her. He was sitting up in bed,
and she would never have recognized in him anything of Gerald except
for the shining Scandinavian quality of his hair. His eyes were not
bandaged, but their sockets were dry and bare like the beds of old lakes
long since drained. She had only seen the like in eyeless marble busts.
There were unsuspected cheek bones, pitched now very high in his face,
and his neck, rising above the army nightshirt, seemed cruelly long,
possibly from thinness.
"Are you Hester?" whispered the man nurse.
She nodded, her tonsils squeezed together in an absolute knot.
"He called for you all through his delirium," he said, and went out. She
stood at the bedside, trying to keep down the screams from her speech
when it should come. But he was too quick for her.
"Hester," he said, feeling out.
And in their embrace, her agony melted to tears that choked and seared,
beat and scalded her, and all the time it was he who held her with rigid
arm, whispered to her, soothed down the sobs which tore through her like
the rip of silk, seeming to split her being.
"Now--now! Why, Hester! Now--now--now! Sh-h! It will be over in a
minute. You mustn't feel badly. Come now, is this the way to greet a
fellow that's so darn glad to see you that nothing matters? Why I can
see you, Hester. Plain as day in your little crispy waist. Now, now!
You'll get used to it in a minute. Now--now--"
"I can't stand it, Gerald! I can't! Can't! Kill me, Gerald, but don't
ask me to stand it!"
He stroked down the side of her, lingering at her cheek.
"Sh-h! Take your time, dear," he said, with the first furry note in his
voice. "I know it's hard, but take your time. You'll get used to me.
It's the shock, that's all. Sh-h!"
She covered his neck with kisses and scalding tears, her compassion for
him racing through her in chills.
"I could tear out my eyes, Gerald, and give them to you. I could tear
out my heart and give it to you. I'm bursting of pain. Gerald! Gerald!"
There was no sense of proportion left her. She could think only of what
her own physical suffering might do in penance. She would willingly have
opened the arteries of her heart and bled for him on the moment. Her
compassion wanted to scream. She, who had never sacrificed anything,
wanted suddenly to bleed at his feet, and prayed to do so on the
agonized crest of the moment.
"There's a girl! Why, I'm going to get well, Hester, and do what
thousands of others of the blinded are doing. Build up a new, a useful,
and a busy life."
"It's not fair! It's not fair!"
"I'm ready now, except for this old left lung. It's burnt a bit, you
see--gas."
"God! God!"
"It's pretty bad, I admit. But there's another way of looking at it.
There's a glory in being chosen to bear your country's wounds."
"Your beautiful eyes! Your blue, beautiful eyes! O God, what does it
all mean? Living! Dying! All the rotters, all the rat-eyed ones I know,
scot-free and Gerald chosen. God! God! where are you?"
"He was never so close to me as now, Hester. And with you here, dear, He
is closer than ever."
"I'll never leave you, Gerald," she said, crying down into his sleeve
again. "Don't be afraid of the dark, dear; I'll never leave you."
"Nonsense!" he said, smoothing her hair that the hat had fallen away
from.
"Never! Never! I wish I were a mat for you to walk on. I want to crawl
on my hands and knees for you. I'll never leave you, Gerald--never!"
"My beautiful Hester!" he said, unsteadily, and then again, "Nonsense!"
But, almost on the moment, the man nurse returned and she was obliged to
leave him, but not without throbbing promises of the to-morrow's
return, and then there took place, downstairs in an anteroom, a long, a
closeted, and very private interview with a surgeon and more red tape
and filing of applications. She was so weak from crying that a nurse was
called finally to help her through the corridors to her car.
Gerald's left lung was burned out and he had three, possibly four, weeks
to live.
All the way home, in her tan limousine with the little yellow curtains,
she sat quite upright, away from the upholstery, crying down her
uncovered face, but a sudden, an exultant determination hardening in her
mind.
* * * * *
That night a strange conversation took place in the Riverside Drive
apartment. She sat on Wheeler's left knee, toying with his platinum
chain, a strained, a rather terrible pallor out in her face, but the
sobs well under her voice, and its modulation about normal. She had been
talking for over two hours, silencing his every interruption until he
had fallen quite still.
"And--and that's all, Wheeler," she ended up. "I've told you everything.
We were never more than just--friends--Gerald and me. You must take my
word for it, because I swear it before God."
"I take your word, Hester," he said, huskily.
"And there he lies, Wheeler, without--without any eyes in his head. Just
as if they'd been burned out by irons. And he--he smiles when he talks.
That's the awful part. Smiles like--well, I guess like the angel he--he
almost is. You see, he says it's a glory to carry the wounds of his
country. Just think! just think! that boy to feel that, the way he lies
there!"
"Poor boy! Poor, poor boy!"
"Gerald's like that. So--so full of faith. And, Wheeler, he thinks he's
going to get well and lead a useful life like they teach the blind to
do. He reminds me of one of those Greek statues down at the Athens Café.
You know--broken. That's it; he's a broken statue."
"Poor fellow! Poor fellow! Do something for him. Buy the finest fruit in
the town for him. Send a case of wine. Two."
"I--I think I must be torn to pieces inside, Wheeler, the way I've
cried."
"Poor little girl!"
"Wheeler?"
"Now, now," he said; "taking it so to heart won't do no good. It's
rotten, I know, but worrying won't help. Got me right upset, too. Come,
get it off your mind. Let's take a ride. Doll up; you look a bit peaked.
Come now, and to-morrow we'll buy out the town for him."
"Wheeler?" she said. "Wheeler?"
"What?"
"Don't look, Wheeler. I've something else to ask of you--something
queer."
"Now, now," he said, his voice hardening but trying to maintain a
chiding note; "you know what you promised after the chinchilla--no more
this year until--"
"No, no; for God's sake, not that! It's still about Gerald."
"Well?"
"Wheeler, he's only got four weeks to live. Five at the outside."
"Now, now, girl; we've been all over that."
"He loves me, Wheeler, Gerald does."
"Yes?" dryly.