AS WILLOWS BUD IN SPRING
Cecille was still up, staring out of the window, when Felicity and
Perry Blair came in that night. Perry stayed but a moment, only long
enough to promise that he would come again. Then he was gone. And
Felicity was standing before the other girl, every line of her pulsing
triumph.
"Not him!" Cecille cried. She could not have understood the triumph
better had Felicity explained with a torrent of words.
"Oh, not him!" with quick, unthinking horror. "He--he's only a boy."
"Who?" demanded Felicity blankly.
"Mr--Mr. Blair."
Felicity's laugh was staccato.
"Him? Good Lord, no. Dunham!" She fairly sang it. "Dunham.
Pig-iron Dunham. I knew if I waited I'd cop. Now watch me. Watch my
dust!"
Cecille wondered why she didn't pack her bag and get out. But she
didn't. She stayed. And later, a little timidly, she inquired about
Blair.
"Perry Blair?" Felicity with a racing tongue had been describing how
Dunham led her away from the near-accident.
"Perry? Oh, he's a prize-fighter. Light-weight champion, or he was
for a minute or so. He wouldn't play the game when he had his chance,
I guess, so Dunham and the bunch broke him. Something like that. I
never did hear the inside stuff. But they say he was a bust
anyway--just a morning-glory--and didn't know his luck. But do I? Did
I play the game to-night? Did I pass up Pig-iron and his limousine to
come home in a flat-wheeled trolley with my hero, who's already made
him sore once? Oh, didn't I though! I guess I'm crazy!"
Cecille recoiled a little from that.
A prize-fighter. A bruiser. A plug-ugly. But--but--why, that wasn't
possible. And if your idea of such a one is what Cecille's once was,
neither will he fill your eye.
Just a kid. Hamilton had hit it off aptly at that. Level-eyed and
diffident of tongue, with only a hint of his hidden bodily perfection
lurking in breadth of shoulder and slenderness of waist.
A prize-fighter! Cecille fell asleep wondering how soon he would come
again. As to whether he would come at all she was never for a moment
in doubt. Once she had watched his eyes follow Felicity across the
room she _knew_. But she hadn't felt sorry for him as Hamilton had.
She felt sorry for herself and bitter against Perry. For the time she
hated him.
Nor did she have to wonder long. Perry came the next night and
escorted Felicity to the Roof. And the next. And next. Then Felicity
realized that it would not be good policy to make Dunham sulk. Indeed
she knew her luck. Indeed she played the game. The third evening she
left Perry at home with Cecille.
[Illustration: Lucky interference.]
And for six whole weeks Broadway nudged and watched it. Broadway
watched Perry Blair's courtship of Felicity and Dunham's, if you can
call the latter's unhurried pursuit that. Dunham was complacent and
patient, Felicity's tactics were not new to him and he did not mind
being made conspicuous. And Perry Blair never knew they nudged; never
knew they laughed. There is some satisfaction in that. But it is far
finer, I think, to be sure that Broadway never guessed at all of the
other courtship which went steadily forward in the same interval,
elementally, naturally as willows bud in spring. Perry himself was
unaware of it. Cecille too--for a while.
For Felicity left him oftener and oftener to the other girl. And
almost immediately a common need for the companionship of the other was
born in both of them. Upon the boy's part it must have been the urge
to carry on his courtship, even vicariously. Lonesomeness was the way
Cecille explained it to herself until with the passage of a little time
she could no longer tell herself that lie and believe it. And that
marked the beginning of a long bad period for her.
She ceased soon to hate him when he spoke of Felicity. Whenever he
observed haltingly, as he did over and over again, that it was no place
for a girl like her (Fiegenspann's) and that she should be gotten out
before it was too late, she learned to agree with him mechanically.
Instead of hating his blindness, as persistently as she dared she swung
the conversation more and more to other things.
From the beginning she found it hard to make him talk about himself.
That instantly set him apart from all other men in her experience. For
they had talked of little else. And yet, when finally she had it from
him, she found his ambition anything but vague.
"I like animals," he told her on one such occasion, "and the--the
country. I guess that's what I am, a country boy. I sure would like
to own a ranch."
He'd not pressed her so eagerly for her hopes. Scarcely. His
singleness of interest at least was wholly masculine. But that didn't
deter her. She found herself giving them to him just the same, just as
eagerly.
"A ranch!" she seized hungrily upon that word. "A home! A white house
on a hill with light green shutters. The house, of course, not the
hill." She went further.
"And a white and blue kitchen." Her haste to tell him was bubbling.
"With aluminum pots and pans. Dozens! A whole set!"
And, somehow subdued:
"They're very expensive."
Broadway never knew anything about that courtship. But Felicity used
to wake up, now and then, and hear the other girl crying softly in the
night.
It was a long bad period for Cecille. At first the birth of this
wholly new thing within her baffled her own power to reason. She
watched its mushroom growth with fascination, just a little aghast.
But when, all in a kind of cataclysmic flash, she thought to recognize
it for what it was, she shrank away as if from a malignant fungus.
From the first evening one thing had intrigued her. Her discovery that
the sensation of pervading cleanliness which she always had from him
was not a result of the careful clothes he wore but something more
essential made her remember how the Sunday-groomed louts of other days,
reeking with cheap toilet water and hair oil, had filled her with dull
loathing. She had never attempted an analysis of that distaste. Now
trying to analyze its opposite, in the case of Perry Blair, she arrived
at a disquieting certainty. She found she could no more be near him,
no more glance at him, without being conscious of him physically, than
she could strike her head against a wall and not be hurt.
She realized more. She realized how keenly she liked being near him.
She realized how often, and for how long, she had been making little
opportunities to stand close, so that her shoulder brushed his. How
often she had contrived a fleeting contact of their hands. And yet if
anybody had tried to tell her that this was the blooming of a perfect
thing to be cherished all her days she would have suffered unutterably
that she had been found out. As it was she suffered sufficiently. She
cried too often into her pillow. But she wasn't yet wholly debased in
her own eyes. That came directly, inevitably.
One Saturday afternoon, urged more enthusiastically by him than she had
ever been urged before, she accompanied him to a gymnasium far uptown.
"I'm keeping in shape, you see," he told her without his usual
diffidence. "I don't know quite why. Everybody says I'm through, but
sometimes I think something may turn up. Enough to bring me a little
stake anyhow. And, anyway, it pays me a little. I'm working out with
Jack English. He's a welter; he's getting ready for a go with Levitt.
I've told you a lot about this business, but you can't judge much just
from talk. I--I'd like to have you come up and watch me box."
There it was, of a sudden. There was his shyness again, so lamely come
upon him that it colored his face. And the halting boyishness of the
request had warmed Cecille's face too; warmed her through and through.
She knew an impulse to hug his head to her breast, a very mature and
motherly impulse.
He had told her much of this business; so much that she hardly recoiled
from it at all. A welter--yes, she understood that. Between a
light-weight and a middle.
But she hesitated so long that he thought he had guessed her objection
and hastened to reassure her.
"There won't be anybody there," he said. "Nobody. Just English and
his trainer and me. You needn't be afraid--"
"I'm not," she stopped him. "It's not--that."
So she went.