The gay and fashionable crowd of which Audrey had been the center played
madly that winter. The short six weeks of the season were already close
to an end. By mid-January the south and California would have claimed
most of the women and some of the men. There were a few, of course,
who saw the inevitable catastrophe: the Mackenzies had laid up their
house-boat on the west coast of Florida. Denis Nolan had let his little
place at Pinehurst. The advance wave of the war tide, the increased cost
of living, had sobered and made thoughtful the middle class, but above
in the great businesses, and below among the laboring people, money was
plentiful and extravagance ran riot.
And Audrey Valentine's world missed her. It refused to accept her
poverty as an excuse, and clamored for her. It wanted her to sit
again at a piano, somewhere, anywhere, with a lighted cigaret on the
music-rack, and sing her husky, naive little songs. It wanted her cool
audacity. It wanted her for week-end parties and bridge, and to canter
on frosty mornings on its best horses and make slaves of the park
policemen, so that she might jump forbidden fences. It wanted to see
her oust its grinning chauffeurs, and drive its best cars at their best
speed.
Audrey Valentine leading a cloistered life! Impossible! Selfish!
And Audrey was not cut out for solitude. She did not mind poverty. She
found it rather a relief to acknowledge what had always been the fact.
But she did mind loneliness. And her idea of making herself over into
something useful was not working out particularly well. She spent two
hours a day, at a down-town school, struggling with shorthand, and her
writing-table was always littered with papers covered with queer hooks
and curves, or with typed sheets beginning:
“Messrs Smith and Co.,: Dear Sirs.”
Clayton Spencer met her late in December, walking feverishly along with
a book under her arm, and a half-desperate look in her eyes. He felt a
little thrill when he saw her, which should have warned him but did not.
She did not even greet him. She stopped and held out her book to him.
“Take it!” she said. “I've thrown it away twice, and two wretched men
have run after me and brought it back.”
He took it and glanced at it.
“Spelling! Can't you spell?”
“Certainly I can spell,” she said with dignity. “I'm a very good
speller. Clay, there isn't an 'i' in business, is there?”
“It is generally considered necessary to have two pretty good eyes in
business.” But he saw then that she was really rather despairing. “There
is, one 'i,'” he said. “It seems foolish, doesn't it? Audrey dear, what
are you trying to do? For heaven's sake, if it's money?”
“It isn't that. I have enough. Honestly, Clay, I just had some sort of
an idea that I'd been playing long enough. But I'm only good for play.
That man this morning said as much, when we fussed about my spelling. He
said I'd better write a new dictionary.”
Clayton threw back his head and laughed, and after a moment she laughed,
too. But as he went on his face was grave. Somebody ought to be looking
after her. It was not for some time that he realized he carried the
absurd little spelling-book. He took it back to the office with him, and
put it in the back of a drawer of his desk. Joey, coming in some time
later, found him, with the drawer open, and something in his hands which
he hastily put away. Later on, Joey investigated that drawer, and found
the little book. He inspected it with a mixture of surprise and scorn.
“Spelling!” he muttered. “And a hundred dollar a month girl to spell for
him!”
It was Rodney Page who forced Audrey out of her seclusion.
Rodney had had a prosperous year, and for some time his conscience had
been bothering him. For a good many years he had blithely accepted
the invitations of his friends--dinners, balls, week-end and yachting
parties, paying his way with an occasional box of flowers. He decided,
that last winter of peace, to turn host and, true to instinct, to do the
unusual.
It was Natalie who gave him the suggestion.
“Why don't you turn your carriage-house into a studio, and give a studio
warming, Roddie? It would be fun fixing it up. And you might make it
fancy dress.”
Before long, of course, he had accepted the idea as of his own
originating, and was hard at work.
Rodney's house had been his father's. He still lived there, although the
business district had encroached closely. And for some time he had used
the large stable and carriage-house at the rear as a place in which to
store the odd bits of furniture, old mirrors and odds and ends that he
had picked up here and there. Now and then, as to Natalie, he sold some
of them, but he was a collector, not a merchant. In his way, he was an
artist.
In the upper floor he had built a skylight, and there, in odd hours, he
worked out, in water-color, sketches of interiors, sometimes for houses
he was building, sometimes purely for the pleasure of the thing.
The war had brought him enormous increase in his collection. Owners of
French chateaus, driven to poverty, were sending to America treasures of
all sorts of furniture, tapestries, carpets, old fountains, porcelains,
even carved woodwork and ancient mantels, and Rodney, from the mixed
motives of business and pride, decided to exhibit them.
The old brick floor of the stable he replaced with handmade tiles. The
box-stalls were small display-rooms, hung with tapestries and lighted
with candles in old French sconces. The great carriage-room became a
refectory, with Jacobean and old monastery chairs, and the vast loft
overhead, reached by a narrow staircase that clung to the wall, was
railed on its exposed side, waxed as to floor, hung with lanterns, and
became a ballroom.
Natalie worked with him, spending much time and a prodigious amount of
energy. There was springing up between them one of those curious and
dangerous intimacies, of idleness on the woman's part, of admiration
on the man's, which sometimes develop into a wholly spurious passion.
Probably Rodney realized it; certainly Natalie did not. She liked his
admiration; she dressed, each day, for Rodney's unfailing comment on her
clothes.
“Clay never notices what I wear,” she said, once, plaintively.
So it was Rodney who brought Audrey Valentine out of her seclusion,
and he did it by making her angry. He dropped in to see her between
Christmas and New-years, and made a plea.
“A stable-warming!” she said. “How interesting! And fancy dress! Are you
going to have them come as grooms, or jockeys? If I were going I'd go
as a circus-rider. I used to be able to stand up on a running horse. Of
course you're having horses. What's a stable without a horse?”
He saw she was laughing at him and was rather resentful.
“I told you I have made it into a studio.”
But when he implored her to go, she was obdurate.
“Do go away and let me alone, Rodney,” she said at last. “I loathe
fancy-dress parties.”
“It won't be a party without you.”
“Then don't have it. I've told you, over and over, I'm not going out. It
isn't decent this year, in my opinion. And, anyhow, I haven't any money,
any clothes, any anything. A bad evening at bridge, and I shouldn't be
able to pay my rent.”
“That's nonsense. Why do you let people say you are moping about Chris?
You're not.”
“Of course not.”
She sat up.
“What else are they saying?”
“Well, there's some talk, naturally. You can't be as popular as you have
been, and then just drop out, without some gossip. It's not bad.”
“What sort of talk?”
He was very uncomfortable.
“Well, of course, you have been pretty strong on the war stuff?”
“Oh, they think I sent him!”
“If only you wouldn't hide, Audrey. That's what has made the talk. It's
not Chris's going.”
“I'm not hiding. That's idiotic. I was bored to death, if you want the
truth. Look here, Rodney. You're not being honest. What do they say
about Chris and myself?”
He was cornered.
“Is it--about another woman?”
“Well, of course now and then--there are always such stories. And of
course Chris--”
“Yes, they knew Chris.” Her voice was scornful. “So they think I'm
moping and hiding because--How interesting!”
She sat back, with her old insolent smile.
“Poor Chris!” she said. “The only man in the lot except Clay Spencer who
is doing his bit for the war, and they--when is your party, Roddie?”
“New-year's Eve.”
“I'll come,” she said. And smiling again, dangerously, “I'll come, with
bells on.”