it managed. The school’s a corporation and my wife owns some stock.”
Mark groaned and was driven uptown thinking sourly of New York. Things
like this made Socialists, he fancied, and looked with sympathy at an
orator on a box in Union Square. But Gurdy was arriving by the five
o’clock train at the Grand Central Station and the lush swirl of the
crowd on Fifth Avenue cured Mark’s spleen. Snow fluttered in planes
of brief opal from the depth of assorted cornices above the exciting
lights. A scarlet car crossed his at Thirty Fourth Street and bore
a rigid, revealed woman in emerald velvet, like a figure of pride
in a luminous shell. Her machine moved with his up the slope. Mark
examined her happily. She chewed gum with the least movement of her
white and vermilion cheeks. He despised her and felt strong against
the pyramidal society in which Walling, of Carlson and Walling, was
disdained. A cocktail in the Manhattan bar helped. The yellow place
was full of undergraduates bustling away from Harvard and Yale. The
consciousness of dull trim boots and the black, perpetual decency of
his dress raised Mark high out of this herd. At least he knew better
than to smoke cigarettes with gold tips and the oblique, racy colours
of neckties had no meaning for him beyond gaudiness. He strolled to
the clapboards and icy labyrinthine bewilderment of the station, found
the right gate and beheld uncountable ladies gathered together with
children in leather gaiters, chauffeurs at attention smoking furtively.
Here, he knew, was good breeding collected to take charge of its sons.
The cocktail struggled for a moment with cold air. Mark retired to the
rough wooden wall and watched this crowd. The mingling voices never
reached plangency. The small girls and boys stirred like low flowers in
a field of dark, human stalks. Colours, this winter, were sombre. The
women walked with restraint, with tiny gestures that revealed nothing,
with smiles to each other that meant nothing. He had a feeling of
deft performance and a young fellow at the wall beside Mark chuckled,
lighting a cigarette.
“A lot of rich dames waitin’ for their kids from some goddam school up
in Boston, see?”
Mark nodded. The young fellow gave the grouped women another stare and
crossed the tight knees of his sailor’s breeches. The nostrils of his
shapely, short nose shook a trifle. He tilted his flat cap further
over an ear and winked comradely at Mark, “Wonder who the kids’ fathers
are, huh? A lot of rich dames....” He spat and added, “Well, you can’t
blame ’em so much. Their husban’s are all keepin’ these chorus girls.
But it’s too much money, that’s what. If they’d got to work some and
cook an’ all they wouldn’t have time for this society stuff. It’s too
much money. If they’d got to cook their meals they wouldn’t have time
for carryin’ on with all these artists an’ actors an’ things--” He
broke off to snap at a girl who came hurrying from a telephone booth,
“Say, what in hell? Makin’ another date?”
“Honest, I was just phonin’ mamma,” the girl said.
“You took a time!--Phonin’ her what?” He scowled, dominating the girl,
“Huh?”
The girl argued, “I’d got to tell her sump’n, ain’t I, Jimmy? I told
her I was goin’ to a show with a gerl fren’--”
“Some friend,” said the sailor, laughed at himself and tramped off with
his girl under an arm. The girl’s cheap suit of beryl cloth shook out a
scent of cinnamon. Mark sighed; she was young and pretty and shouldn’t
lie to her mother about men. But perhaps her mother was bad tempered,
illiberal. Perhaps the flat was crowded with a preposterous family and
exuded this slim thing often, hoping a fragment of pleasure. A man
couldn’t be critical. Mark went to meet Gurdy and immediately forgot
all discomforts in seeing that the boy had grown an inch, that the
lashes about his dark blue eyes were blackening, in hearing him admit
that he was glad to be at home again.
Gurdy’s schoolmates had sisters at Miss Thorne’s, it seemed, and Mark
waited, fretting, through the Christmas holidays until his broker wrote
that Miss Thorne would be pleased to have Margot as a pupil. Miss
Converse, the governess, asked Mark bluntly how he had managed this
matter.
“You Americans are extraordinary,” she said, “You’re so--so essentially
undemocratic. It’s shocking. But we must get Margot some decent frocks
directly.”
The bill for Margot’s massed Christmas clothes lay on his desk. Mark
started, protesting, “But--”
“I’ve been meaning to talk of this for some time,” said the governess.
“Her clothes?”
“Her clothes.--My people were quite rich, you know, and I had things
from Paris but really--O, really, Mr. Walling, you mustn’t let her have
every pretty frock she sees! I must say you’ve more taste than most
women--quite remarkable. But what will there be left for the child when
she comes out?”
He wanted to answer that no frock devised of man could make Miss
Converse other than a bulky, angular female but gave his meek consent
to authority. He resented the dull serges and linens of Margot’s
school dress and Sunday became precious because he saw her in all
glory, flounced in rose and sapphire. She was a miracle; she deserved
brilliancies of toned silk to set off the pale brown of her skin, the
crisp thickness of her hair. But in June on the _Cedric_ he heard one
woman say to another, “Positively indecent. Like a doll,” when he
walked the decks with Margot and the other woman’s, “But she’s quite
lovely,” didn’t assuage that tart summary of Margot’s costume. An
elderly actress told him, “My dear boy, you mustn’t overdo the child’s
clothes,” and a fat lady from Detroit came gurgling to ask where he
bought things for Margot. He knew this creature to be the wife of a
motor king and looked down at her thoughtfully.
“I suppose you have daughters, yourself?”
“Yes, three. All of them married. But they still come to me for
advice.--Mastin’s? I thought so. Thank you so much.”
He watched her purple linen frock ruck up in lumps as her fat knees
bent over the brass sill of a door and pitied her daughters. He was
playing poker in the smoke room when Gurdy slid into the couch beside
him and sat silently observing the game. The boy was lately thirteen
and gaunt. His silence coated an emotion that Mark felt, disturbing
as the chill of an audience on an opening night. Gurdy was angry. The
milky skin below his lips twitched and wrinkled. The luncheon bugle
blew. The game stopped and, when the other players rose, Mark could
turn to him. “Was that fat woman in tortoise shell glasses talkin’ to
you?” The boy demanded.
“Yes.”
“Well, it was a bet. I was reading in the parlour place. It was a bet.
One of the women bet you got Margot’s things in New York and the rest
of ’em said Paris. And that fat hog--” Gurdy’s voice broke--“said she
didn’t mind slumming. So she went off and talked to you. They all
s-said that Margot looked like a poster.”
This was horrible. Mark saw some likeness between Margot’s pink
splendour and the new posters clever people made for him. He must be
wrong. He uncertainly fingered the pile of poker chips and asked Gurdy,
“D’you think sister’s--too dressed up?”
Gurdy loosed a sob that slapped Mark’s face with its misery and dashed
his hand into the piled chips. He said, “D-don’t give a dam’ what they
say about her. I hate hearin’ them talk about you that way!”
Mark waited until the nervous sobs slacked. Then he asked, “Do they
ever talk about me at your school, sonny?”
“No. Oh, one of the masters asked me why you didn’t put on some play.
Is there a play called the Cherry Orchard?”
“Russian. It wouldn’t run a week.” Mark piled up the chips and said, “I
may be all wrong--Anyhow, don’t you bother, son ... God bless you.”
Olive Ilden gave him her view while Margot and Gurdy explored the
garden that opened from her Chelsea drawing room. She sat painting her
lips with a perfumed stick of deep red and mimicked his drawl, “No,
her things ar-r-ren’t too bright, old man. She isn’t too much dressed
up. It’s merely that this thin faced time of ours isn’t dressed up to
her. She’s Della Robbia and we’re--Whistler. It’s burgherdom. Prudence.
It’s the nineteenth century. It’s the tupenny ha’penny belief that
dullness is respectable. Hasn’t she some Italian blood? Now Joan--my
wretched daughter--simply revels in dowdiness. She’s only happy in a
jersey or Girl Guides rubbish. She’s at Cheltenham, mixing with the
British flapper. When she’s at home she drives me into painting my face
and putting dyed attire on my head. If I had to live with Margot I
shouldn’t wear anything gayer than taupe.”
He stared out at Margot whose pink frock revolved above her gleaming
silver buckles on the crushed shell of the walk. Olive saw his face
light, attaining for the second a holy glow. It was a window in the
wall of dark night. He looked and doted. The woman wondered at him. He
had all the breathless beauty of a child facing its dearest toy. His
grey eyes dilated. In her own eyes she felt the dry threat of tears and
said, “Old man, I’m sorry for you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re such a dear and because you’re a pariah. I don’t
know that all this garden party petting is good for our player folk
but--over in your wilderness--no one seems to investigate the stage
except professors and the police. It must be sickening.... What’ll
become of Margot when she’s grown up?”
It had begun to worry him on the _Cedric_. He loosely thought that her
friends from Miss Thorne’s school would be kind to her. Wouldn’t they?
He said, “She’s only ten, Olive,” and sat brooding. It wasn’t fair.
Smart society, the decorous women of small gestures, hadn’t any use
for him. He looked at Olive who wrote letters to him and called him
old man. She wrote books. She knew all the world. She had been to the
king’s court and laughed about it. He went to shelter in her strange
kindness and sighed, “It isn’t fair. She ought to have--she ought to go
anywhere she wants to.”
“She probably will if there’s anything in eyelashes,” said Olive, “and
Gurdy will go anywhere he wants to, by the shape of his jaw. I’ve been
dissecting American society with horrific interest. It seems to have
reached a lower level than British! You haven’t even an intelligent
Bohemia.”
“There ain’t many literary people,” Mark reflected, “and they mostly
seem to live in Philadelphia and Indiana, anyhow. Or over here. What’s
a man to do? I can’t--”
“You can’t do anything. Whistle the children in. There’s a one man
show. Stage settings. Italian. I haven’t seen them and you should.” She
threw the stick of paint away and set about cheering him. She liked
him, muddled in his trade, labouring after beauty, unaware of his own
odd sweetness. She gave up the last weeks of the season, guiding him
about London, watching him glow when Margot wanted a scarf of orange
silk in Liberty’s, when Gurdy demonstrated his Latin, not badly, before
a tomb in Saint Paul’s. Margot was the obvious idol, something to be
petted and dressed. But the child had a rich attraction of her own,
graces of placid curves, a quiet loveliness that missed stupidity.
“You don’t like Margot,” Olive told Gurdy in a waste of the British
Museum.
The boy lied, “Of course I do,” in his cracked voice but Olive took
that as the product of good schooling, like his easy performance of
airs on the piano. He was jealous of Margot and showed it so often that
the woman wondered why Mark didn’t see. But this wasn’t the usual boy.
“You let him read anything he likes,” she scolded Mark.
“Sure. Where’s the harm? I haven’t got the Contes Drolatiques at the
house or any of those things. Aunt Edith used to make me read the Book
of Kings when I was a kid. Oh, Gurd knows that babies don’t come by
express,” said Mark, “He’s lived in the country, too much.”
“I thought the American peasantry entirely compounded of the Puritan
virtues, old man.”
“You missed your guess, then. You read a lot of American novels, Olive.
Some day or other some writer’s goin’ to come along and write up an
American country town like it is. The police will probably suppress
the book.... My father and Gurdy’s mamma are sort of scared because
I’ve got the kid at a rich school. You mustn’t believe all the stuff
you see in the American magazines and papers about the wicked rich,
Olive. I’ve met some of the rich roués at suppers and so on. Put any
of ’em alongside some of the hired men and clerks and things that were
in my regiment in Cuba--or alongside Tommy Grover that’s blacksmith
at Fayettesville and they’d look like Sunday School teachers. I sort
of wish the poor folks in the United States’d leave off yawping about
the wicked rich and look after their own backyards a while! No, I
don’t take any stock in this country virtue thing. The only girl in
Fayettesville that ever run off with a wicked drummer had morals
that’d scare a chorus girl stiff. Who’s the fellow that hangs ’round
the stage door of a musical show? Nine times out of ten he’s a kid
from the country that’s won twenty dollars at poker. Who’s the fellow
that--well--seduces the poor working girl? Once in a hundred it’s a
rich whelp in a dinner jacket. Rest of the time it’s the boy in the
next flat. When I was acting and used to get mash notes from fool
women, were they from women on Fifth Avenue or Park Avenue? Not much!
Stenographers and ladies in Harlem that had husbands travelling a good
deal. You believe in talking about these kind of things out loud and I
expect you’re right.”
“Gurdy’s not handsome,” said Olive, “but he’s attractive--charming
eyes--and women are going to like him a goodish bit, bye and bye. And
man is fire. What moral precepts are you going to--”
“Just what my father told me. I’m going to tell him that he mustn’t
make love to a married woman and that he mustn’t fool after an innocent
girl unless he means matrimony--but God knows it’s getting pretty hard
to tell what an innocent girl is, these days! Nine tenths of ’em dress
like cocottes.”
“Old man, where did you pick up that very decent French accent?” Olive
saw his blush slide fleetly from his collar to the red hair and added,
“I hope it was honestly come by. You’re a good deal of a Puritan for a
sensualist.”
“Oh ... I am a sensualist, I guess. But, I ain’t a hog.”
Olive said, “No, that’s quite true, my son. There’s nothing porcine
about you. My brother has a house this season and he’s giving a dance
tonight. There might be some pretty frocks.”
“Didn’t know you had a brother!”
“Sir Gerald Shelmardine of Shelmardine Cross, Hampshire. He’s rather
dreary. Will you come?”
She took him to several evening parties and his wooden coldness
before a crowd was enchanting. It occurred to her that individuals
wearied the man. He eyed pretty women, striking gowns, studied the
decoration of ball-rooms. He confessed, “I’ll never see any of them
again and shouldn’t remember them if I did. My memory for people’s no
good--unless they’re interestin’ to look at. My god, look at that girl
in purple. Her dressmaker ought to be hung! Skirt’s crooked all across
the front.” He gave the girl in purple his rare frown then asked,
“Well, where’s some place in France, on the seashore, where I can take
the kids until August?”
She recommended Royan and had from him a letter describing Margot’s
success among the ladies of a quiet hotel. His letters of 1912 and 1913
were full of Margot. Snapshots of the child dropped often from the
thick blue envelopes. When he sent his thin book, “Modern Scenery” in
the autumn of 1913 it was dedicated, “To my Daughter.” The bald prose
was correct, the photographs and plates were well selected. Mark wrote:
“Gurdy went over it with a fine tooth comb to see if the grammar was
O. K. Mr. Carlson is not well and we have four plays to bring in by
December. Spoke at a lunch of a ladies’ dramatic society yesterday.
Forgot where I was and said Hell in the middle of it. They did not
mind. Things seem to be changing a lot. I am pretty worried about one
of our plays.”
Olive saw in the New York _Herald_ some discussion of this play and a
furious reference to it on the editorial page, signed by a clergyman.
This was at Christmas time when she was entertaining her tiresome
brother at Ilden’s house in Suffolk. She folded the newspaper away,
meaning to explore the business. She forgot the accident in the hurry
of her attempt to reach a Scotch country house where her daughter Joan
died of pneumonia on New Year’s Day. The shock sent Olive into grey
seclusion. Her husband was on the China station with his cruiser.
She suddenly found herself worrying over the health of her son, then
in the Fifth Form at Harrow, so took a cottage in Harrow village and
there reflected on the nastiness of death while she wrote her next
novel. The cottage was singularly dismal and the daughters of the next
dwelling were pretty girls of thirteen and fourteen, with fair hair.
“Sentimental analogy is the bane of life,” she wrote to her husband,
“I went to town yesterday for some gloves and saw the posters of
Peter Pan on a hoarding in Baker Street. Joan liked it so. So I went
to the theatre and squandered five sovereigns in stalls and gave the
tickets to these wretched girls who would infinitely prefer a cinema,
naturally. However I managed to laugh on Saturday. The news had just
reached Mark Walling by way of Ian Gail who is in the States trying to
sell his worst and newest play. Mark cabled me a hundred words quite
incoherent and mostly inappropriate.”
Three days later Olive came in from a walk and Mark opened the door of
the stupid cottage. When she drew her hands away from his stooped face
they were hot and wet.
“But, my dear boy,” she said, presently, “what blessing brought you
over? In the middle of your season, too.”
“I’m in trouble. See anything in the papers about the Mayor stoppin’
a play we put on?--I don’t blame the Mayor, for a minute. Mr. Carlson
wanted it.... Well, it was stopped and some of the newspapers took it
up. And then Mr. Carlson had a sort of stroke. His mind’s all right
but his legs are paralyzed. Won’t ever walk again.” His voice drummed
suddenly as if it might break into a sob. He passed his fingers over
the red hair and went on, “I’ve got him up at my house.”
“Of course,” said Olive.
“Sure. The doctors say he’ll last four or five years, maybe.--Say
you’ve always said we’re a nation of prudes. Look at this,” and he
dragged from a black pocket a note on formal paper. Olive read: “The
Thorne School, Madison Avenue and Sixty Sixth Street. December 28th,
1913. My dear Mr. Walling, Will you be so good as to call upon me when
it is possible in order to discuss Margaret’s future attendance. It
seems kindest to warn you that several parents have suggested that--”
“What is this nonsense?” Olive asked, “What’s the child been doing?”
“Doing? Nothin’! It’s this damned play!”
“You mean that there were women who seriously asked this Miss Thorne
to have Margot withdrawn because you’d produced a risqué farce? But
that’s--”
His wrath reached a piteous climax in, “Oh, damn women, anyhow!... Well
I took her out. My broker could have fixed the thing up. What’s the
use? Well, I brought her over with me. She’s at the Ritz. What’s the
best girls’ school in England?”
Olive said, “Oh, I’ll take her,” saw him smile and began to weep.
V
Margot
Gurdy Bernamer kept his twentieth birthday in a trench. The next week
his regiment was withdrawn from the line to a dull village where Gurdy
was taking a warm bath in a zinc tub behind the Mairie when a German
aeroplane crossed above and lifted his attention from a Red Cross
copy of “The Brook Kerith” which he read while he soaked. He dropped
the dialectics of George Moore and watched, then saw the whitewashed
wall of the yard bend in slowly, its cracks blackening. He spent a
month in hospital getting the best of the wandering, deep wound that
began at his right hip and ended in his armpit. He wrote to Mark, “I
kept trying to remember a quotation from Twain’s Tramp Abroad. ‘Not
by war’s shock or war’s shaft. Shot with a rock on a raft.’ They dug
a piece of zinc out of me. I feel fairly well. Mrs. Tilford Arbuthnot
has the Y. M. C. A. cafeteria in Bordeaux. Her brother was with me at
Saint Andrew’s. She brings me novels and things. I think she has a
secret passion for you. She says you were a great actor. My nurse also
thinks you were. Her name is Zippah Coe and she looks it. She says the
immorality of French women is too awful for words. She is coming to
take my temperature.” The temperature displeased the nurse and Gurdy
passed into a daze. The wet hemlocks beyond the window sometimes turned
cerise, inexcusably. Pneumonia succeeded his influenza.
Through all this lapse he meditated and drew toward a belief that
life was a series of meaningless illusions, many painful. He expanded
“All the world’s a stage.” Suicide wasn’t universal as some of the
players acquired a thrilling interest in their parts, rose to be
directors--Wilsons, Northcliffes, Millerands. It was satisfactory to
know this at twenty. His education was complete in its departments
passional, athletic and philosophical. Saint Andrew’s school. Two and a
half years of Yale in smart company. The miscellany of his regiment. He
must certainly begin maturity as a critic. He lay composing an essay on
the illusory value of passion in a loop of paradoxes which vanished as
his pulse improved. Then he was conscious that a surgeon took interest
in him. Orderlies came from the hospital adjutant inquiring. Gurdy sat
up, read the papers and accepted five thousand francs in mauve and blue
bills from a bank agent. It seemed that Mark had run him to earth by
cabling. Soon he was uniformed again and given orders that assigned him
to duty in a Paris military bureau. There Gurdy found Mark’s broker,
decorated as a Major.
“Of course, I got you up here,” said Major Villay. “Why not?”
“But--” With recovery Gurdy had shed some sense of illusions. He stood
thinking of his regiment rather sourly, rather sadly.
The broker-major grunted, “Rot, Gurdy. You’re all Mark’s got--Son, and
all that. Dare say Margot’ll marry some Englishman. Anyhow, it’s all
over. Bulgaria’s on the skids. Mark thinks too much of you.”
Gurdy was subtly pleased. He stood thinking of Mark fondly, with
annotations in contempt. Mark was nothing but a big blunderer among
the arts, a man who couldn’t see the strength of Russian drama or
disillusioned comedy, who didn’t admire Granville Barker’s plays. But
if Margot stayed in England Gurdy could steer his uncle toward proper
productions. Mark meant well, very well. He had done some fine things,
had a feeling for vesture, anyhow.
“I see the Celebrities people have bought the Terriss Pictograph,” said
Major Villay, “Exchange of stock. Funny. Mark hates the movies so and
he makes twenty thousand a year out of them. And the movie people gave
him fifteen thousand for that rotten Gail play. Here, take this stuff
and translate it. I can probably get you a pass over to London if you
want to see Margot.”
Gurdy didn’t want to see her. His last view of Margot had been in the
stress of her removal from Miss Thorne’s school. Mark had gone five
times to England on visits of a month, reported her beautiful, witty,
petted by Mrs. Ilden, by Mrs. Ilden’s friends. But he wrote her a
note dutifully and got an answer in three lines. “Glad you are out of
the silly mess. Try to run over. Frightfully rushed catching a train
for Devon. More later.” He was not offended. He thought that Margot
disliked him as he disliked her. He threw the note into the waste
basket and went on translating French political comments into English.
The Armistice broke on the third week of this employment. The bureau
became a negation of labour. Gurdy roamed contentedly about the
feverish, foolish city with various friends--young officers, sergeant
majors on agreeable posts. He was tall, still pallid from sunless
convalescence. His uniform happened to fit a long, loosely moving body
and he liked dancing. He equably observed male diversion with his
dark blue eyes and was often diverted. This might be the collapse
of known society, the beginning of a hygienic and hardworked future.
This churning of illusions might bring something fresh. Men might
turn to new programs of stupidity, exhausting the old. He danced and
was courted. He wrote to Mark, choosing words: “There will be plays
about this, I suppose. I do not think any one will believe it fifty
years from now. It is an upheaval of cheap pleasure. I keep thinking
how Carlson calls people hogs.” He hesitated, continued: “I do not
know that there is an excuse for all of it. Some of the Americans
make bigger hogs of themselves than is necessary.” Then he destroyed
the letter. After all, Mark was your typical patriot. He took America
seriously, the American soldier seriously, the American Red Cross had
profited by his sentiment. There was no point in hurting Mark. Gurdy
wrote a gay tale of driving through Paris in a vegetable cart with a
drunken Australian colonel and went to dine at Luca’s.
From Luca’s his party retired to the Opera Comique, stopped to drink
champagne in the bar and stayed there until it wasn’t worth while to
hear the last act. “And,” said a youth from San Francisco, “we can go
to Ariana Joyce’s. She’s giving a party.”
“But she’s dead,” Gurdy objected.
“Damn healthy corpse! Come ahead and see if she’s dead!”
They floated in a taxicab along Paris. The machine slipped from the
lavender rush of some broad street up a slope and Gurdy stumbled into a
brilliance of laughing people where his guide pushed him toward a green
dais and hissed, “She won’t know you from Adam. Tell her you’re from
Chicago.”