Ilden Thursday. Margot sailed Friday. Ought to land day after
tomorrow.” He saw the orange level of Gurdy’s cocktail flicker. Then
the boy set it down and brooded. Mark made his face stolid to watch
this. The butler served fish and retired without noise to his pantry.
The tapestry of Chinese flowers behind Gurdy’s chair stirred in the
May wind. The boy was immobile, fair and trim in his chair. He seemed
strangely handsome--a long, easy lounging gentleman who hated sharp
emotions.
“Really think I’d better go out to Lake Forest, Mark. I more or less
promised I would. I shan’t be gone more than a--couple of weeks.”
Triumph dragged a chuckle from Mark. He covered it with, “Oh, sure!
If Lacy’s got the blues, run ahead out and cheer him up.” The boy was
in full flight from love, of course, and didn’t want to admit it.
Mark doted on him, drawled, “Got all the money you’ll need?” and was
pleased by Gurdy’s confession that he needed a good deal. He gave
the boy errands about Chicago to aid the retreat. “There’s a girl
named Marryatt playing at the La Salle. Some of them think she’s got
distinction. And poke around and see if you can rake up a scenery man.
Take the directions for Captain Salvador along. If you find any one
that ain’t just copying Bobby Jones or Gordon Craig make him send me
sketches. And there’s this poet on a newspaper--he’s named something
like Sandwich--no, Sanbridge. See if he’s got a play up his sleeve.
O’Mara was talking about him.”
He saw Gurdy off for Chicago, the next noon, then set about making
lists of successive luncheons for Margot. This return must be an
ample revenge for her waygoing. She wasn’t, now, the small girl whose
presence in Miss Thorne’s school had frightened matrons. She was some
one protected by his celebrity and trained by Olive Ilden. He must
contrive her content until she married Gurdy. She was democratic--Olive
had seen to that. Mark had watched her chaff a knot of convalescent
soldiers in Hyde Park. She wouldn’t care that one of his best friends
had risen toward management from the rank of a burlesque dancer, that
another had been an undertaker in Ohio. She wouldn’t mind things like
that. He marshalled the cleverest of the critics and the young women
who dealt in publicity. Gurdy would bring proper men to call, when he
came back from his flight. The expanse of her future opened like an
unfurling robe of exquisite colours. She strolled in Mark’s mind most
visibly. He hummed, inspecting his house.
“Yes,” Carlson sneered, “she’s been footloose amongst a pack of dukes
and things and you think she’s going to like bein’ mixed up with a lot
of--”
“She won’t mind,” said Mark.
She seemed to mind nothing. She landed on the twentieth of that cool
May, kissed Mark on the nose and told him she had three cases of
champagne in the hold. The customs inspectors were dazzled stumbling
among her trunks. A file of other voyagers came to shake hands. A great
hostess kissed the girl, smiled at Mark and said gently that she hoped
Mr. Walling would bring Margot to luncheon next fall.
“She’s quite nice,” Margot assured him in the motor, “She probably kept
your photograph with a bunch of violets in a jar in front of it when
you were a matinée--Oh, how you hate that word! How nice your nose is!
Where on earth’s Gurdy?--Lake Forest? Oh, that’s where all the Chicago
pig kings live, isn’t it? They have chateaux and moats and exclude--But
it’s rather rotten he isn’t here. I’ve a couple of awful French novels
for him. He speaks such rather remarkable French. I can’t make the
right J sounds. He’s such a stately animal. I was awfully frightened of
him in London. Such a ghastly crossing!”
“Why, honey?”
She stared at him with wide black eyes and said more slowly, “How
nicely you say things like that.--You’re really awfully glad I’m back,
aren’t you?”
Mark choked, “Here’s Times Square.”
She shrugged and leaned back on the blue cushions. “Horrible! But the
theatre district in London’s worse, really. The Walling’ll be on a side
street, won’t it? I’d loathe seeing Walling in electric bulbs along
here. Be rather as though you were running about naked. Did I write you
about Ronny Dufford’s new play? Been a most tremendous success. You
should bring it over. That’s the Astor, isn’t it? What colour’s the
Walling to be inside? Blue? Rather dark blue? And swear to me that you
won’t have Russian decorations!”
“I swear, daughter.”
“You old saint,” said Margot, “and you’re still the best looking man in
the known world!”
Her lips had a curious, untinted brilliance as though the blood might
burst from them. Dizzy Mark told himself that she wasn’t the most
beautiful of women. Her brown face was like his face and her father’s
face, too flat. Her hands weren’t small, either, but she wore no rings.
Her gown was dark and her tam o’shanter of black velvet was inseparable
from her hair in the mist of his eyes. Silver buckles swayed and
twinkled when her gleaming feet moved about his house and she smiled in
a veil of cigarette smoke.
“You’ve simply natural good taste, dad. Born, not made. Don’t think I’m
keen on that Venice glass in the dining room. Too heavy. Where does
Gurdy sleep?--I snore, you know?”
“I don’t believe it. He sleeps on the top floor where the old playroom
was.”
She threw her head back to laugh and said, “Where he used to make such
sickening noises on the piano when he thought you were petting me too
much? He’s a dear. It wouldn’t be eugenics for me to marry him, would
it?”
“See that, Mark?” Carlson squealed, “She ain’t been ten minutes in the
country and she’s huntin’ a husband? That’s gratitude!”
“Oh, you,” said Margot, spinning on a heel, “If you were ninety seven
years younger I’d marry you myself.”
She teased the old man relentlessly. She teased Mark before his guests
at the first luncheon. Her variations appalled the man. She seemed
to know all the printable gossip of New York. She spoke to older
women with a charming patience, played absurd English songs to amuse
Mark’s pet critic and got the smallest of the managers in a loud good
temper by agreeing with his debatable views on stage lighting. Most
of these, his friends, had forgotten that she was Mark’s niece. Their
compliments were made as on a daughter. He felt the swift spread of a
ripple; editors of fashion monthlies telephoned to ask for photographs;
the chief of a Sunday supplement wanted her views on the American Red
Cross; a portrait painter came calling.
“Silly ass,” said Margot, “I met him in Devonshire. I hate being
painted. You’ve never had a portrait done? Dreary. One has to sit and
smirk.” She went fluttering a yellow frock up the library to find an
ash tray, came back smoking a cigarette, neared Mark’s chair then
veered off to pat Carlson’s jaw.
“You used to set like a kitchen stove in one spot for an hour at a
time,” Carlson said, “Now you’re all over the place.”
“One has to move about in England to keep warm. Dad, I wrote Ronny
Dufford to send you a copy of his play. Ronny’s land poor, you know?
It’s made mountains of money but I don’t think he’s half out of debt,
yet. Such a nice idiot. He liked Gurdy such a lot. What the deuce an’
all is Gurdy doing in Chicago? Bargin’ about with the pigstickers?”
She shed her mixture of slangs when his broker’s wife came to luncheon.
Mark didn’t think it affected that she mainly talked of titled folk
to the smart, reticent woman. Mrs. Villay invited her to Southampton
before leaving. Margot shook her hair free of two silver combs and
shrugged as the front door shut. “I suspect her of being a ferocious
snob. Sweet enough, though. Fancy she doesn’t read anything but Benson
and the late Mrs. Ward.--Oh, no, Mrs. Ward isn’t late, is she? Simply
lamented.”
Mark laughed, “Let’s go talk to Mr. Carlson.”
“You always call him Mister. Just why, darling?”
“Well, he’s forty years older than me, sister. And he made me. He--”
“Tosh! You made yourself! Let’s walk over and see how the Walling’s
getting on.”
He wallowed in this warm enchantment for ten days. Margot dismissed
herself to Fayettesville on the first breath of heat. He went down to
see her established in the gaping adoration of the family. He thought
it hard on the Bernamer girls. He had hinted boarding school for these
virgins but the Bernamers, trained by moving pictures, were wary. Yet
Margot was clearly born to captivate women. He wrote to Gurdy at Lake
Forest: “It was nice to see her tone herself down for your grandfather
and your mother. I told her she had better not smoke except with your
dad in the cowbarn. You kept telling me I must not be shocked. What is
there to get shocked at? Young girls are not as prissy as they were
when I was a pup.--Hell of a row coming on with the actors. We are
trying to keep things quiet but it looks like a strike. But some of the
men still think an actor is a cross between a mule and a hog. Letter
from Olive Ilden says she is going to Japan pretty soon and will come
this way. I see in the London news that Cora Boyle has signed up with
the Celebrities and is coming over to be filmed as Camille or The Queen
of Sheba. You are wrong about ‘Heartbreak House.’ It is a conversation,
not a play. I wish Shaw would do something like Cæsar and Cleopatra
again. They start work on the sets for Captain Salvador next week at
the studio. Shall have two sets made for the Voodoo scene and try both
on the road before we open the Walling.”
Gurdy reflected that it was time to come home. Then he put it off.
Lake Forest was pleasant. He was fond of his host. It was prudent to
test the pull of this feeling for Margot. The thing augmented now that
he couldn’t talk of her. A strict detachment from passion was silly,
after all. But he was annoyed with himself as the passage of any tall
and blackhaired woman across a lawn would interrupt the motion of his
blood. He set his brain tasks, meditated the girl at Fayettesville,
hoped that she wouldn’t singe the acute American skin of his young
brothers by comments on the national arms. His sisters had probably
made their own experiments with cigarettes. They were sensible lasses,
anyhow, if given to endless gush about moving pictures. His young
host’s sisters, amiable, blond girls were much the same thing, rarified
by trips to Europe, suave frocks and some weak topics in the cerebral
change. They held Dunsany a fascinating dramatist and thought there was
something to be said for communism. Chicago puzzled him with its summer
negligence and the candour of its wealth, with the air of stressed
vice in the Loop restaurants and the sudden change from metropolis
to a country town within the city limits. It seemed absurd that the
listless, polished wife of a hundred million dollars should return from
Long Island to give a dance in honor of a travelling English poet held
lowly in Chelsea, described by Olive Ilden as a derivative angleworm.
At this dance he heard of Margot from an unknown woman with whom he
waltzed.
“I saw you in London, last winter.”
“I was there. Funny I don’t remember--”
“You were in uniform with Margot Walling and Lady Ilden. At a play.
Margot was wearing one of her yellow frocks. I was the other side of
the gangway. I wondered about you, rather. Margot always snubs me. I’m
a countess of sorts and it always interests me when Americans snub
me.--Let’s get something to drink. I don’t dance well and you must be
in torments--What’s your name?”
She was a lank, tired creature in a rowdy gown sewn with false pearls
that hissed theatrically as she slumped into a chair on the lit
terrace.
“Cousin, eh?--Well, Margot amuses me. She’s the genuine aristocrat,
you know? Take what you want and to hell with the rest. Pity so few
Americans catch the idea. Imagine any continental woman coming a
thousand miles to give a dance for a cheapjack penny poet like this
sweep. Afraid he won’t mention her in his travel book, I dare say.
Run and get me a drink. Something mild.” A youth at the buffet told
him this was the Countess of Flint. She sipped wine cup, refused a
cigarette and asked, “Where did you go to school? Saint Andrew’s? My
brothers did Groton. Beautiful training wasted on the desert air.
That’s the trouble with the American game. Did you ever think how much
good it would have done the beastly country to have had about four
generations of a hard and fast aristocracy--plenty of money, no morals,
quantities of manner? It’s simply a waste of time and money to train
lads and then turn them loose in a herd of rich women all afraid of
their dressmakers. What a zero the average American woman is!”
“Hush,” he said, “That’s treason! You’ll be shot at sunrise!”
“Unsalted porridge. Utter vacuum. Not a vacuum either because she’s a
bully, usually. And a prude.--Is Margot going to marry Ronny Dufford?”
Gurdy jumped, inescapably startled. He said, “Colonel Dufford? The
General Staff man who writes plays? I’m sure I don’t know.”
“It wouldn’t be a bad thing. Ronny’s all right--the gentleman Bohemian
touch and I dare say she has money.” The lank woman coughed, went on,
“She’ll take on an Englishman in any case, though.”
“She’s in New York.”
“Oh, she’ll get fed with that directly and trot home.” The woman
locked her gaunt arms behind her careless hair and yawned at the
amber moon above the clipped pines. “New York’s frightful! Stuffed
middle westerners squatting in hotels trying to look smart. Place is
absolutely run by women. Getting more respectable every time I go
through. Haven’t had any patience with New York since the Stanford
White murder. Imagine all the bloods running to cover and swearing
they’d never even met White because he’d been shot in a mess about a
woman! Imagine it! I always bought Harding Davis’s books after that
because he had the sand to get up and say he liked White, in print.
But that’s Egyptian history.” She began to cough fearfully. The pearls
clattered on her gown.
“You’ve taken cold.”
“No. Cigarettes. Are you married?”
“Good lord, no. Only been twenty-one a couple of weeks.”
“How odd that must be! Twenty-one a couple of weeks ago. And you went
to France and got shot. Singular child!”
“Why singular?”
“Oh, I’ve been amusing myself at Saranac--at a house party, with a
social register and an army list. A war where eighty per cent. of the
educated men--I mean the smart universities--the bloods under thirty
all went and hid themselves. It’s not pretty.”
“Aren’t you exag--”
“Not in the least. I had fifty American officers convalescing at my
husband’s place in Kent and half of them were freight clerks from Iowa.
What can you expect when the American woman brings her son up to be
a coward and his father makes him a thief? And naturally the women
despise the men. Who on earth wants an American husband?”
“They seem to find wives, somehow.”
She coughed, rising, “Oh, travel’s expensive.” Then she gestured to
the orange oblongs of the ballroom windows. “D’you think any one of
those women would hesitate a minute between being the next lady of the
White House or the mistress of the Prince of Wales? Of course not! Give
Margot my love. Good-bye. Too chilly out here.” She rattled away.
Gurdy dropped into the chair and stared after her. He should tabulate
this woman at once with her romantic illusions of aristocracy and
patriotism. Margot supervened and seemed to move across the moony
stones of the terrace. He thought frantically of Colonel Dufford. He
thought solidly of marriage for ten minutes. Beyond doubt he was in
love with Margot. He stirred in the chair, repeating maxims. Passion
wasn’t durable. He might tire of her. He argued against emotion and
blinked at the gold lamps on the bastard French face of this house. He
was too young to select sensibly, didn’t want to be sensible, suddenly.
His pulse rose. He marvelled at love. In the morning he announced his
present departure. At noon he had a special delivery letter from his
youngest brother, Edward Bernamer, Junior, a placid boy of thirteen
interested in stamp collecting. The scrawl was the worse for that
complacency.
“Dear Gurd, For the love of Mike come on home and help take care of
Margot E. Walling. She has got mamma and the girls all up in the air.
Grandfather is getting ready to shoot her. I heard him talking to dad
about writing Uncle Mark to take her away. I sort of like her. Eggs and
Jim think she is hell.”
Gurdy came whirling east to New York and found Mark at the 45th Street
Theatre, humming over the model for a scene of “Captain Salvador.”
But plainly Mark knew nothing of any fissure in the sacred group at
Fayettesville. He was busy rehearsing a comedy, had been to the farm
only once. In any event Mark mustn’t be hurt. Gurdy took breath and
delicately put forth, “I want you to do something damned extravagant,
Mark.”
“Easy, sonny. Just got the estimate for the mirrors at the Walling. Not
more than ten thousand, please!”
“Not as bad as that. Get a cottage on Long Island for July and August.
The farm’s all right for Margot for a while. But grandfather goes to
bed at nine. The kids play rags on the phonograph all afternoon. It
gets tiresome after a while. I--”
“Oh, son,” said Mark, “I’m not so thickheaded I can’t see that
sister’ll get bored down there.” He beamed, thinking Gurdy superb in
grey tweeds, his white skin overlayed with pale tan. “No, I expect
I’d get bored with the cows and chickens if I was there enough.--And
we ought to have some kind of a country place of our own.--There’s
some friend of Arthur Hopkins has a place on Long Island he wants to
let.--Olive Ilden’ll be here in July and we ought to have a cottage
somewhere. I don’t think your dad and Olive’d have much to talk over.”
Mark grinned. Gurdy laughed, curling on a corner of the desk, approving
the man’s common shrewdness. Mark patted his palms together. “Look,
you pike on down to the farm. Margot’s got your car there. You fetch
her up in the morning and you two go look at this cottage. I’ll ’phone
Hopkins and find where it is. Oh, here’s this piece Margot’s friend
Dufford’s sent over. I hear it’s doing a fair business in London but
nothing to brag of. Read it and see what you think. Get going, son. You
can catch the three o’clock for Trenton.”
Gurdy strove with this fragility in neat prose all the way to Trenton.
It had to do with a climber domiciled by mistake in the house of
a stodgy young Earl. It was wordy and tedious. The name, “Todgers
Intrudes,” made him grunt. He laughed occasionally at the tinkling
echoes of Wilde and Maugham. It might be passable in London where
the lethal jokes on “Dora” and “Brass Hats” would be understood. He
diligently tried to be just to Colonel Dufford’s art which served
to keep his pulse down and his mind remote from the approaching
discomfort. Margot wasn’t perfect. She had upset the family. It was
best to get her quickly away from Fayettesville. He hired a battered
car at Trenton. The Fayettesville Military Academy was closing for the
summer, by all signs. Lads bustled toward the station towing parents
and gaudy sisters in the beginning of sunset. He overtook his three
brothers idling home toward the farm and gave them a lift. No one spoke
of Margot directly. Edward, his correspondent, smiled sideways at
Gurdy and drawled, “Must have been having a damn good time in Chicago,
Gurd,” but nothing else was said. The car panted into the stone walled
dooryard. His grandfather waved a linen clad arm at Gurdy from the
padded chair on the veranda. His sisters accepted the usual candy and
hid a motion picture magazine from him, giggling. Mrs. Bernamer was at
a funeral in Trenton. Gurdy found Bernamer in the dairy yard studying a
calf. It was always easy to be frank with the saturnine, long farmer.
His father didn’t suffer from illusions. They sat on the frame of the
water tower and lit cigarettes, before speech.
“How’s Margot been behaving, dad?”
“You sweet on her, son?”
“I like her. How’s she been acting?”
Bernamer pulled his belt tight and lifted his hard face toward the
sky. Gurdy felt the mute courtesy of his pause. The man had a natural
scorn of tumult. He lived silently and, perhaps, thought much. He said,
“This is just as much Mark’s place as it is ours. He’s the best feller
livin’. We all know that. And she’s Joe’s daughter.” Something boiled
up in his blue eyes. He cried, “What in hell! You’re as good as she
is, ain’t you? You can come home and act like we wasn’t mud underfoot!
Who the hell’s she?” His wrath slid into laughter. He pulled his belt
tighter and winked at Gurdy. “It’s kind of funny hearin’ her cuss,
though.”
“She over does that, a little. Just what’s the trouble, dad?”
“I can’t tell you, son. She’s sand in the cream. It ain’t her smokin’.
I miss my guess if the girls ain’t tried that.--She kind of puts me
in mind of that Boyle wench Mark married. She’s got the old man all
worried. Your mamma’s scared to death of her. So’s the girls.--She
ain’t so damned polite it hurts her any.... Say, I wouldn’t hurt Mark’s
feelings for the world--And I notice she don’t carry on so high and
mighty when Mark’s here, neither.--Ain’t there some place else she
could go?”
Gurdy had a second of futile rage that divided itself between Margot
and his family. This wasn’t within remedy. She had absorbed the
attitudes, the impatience of worlds exterior to the flat peace of the
farm. He grinned at his father.
“Yes. I’m going to take her off. Mark’s got more sense than you think,
dad.”
“Sure. Mark’s got plenty of sense when he ain’t dead cracked over a
thing. Don’t tell him I’ve been squalling. Mebbe that Englishwoman
spoiled her, lettin’ her gallivant too much. Mebbe it’s her father
comin’ out in her. Between us, Joe was tougher’n most boys. You’ll
likely find her down in the orchard smokin’ her head off. It’s all kind
of funny ... and then it ain’t.”
She wasn’t smoking. She sat with a novel spread on her yellow lap and
the bole of an apple tree behind her head. There was a shattered plate
of ruddy glow about her. The pose had the prettiness of a drowsy child.
She was, her lover thought, a bragging child, lonesome for cleverness,
annoyed by stolidity. In the vast green of the orchard she seemed
small. He whistled. She rose, her hair for a moment floating, then
laughed and threw the book away.
“Thank God, that’s you! I thought it was one of--O, any one!”
There was a shrill, unknown jerk in her voice. She came running and
took his arm.
“Tell me something about civilization--quick! You don’t want to talk
about the fil-lums do you? Or whether Jane Rupp’s going to marry that
Coe feller or--”
“Bored?”
“Oh--to death! How do you stand it? How do you stand it?... I knew
they’d be common but I didn’t think they’d be such bloody--”
“Look out,” said Gurdy.
But the girl’s red lips had retracted. She was shivering. She had lost
her charm of posture. She cried, “Oh, yes! They’re our people and all
the rest of that tosh! I’m not a hypocrite. It’s a stable! A stable!”
Her breath choked her. She gasped, “Get me out of here! I’m used to
what you call real people!”
She loosed his sleeve and patted her hair. But some inner spring shook
her. Scarlet streaks appeared in her face. She babbled, “He must be
mad! Of course he’s sentimental about them--about the place--the old
place--It’s the way he is about Carlson! My God, why should he think I
can stand it!”
Something hummed in Gurdy’s head. His hands heated. He stood
shuffling a foot in the grass and looked from her at the green
intricate branches. He must keep cool. He whispered, “Can’t you find
anything--well, funny in it?”
“It’s all funny rather the way an old dress is!--Why should he think I
could stay here? Three weeks! Of course, he hasn’t any breed--”
“Shut up,” said Gurdy, “That’ll be all! We were born here. Mark took us
and had us dressed and looked after--trained. I’m not going to laugh
at them. I can’t.--I’ll be damned if I’ll hear you laugh at Mark. Yes,
he’s sentimental! If he wasn’t, d’you think he’d have bothered about
taking care of you--of us? The family’s sacred to him. He loves them.
He’s that kind.--Stop laughing!”
He hated her. There was no beauty left. Her face had shrivelled in this
fire. She was swiftly and horribly like an angry trull. She said,
“Sentimentalist! You’re a damned milk and sugar sentimentalist like--”
“Ah,” said Gurdy, “that’s out of some book!... All right. Mark’s going
to take a place on Long Island. We’ll go up in the morning.”
He tramped off. The orchard became a whirl of green flame that seared
then left him cold. He was tired. His body felt like stone, heavy and
dead. The illusion of desire was gone out of Gurdy.
VII
Todgers Intrudes