AN UGLY GLIMPSE
I
Mrs. Thorstad went back to Mohawk a few days later, leaving behind her a
trail of increased prestige and carrying with her many assurances of
appreciation which she could cogitate at her leisure. Her husband met
her at the station, quietly, graciously pleased as he always was at a
home-coming.
“So Freda stayed for a while,” he said, as they went down the street his
arm hanging heavy with her suit-case.
“Yes. It will be nice for her. Pleasant young girls, Mrs. Brownley’s
girls, although they haven’t a great deal of mentality. Freda attracted
quite a little attention. Miss Duffield is very anxious for her to stay
in St. Pierre but of course Miss Duffield is an outsider and cannot
exert any influence. Mrs. Flandon had some very sensible suggestions.
They were going to see if there was a chance for Freda to get a place as
secretary to the general Republican district committee and later do some
work for the campaign committee. She can’t typewrite and that’s a
drawback but they thought they might get around that. She’ll know in a
day or so. It needs the consent of the chairman and he’s out of the
city. But he’ll probably do just what Mrs. Flandon asks.”
“In the meantime Freda stays at Mrs. Brownley’s?”
“Yes, and if she stays for a definite work, Mrs. Flandon will find her a
place to live.”
“The Flandons are nice people?”
“Oh, yes, a worldly sort, but very good. Mrs. Flandon is to be made
delegate at large from the state if they can manage it.”
“That’s good stuff.”
“She’s hardly the person for it,” said Mrs. Thorstad. “As a matter of
fact I am convinced that if this visiting organizer, Miss Duffield, who
after all is in a most anomalous position, had not urged it (she is an
intimate friend of Mrs. Flandon’s)--well, if she had not interfered I
might have been made the delegate at large myself. As it is, I’ll have
to try to get the Federated clubs to send me. I ought to be there. It’s
important for the future. I should have been the candidate for delegate
at large.”
Her husband whistled and shifted the bag to his other arm.
“I’m very glad you were saved that grave responsibility, Addie,” he
said, with his unfailing tact.
“Yes--there is that side, of course. But this Miss Duffield is a person
who’ll bear watching. I never can see the point in sending these
unsettled young women about the country organizing. They’re dangerous in
some ways. Now I happen to know that Miss Duffield is the sort of young
woman who receives men in her rooms--it’s only one room and there’s a
bed in it even if it has a cretonne cover--”
“Addie--Addie--!”
“But that’s not all. At the same time she does receive men in her
room--of course it may be all right and just a modern way--but she also
gets passionate, very suspicious letters from other men.”
Mr. Thorstad frowned. But they reached the house just then and in the
business of entering and commenting on his housekeeping Mrs. Thorstad
let the matter drop. She flew about efficiently and her husband sat back
in his armchair and watched her. There was no doubt of his gladness at
her return. His pleasant gray eyes were contented, a little sad perhaps,
but contented.
“Freda isn’t involved with any young men?” he asked.
“No--they tease her about young Smillie--that’s H. T. Smillie, First
National Bank, you know, but she says that’s just nonsense.”
II
Yet it was that very night after the Thorstads had gone to bed and were
sleeping in the pale light of a quiet moonlit sky, that Freda was forced
to admit that it wasn’t nonsense.
All along she had hated staying without her mother, who after all was
her reason for being here. She had to do it, however, or else abandon
the chance of getting the job as secretary to the committee. Freda
herself was a little homesick under all her excitement but, steadying
her, there had come letters from her father which urged her to make the
most of any opportunities which might come to her, which bade her make
suitable and wise friends and learn as much as she could.
One or two of the young men Freda met stood out, as being more
interesting than the others. Ted Smillie, because he was so attracted to
her from the first, had more or less intrigued her. Barbara’s obvious
dislike of the situation had forced both Ted and Freda into somewhat
closer acquaintanceship than would have naturally developed, but they
both worked against Barbara’s interference. There was in Ted, for all
his amorousness, a real feeling for health and beauty. That drew him to
Freda and her to him and there was enough in the glamour of being
chosen by the most competed-for man as worthy of attention, to make
Freda feel rather strongly in his favor. If he had been rude to her, as
he might have been to the country guest of the Brownley’s, she would
have seen him more clearly, seen his weakness, his impressionability,
read the laziness of his mind, seen the signs of self-indulgence which
were already beginning to show on his handsome face. She would have seen
him as too “soft” of mind and body. But he was frankly at her feet and
it would have taken an older head than Freda’s to analyze too clearly
past that during those first few weeks.
It was not the first attention she had had, of course. There were always
young men who were ready to be nice to Freda in Mohawk. But much as they
had liked her they had not, as she would have said, “made love to her.”
Ted did that. In his own way, he was good at it and Freda was collecting
experiences and naïve in spite of her power to get a perspective on her
own situation. He had singled Freda out as capable of giving him a
fresher thrill than any of the girls of his own “crowd.” And he had
ended by being pushed a little more than he expected by his own
emotions. The prospect of Freda’s return to Mohawk had annoyed him. He
had felt that if she went now, it would be an incomplete experience. He
wanted more than he had had. Freda had been pleasant, had been more than
pleasant, been frank enough in showing how much she liked him. But he
was used to more abandonment in the girls he knew--more freedom of
caresses. He wasn’t quite sure how far he wanted to go and of course he
had no intention of marrying anybody, certainly not Freda. But he was
unsatisfied.
Mr. and Mrs. Brownley had gone to Chicago the day after Mrs. Thorstad
had gone home and the three girls were alone in the house with the
servants. There had been a gay party at a hotel ballroom and at one
o’clock the three girls had left the hotel with their escorts. Ted had
his small car and Freda had wanted him to take Barbara home. But Barbara
had demurred, strangely enough. She was going in the big car with the
others, she said.
Barbara had been making life hard for Freda all day. Wherever they had
been she had managed to make Freda miserable. When the older Brownleys
were home, and when her mother was with her, Freda had never been so
completely at Barbara’s mercy as she was to-day. Allie, her usual ally,
had suddenly fallen away too. The fact was that Allie, having pressed
her mother for the purchase of the new runabout, had been put off on the
ground that her father said it was too expensive and on the further
ground that Freda’s visit was not over and that anyway Mrs. Brownley had
made no definite promise. Allie was disgruntled and the enthusiasm she
had had for Freda having run its brief course, like most of Allie’s
enthusiasms, she was willing to lend some slight support to Barbara’s
evident ennui with their guest. All through luncheon Barbara had
engineered an extremely rude conversation about things and places which
were entirely foreign to Freda. Not once had she let her guest slip into
the conversation. She had misled Freda deliberately into wearing her
flame colored satin dress to a very informal afternoon affair and
appeared herself, like every one else, in the most simple suit, making
Freda feel foolishly over dressed. It was a little thing but it pricked
Freda. At dinner she had asked some people to come in whom she knew
would follow her lead and they had again left Freda high and dry on the
conversational sands. It had not been a pleasant day and even as they
danced, she and Ted, that evening, Freda felt Barbara’s eyes rather
scornfully on her and guessed at the little tide of innuendo that was
being set in motion. She knew Barbara’s ways by this time. She could not
stand it another day, she vowed. In the morning she would see Mrs.
Flandon or go to a hotel or back to Mohawk.
It was clear that the others had not arrived when they drove up under
the Brownley porte-cochère where a single light was burning. Freda did
not want Ted to come in. She wanted to make her escape to bed before
Barbara might arrive and make her a further target. Besides it was clear
that Ted had been drinking and that he was most amorous. But he was
insistent. The others would be along in a minute and he wanted to see
one of the boys, he said.
They went into the long drawing-room. A single standing lamp was lit
beside a big divan and at Freda’s gesture as if she would turn on more,
Ted caught her hand.
“Quite enough light,” he said. “Come sit down.”
His methods were not as subtle as usual and they frightened Freda. But
she thought it wiser not to quarrel with him and sat down obediently
beside him on the divan--much too close for her taste.
“You aren’t really going away, are you, Freda?”
“I can’t stay forever. My welcome’s wearing a little thin.”
She tried to pull away from that encircling arm but he would not have
it. His strength had surprised her before, and she had not before minded
his demonstrations. To-night she felt them as different, vaguely
repellent.
“Please don’t, Ted.”
“I’m crazy about you, Freda. I’ve never seen a girl like you. There
aren’t any girls like you. Never have been any. I never knew what it
meant to be in love before.”
And all the time that arm tighter, heavier. His face seemed to Freda to
thicken. She discovered that she hated it. Abruptly she wrenched herself
free. But he followed her and unfortunately she had gone to an even
darker corner.
He pulled her to him and kissed her. It was the first time he had done
it and it seemed to exhilarate him.
There followed one of the worst half hours of Freda’s life. She kept
wondering what had happened to the others. She was conscious of herself
growing disheveled. She realized that he was in earnest, that he was
excited past his own control.
In desperation she cried at him--
“But I don’t care for you at all.”
“That makes it more interesting to a man,” said Ted, gallantly. “Anyway,
I’ll never give up.”
“And,” thought Freda, suddenly, with directness, “he hasn’t said one
word about marrying.” With a kind of vague desire to sound the situation
fully, she said--
“Do you really want me to marry you?”
The drinking that Ted had done had not improved his keenness of wit. He
laughed.
“I think you could almost make me do that,” he answered, “but what’s the
use of marrying? What we want is love--you know. I sized you up at the
start. Freda--you wonderful girl--let me tell you--”
What he told her, the outlines of his plan, struck Freda with impersonal
clearness. She had an odd sense of watching the scene from the outside,
as an observer who jeered at her a little for being implicated. Similar
scenes she had read about ran through her mind. She thought of Ann
Veronica and Mr. Ramage. “He hasn’t gone quite far enough for me to
actually fight him,” she thought--and then--“I ought to ring for a
servant or something--that’s what’s always done. I’m being insulted. I
ought to either faint or beat him. I’m interested. Isn’t it shocking!”
Above all these almost subconscious thoughts her mind dealt with
practicalities. She wondered where the others were. She must get out of
the house early in the morning. She wondered if Ted would keep this up
even if the others came in.
She tried to get to the door but her movement towards escape roused him
further. It had evidently never entered his head that she really meant
to rebuff him. He caught her in his arms.
“So you see, beautiful, how easy the whole thing will be--”
He was growing noisy and she realized that she did not want the servants
to hear. After all it wasn’t her house. She saw that they had been alone
for an hour. It was past two. And then to her immense relief she heard
the limousine outside.
“The others are here,” she said to him.
“Damn the others,” he said mumblingly, and, without apology, forced
himself into his overcoat. In the hall he seemed to recover himself.
Perhaps his sense of social convention struggled and overcame his
amorousness temporarily. He went out, past the entering girls, vaguely
speaking rather at them than to them.
Nothing of what happened after that seemed quite real to Freda. She was
fairly worn out from her trying day and hour of struggle and
embarrassment. As she stood for a minute by a long window trying to
collect her thoughts, she heard the girls at the door and it flashed
through her mind to ease the disgust from her own mind by telling the
whole business. She knew how frankly these girls talked of such things
among themselves.
They came in, Barbara leading. With a quick, sharp movement Barbara
turned on all the lights and as if in a spotlight the disarrayed parts
of the room seemed to stand out, the rug in which Ted’s foot had caught
and which he had kicked aside, the several chairs at unfamiliar angles,
the divan all tossed, with pillows crushed--most of all Freda herself,
hair somewhat disheveled, cheeks angrily flushed. Allie looked a little
queer as she gazed around. Barbara, after one scornful glance, never
took her eyes off Freda.
“So you brought him here?”
“Brought him? Ted? Where were the rest of you?”
“You knew where we were. We said where we were going. We waited and
waited at the Hebley’s. Every one was wondering where you’d gone. You
and Ted Smillie--at two o’clock. But I didn’t really think you’d have
the audacity to make my mother’s house the scene of your--”
The awful thing, thought Freda, is that she doesn’t believe that. But
she’s going to pretend she believes it and it’s just as bad as if she
did. Some one had let her in for this. It looks exactly as if--she
looked around and the color swept her face again.
“You shameless girl!” Barbara went viciously on. “If my mother was here
you wouldn’t dare have done it. To think that we have to stay in the
same house--to think--come Allie--”
But Freda was roused, infuriated. The scorn of her own position, a
position which allowed her to be insulted by such a person, rose above
all else. She flung her cloak around her.
“I wouldn’t stay in your house another night,” she cried, “if I have to
sleep on a park bench all night.”
The front door closed after her. As she reached the sidewalk she heard
the door open again, her name called cautiously, heard the latch
slipped. They were leaving the door open. As if she would go back--
She went through the streets swiftly.