little; she looked more than ever as if she were straining at a leash.
There was an unusual colour in her face, a sort of flame, which for an
instant attracted Alyse’s attention. Aunt Jude, she reflected, must have
been almost beautiful when she was younger, before the expression of
half-defiant endurance came into her face. Her dark hair was still
lovely, with its blue-black shadows. Over her brow was a white lock,
which she took no pains to conceal. She wore it rather like a defiant
banner, and it went well with a certain gallant air she sometimes had.
As soon as supper was finished the family began to melt away. Wally
called for George Todd and they went out. They admitted, grinning, that
they were going to an express-company auction of unclaimed packages. It
was one of their pet forms of entertainment, and they frequently brought
home queer bundles, which they opened with shouts of amusement. Alyse
thought they were dears, but rather foolish. She could not guess that
when they started out of an evening arm-in-arm they became boys again
and forgot that life had been a somewhat niggardly affair for them.
A moment later Miggs made a dash for the door, pulling on her long
gloves. Her face was flushed and exquisite under her modish hat.
“I’ll have Eddie come around to Jane’s for you, Milly,” her mother
called to her.
A shadow of fright and annoyance came over Miggs’s face.
“No, please don’t, Mamma. Jane, or somebody, will come home with me.
Besides, we--we may go to a movie. Don’t fuss over me, Mamma. I’m not a
baby.”
Then she darted back into the room, caught her mother’s head in her
slim arms, snuggled her little powdered nose into her neck.
“Oh, mamma, I’m all right. I’m just so full of pep to-night I’m--I’m
snappy. Don’t you worry, darling.”
And licking her scarlet lips, glancing once more into the mirror of the
old-fashioned sideboard, she was off--a humming bird caught in a
mysterious gale.
Then appeared Aunt Jude, her jacket over her arm, the tray in her hands.
Her dark eyes were feverishly bright, but her face looked pale and
strained. Would they mind just cocking an ear now and then toward
Mother’s room? She would probably drop off to sleep soon, though she had
made up her mind she wouldn’t.
“But I must go to-night,” she said, “just to-night. Perhaps after this
I--won’t be going out Tuesday and Thursday evenings.”
She stood still, staring down at the tray she had put on the kitchen
table. Then she threw up her head with the familiar defiant movement,
made a sound as if of scorn at her own weakness, and shrugging herself
into her old blue serge jacket, she, too, darted out into the evening.
Eddie stood by the window. He stooped to look up at the dark blue of the
night sky--a gesture habitual with him--fiddled wistfully for a long
moment with the shade, and then pulled it down as if resolutely shutting
something out. But a moment or two later he took his hat down from the
hall rack, muttered to his mother “Be back early,” and slid out the
front door, as if suddenly afraid of being late for something.
The house fell silent. Alyse’s mother put a dark-red spread on the
dining-room table and placed her darning basket under the light.
“Now this is cozy,” she said happily. “We’ll have time for a nice visit.
Tell me about your work, dear. I’ve been hoping maybe you’d feel like
coming home to stay as soon as you’d got some material to work on. Of
course, I understand,” she added humbly, “you have to have something to
inspire you.”
“That’s exactly it, Mother. I must know interesting persons. It’s very
important to be stimulated. Sometimes I’ve thought that if I could only
go to Russia or Austria or some place where there is a sense of crisis,
a--a vividness, you know; strife of souls. That’s what I want to study.
You see, Mother? And of course, here at home----”
Her mother sighed.
“I know we’re all pretty ordinary, and nothing much happens, here at
home.”
She looked apologetic, as if she realized the family’s limitations and
wished she could offer something more interesting to her talented
daughter. She dropped the old darning egg into the heel of a sock. The
homely house was very quiet.
And a few miles farther south Milly was running breathlessly up the
Subway stairs, an eager, half-frightened Proserpine coming up from the
bowels of the earth into flowery meadows, into the glare of the electric
flowers of Broadway.
And a few blocks north Judith Todd stood in a dark doorway and
whispered: “I mustn’t hope for anything. If nothing comes of to-night, I
must go on. But, O God, make something come out right for me at last, at
last!”
And Eddie----
At about this moment Eddie’s mother was rolling a pair of his socks into
a neat ball. She sighed unconsciously.
“Sometimes it seems to me,” she said, “as if Eddie has never really
waked up. I--I can’t express it the way you would, Alice; but as if he
was driving himself--dumb, you know.”
“Doesn’t he like his job?”
“I don’t know. He never says. But sometimes he looks---- And then
there’s that Haskins girl. I’m afraid he’s let her push him into being
engaged. I wish I knew--he’s so silent lately.... When he was a little
boy he used to lie on the floor by the hour, so happy, drawing pictures
of ships.”
Ships! Alyse had never noticed them, but they lay like a fringe about
the tall city, slowly rising and falling with the tide, lying there
waiting to be unloosed to the seven seas. But Eddie knew they were
there. All the miles of wharves he knew, from Sunday and evening
rambles, from noon hours when he went without food to stand looking at
some lovely visitor from an unknown port. And now at this moment he was
making his way as fast as he could to say farewell to one that had
become the very core of his heart.
More eagerly, and more swiftly than he ever had made his way to the
Haskins girl he travelled toward the North River. Just before he reached
the corner beyond which he could look down upon the river he felt his
heart grow cold with the fear that sometime during the day she might
have slipped out to sea. It seemed to him that if she had gone he could
not bear it; and yet he told himself that to-morrow night she would not
be there; they had begun to ship her cargo.
But when he had rounded the corner, there were her masts against the
deep blue of the night sky--five masts, the beauty! He had seen them two
weeks before one night when he was leaning over the wall of Riverside
Drive, and his heart had leaped. He had made his way down to the wharf
alongside which the schooner lay, and stood there studying her, feasting
his eyes on her. The tall cliffs of houses towered above her, but she
smelled of many cargoes and of the sea. He could imagine her furled
canvas slowly shaking out to the breeze, the deck tilting. The mate had
come up on deck with his pipe and talked to him over the side.
Next evening Eddie was there again, and the mate invited him on board;
he talked about the schooner as a man might about a wife whose very
faults he loved. And Eddie had asked him questions which had been
storing up in his heart since he was a boy. He could talk to this man
Jennings, for they had a passion in common. Evening after evening they
leaned over the deck rail or sat in the cabin, smoking and talking, and
a deep friendliness developed between them.
To-night when Eddie came to the edge of the Drive he did not hurry down
as usual to the wharf where the schooner was tied up, but stood looking
down at her. In his brain there was a misery and a battle. They were
working overtime down there, loading the last of a general cargo, and
that meant they would take advantage of the first tide. To-morrow she
would be gone, off to the River Plate. He shut his eyes hard and gripped
the wall against which he leaned.
To-morrow he would go downtown as usual in the Subway, and all day long
he would be nailing up boxes in the basement of the store, and in the
evening he would go around to see Lily Haskins. Under his breath he
uttered a sound between a groan and an oath. He felt bewildered when he
thought of Lily. He gazed at the five masts against the sky and they
were like a shining vision beside which Lily Haskins was but a dull
unreality. Was it actually true that he was going to marry, to go on all
his life nailing up boxes as if they were his own coffin?
His feet carried him slowly down toward the wharf. He must say good-bye
to Jennings, no matter how much he shrank from going on board the
schooner again, and as he went down the long stairs he was wondering at
the stupidity of his own life. Why hadn’t he talked things over with
someone? Perhaps someone else could have told him whether he was really
obliged to marry Lily. But he guessed that he had always been dumb. Life
had gone on within him, half asleep, in the dust of the packing room,
until he and Jennings and the schooner became friends.
And after that he had awakened, but he was still dumb. Perhaps if years
ago he had begun to talk about what he wanted to do---- But that year
when he was eighteen, and making his secret plan to join the Navy, was
the year Dad’s business was so poor. He couldn’t desert him when he was
so hard pressed. Perhaps later, when Dad had got on his feet, he might
have broken loose, if only he had believed in his dream; if he hadn’t
been afraid of being laughed at.
His thoughts went still farther back, to the days when he used to cover
immense sheets of paper with pictures of ships, full-rigged, with each
detail as correct as he could make it from pictures he had seen.
He remembered looking up one day from his drawing with a sudden vision
in his heart and crying out, “When I grow up I’m going to be a sailor!”
And someone, he could not remember who, had laughed. For a long time
they called him Yeave-Ho. The door of his heart through which this cry
had gone out had closed.
If he had cared less about his dream, the door would not have closed so
tightly, perhaps; or if there had been any one in his world who did not
regard the sea as merely a blue blur in a geography.
Well, if a man was a sensitive fool, he had only himself to blame. He
closed his lips more tightly and went on down the wharf. Two fellows
passed him with bundles over their shoulders. The crew was going on
board. In the light of torches the last of the cargo was being hustled
on board. The light streamed upward and touched the masts; the vessel
moved slightly with the tramping of feet and the lifting of the tide.
With the lights, the shouting and movement of men, the schooner seemed
to rise on tiptoe, eager and expectant.
In a shaft of light stood Jennings, checking off the crew as they came
aboard. Down the wharf came the captain, a man behind him carrying bags
and bundles. As soon as he climbed on board, Jennings could be seen
showing him a telegram, and the captain frowned. Eddie, his habitual
diffidence overcoming him, shrank back into shadow, but presently when
the captain had gone into the cabin, Eddie moved over to the edge of the
wharf and called, “Good-bye, Mr. Jennings! Just thought I’d come down to
wish you--wish you----” But before he could finish, Jennings leaped and
grasped his shoulder.
“Eddie! By cricky, boy, you look good to me! Look here!” He waved the
telegram under Eddie’s nose and dragged him on board. “Look here, it’s
Providence sent you down here just now. Petersen’s in hospital. We’re
short a hand. My boy, it’s your chance! You’ll never have a better one.
How about it? You’d have time to get your dunnage. Let’s see--tide will
be right in two hours and fifteen minutes; all the time in the world.
What say?”
The night reeled and rocked around Eddie.
“To-night!”
The mate drew him forward, whispering, “Look here, you know as much
about a vessel now as Pete ever did. You were born for the sea, and
that’s the truth. This is your great chance to get your
apprenticeship--good captain and a dandy vessel.”
Eddie stared about him while his heart pounded. He looked down the long
lines of the schooner, he heard the masts faintly creaking and
whispering in the rising wind, he smelled the unforgettable smell of a
ship, and he choked with longing. He thought of his mother, but not at
all of Lily Haskins. Could his father do without him? Would they all
think he had gone crazy? Would they laugh? And at that instant the wind
ruffled the water, the smell of the sea came stealing up the river, and
the deck rose under his feet, an imperceptible movement to any one not
tuned to the sea. But to Eddie it was as if his heart itself turned
over. His heart was like a seed, long buried in the dark and cold of the
earth, which has been pushing blindly upward and now at last sees the
sun. His hand on the smooth curve of the mast tingled and drank in the
feel of the ship, while into his soul there poured a new steadiness, a
clean new certainty. His dumb boyhood was over and his beloved was under
his hand.
* * * * *
Alyse yawned and her thoughts came back from her novel about Russia as
her eyes fastened themselves on the chiffon stocking her mother was
carefully mending.
“Really, Mother, it’s ridiculous the way Mildred dresses. And ought she
to go out every night? When I was sixteen I didn’t want to do anything
but read.”
Her mother smiled and sighed.
“I wish to goodness Milly would sit down at home with a book. But she
says life is so much more exciting than books. She told me the other day
that she had to live her own life.”
“Life!” Alyse laughed scornfully. “That baby!”
* * * * *
It was at about this moment and several miles farther downtown in a
dancing place called Poppy Gardens that Mildred, the baby, was on the
verge of learning something about life. She was also being called an
infant, but in quite a different tone.
“I’d jus’ soon tell the world,” said Dion Delanoy, holding her closer,
“that you’re some little dancer, baby.”
And at the half-lazy, half-insolent caress in his voice, Milly thrilled
with rapture and with discomfort. But it was very queer--there seemed to
be two of her. One was intoxicated with delight and wonder, and the
other held herself cool and aloof and, looking on, curled her lip.
Overhead in the ceiling electric bulbs were stuck like pins in a
cushion. When you tilted your head back so that your cheek touched your
partner’s shoulder, all these lights reeled and swam after you around
the room, and the floor undulated in long flat waves. When you floated
through the green spotlight, Dion Delanoy’s eyes, like large shoe
buttons in an ordinary light, became queer and sinister. When at the
other end of the room the red spotlight washed over you, his pale dusky
skin with the blue tinge from shaving had a bloom like an exotic fruit,
and he became beautiful; he became what she had come out to meet, a
romantic hero.
And she had reached that brief, glamorous season when there must be a
hero to worship or one goes hungry and thirsty. When she had seen him in
a bullfighter’s costume with the footlights performing their nightly
miracle with him, her hunger had fed itself upon him. Jane Tremont had
been almost as bad, but it was her note he had answered, and she alone
whom he had invited to meet him in the Peacock Alley of a Broadway
hotel. It was Fate, his choosing her and not Jane, and it could only
mean that they were meant for each other.
Having only just begun to learn about life, Milly didn’t suspect that
the trysting spot Delanoy had chosen could be neatly overlooked from a
balcony, and standing here, he could scrutinize his latest conquest and
decide whether or not he cared to keep the appointment. He had been a
bit taken aback by Milly’s youth, but it happened to be a dull evening.
And besides, in the dressing room, heavy with the odour of stale powder,
Milly had used a forbidden lipstick. He could not possibly know that in
spite of her desirous lips her heart was pounding with fright.
But now, since they had danced for half an hour, fright had given place
to this queer mixture of emotions; elation, dizzy wonder--she, Mildred
Todd, dancing with a famous dancer, or at any rate a nearly famous
dancer--hadn’t he had a dance practically alone, with the spotlight once
directly on him?--and a curious undercurrent of vague unhappiness, as if
already she had said good-bye to someone she had shrined and now had
lost. And those two individualities into which she had divided, the one
whose lip curled sometimes, who looked on, not happy and yet not
unhappy--homesick, rather--and the other, confused, ecstatic, and silly.
“I feel funny,” thought Milly, “and nothing is quite like I thought it
would be.”
Then the next minute she thrilled when someone behind them said, “That
fella’s Dion Delanoy.”
They had iced drinks at a sloppy table in a room off the dancing floor.
He poured something into her glass from a flask, under the table. She
became dreadfully sleepy and wished she were home and in bed. Then the
lights around the dancing floor grew suddenly brighter and danced, and
every thing was gayer. Dion Delanoy became again a hero, and she knew
that she herself was very wicked and beautiful. The cool half of her
gave her lips one final curl of scorn and retired to an immense
distance. The vague ache of disillusion left her too. She saw herself
engaged to Dion Delanoy, giving a theatre party in a box, and afterward
taking Jane behind to meet him. He was her hero. He was marvellous. She
clung tight to this thought, as if she knew that once she let it go she
could not stand him.
And they wandered down to the street and into a taxicab. The drive was a
flash and blur of lights, with Dion Delanoy holding her uncomfortably
close. The taxicab increased her sense of wickedness, and she thought of
a word she had recently added to her vocabulary--“insouciance.” She was
convinced that she had a great deal of it, and as for Dion Delanoy, he
was magnificent with it. If only the cool and critical half of her would
drop behind, and take with her the dim sense of sadness that was so
oddly like homesickness.
“Wouldn’t it be perfectly terrible if I should cry?” thought Milly.
The cab stopped in front of a studio building.
“Friend of mine let me have his studio,” murmured Delanoy vaguely.
“Let’s go up and start the phonograph.”
Milly hung back.
“I--I ought to go home. It’s getting late.”
He laughed at that, without any particular merriment in his watchful
eyes.
“Aw, baby--that’s what you are, baby.”
There was no taunt that could have hurt Milly more deeply. She looked up
at him pleadingly, when an incident, small but important, as many small
incidents are, occurred. Two markedly elegant young women approached and
passed, perfuming the air. They bowed and smiled at Delanoy. He swept
off his hat with a gesture nicely combining hauteur and suavity. In the
light from the apartment-house doorway he looked for the first time that
evening as she had seen him on the stage.
“Evelyn’s looking all to the good to-night,” he said gazing after the
two young women with a careless appraisal.
“You don’t mean Evelyn Beverly, of the Follies, do you?”
“Sure,” he replied, rather too quickly; “old friend of mine. She and I
was dancing up here in Jack’s studio last night. Come on. Don’t pretend
you’ve never been out after dark before. That kind of bluff makes me
sick.”
She felt a desperate necessity not to displease him, this godlike being,
so handsome as he stood frowning down at her. And she would die rather
than let him think her less endowed with insouciance than Evelyn
Beverly. Meekly, with her lips parted childishly and her flower-blue
eyes very wide, she followed him to the elevator.
* * * * *
In spite of Alyse’s contempt for coincidence, it does happen in life.
For instance, there was the sprig of lilac in the buttonhole of the
Negro elevator boy. As Milly stepped out of the elevator this bit of
flower, stuck so casually in a buttonhole, sent a sort of message to her
brain. On the supper table at home that night there had been a sprig or
two from the bush in the back yard. Her mother had always been foolish
about that bush, coaxing it, feeding it, ever since Milly could
remember. And now the perfume of lilac acted like a reagent in Milly’s
subconscious mind. As she watched Dion Delanoy searching his pockets for
his key, bending over the keyhole, it was as if her vision for the first
time that evening was quite clear.
And nothing can be more merciless than a young girl’s scrutiny. Milly
saw the ignoble back of his head, his hair sleeked back with pomade, a
slight sprinkling of dandruff on his coat collar, his commonplace hand,
not too clean. He smelled slightly of the barber shop and of toilet
water. She disliked his necktie.
She was kept waiting only a few seconds, but in this interval a romantic
hero died. She had a sudden, furious distaste for this cheap stranger,
and her heart ached too. She wanted dreadfully to be at home. But she
felt helpless; she couldn’t think what to do next or how to get away.
Delano had at last got the door open. He opened it, turned to her.
And at that instant behind a door at the end of the short hall a woman
laughed low and happily.
“Why,” exclaimed Milly, “that sounds exactly like Aunt Jude!”
* * * * *
Judith Todd, when she had left the house and her mother behind her,
became as usual a thing with wings on her feet. She flew toward the
Subway entrance, her dark eyes eager, her chin outthrust, her tall
figure leaning forward as if the waiting to get there was intolerable.
Sometimes she took a quick and happy look up at the sky, as a girl may
who is hastening to meet a lover.
At Columbus Circle she came up to the surface and walked quickly across
to a certain somewhat shabby studio building. Usually she could not
reach it quickly enough; but to-night she passed the door twice, and
finally stepped into the shadow of another doorway to have it out with
herself. She told herself that to-night was not different from any other
Tuesday or Thursday night, and she was a fool to be so excited. But all
day it had hung over her, a prescience that this was the most important
hour of her life. She longed for it, and she dreaded it terribly. If it
brought her disappointment it would be no ordinary disappointment; it
would mean the death of something in her without which her life would
become merely an existence--hope. To-night she realized that she had
never really lost it--hope--and an undying belief in her own genius.
But to-night could kill them both, or it could turn them into strength
and glory. She clenched her hands into the pockets of her old serge
jacket and set her lips in their lines of endurance.
The coloured boy in the elevator smiled at her and eyed the sprig of
lilac in her buttonhole. She had taken it from the supper table and
completely forgotten it until this instant.
“Looks like summer’s comin’,” he drawled.
She held the flower out to him.
“For luck,” she smiled.
Then at the top floor she went on down the short hall to the door behind
which every Tuesday and Thursday night she came to life.
With her hand on the knob, she heard voices within. She shrank back. So,
already it was here, the life or death of her hope, waiting there beyond
the door. She had expected to have a half hour to herself, to quiet in
work this sickening tremor of her heart. Well, nothing for it now but to
harden herself for whatever verdict those voices in there would soon
utter. She threw her head back defiantly and opened the door.
Three men were in the high, bare studio, standing about a long table.
They turned toward her at the sound of her entrance, and one of them, a
tall, thin man of forty, with quiet eyes and a sensitive mouth, came
quickly forward to meet her. But she looked past him toward the table on
which stood ten or twelve little figures, some of them still mere lumps
of clay. Not even in this moment could she keep her eyes from them, the
objects into which she had poured herself in delight and in suffering.
The tall man, John Richmond, followed her glance with understanding.
“You see, I got them back safely; and these gentlemen asked to meet
you.”
He presented them, and at the name of one of them she flushed--Ybarra.
She knew him by repute as a Fifth Avenue art dealer whose galleries were
noted for the cleverest and most daring of the exhibitions. The second
man stood a little without the circle of white light that beat down from
overhead. He appeared to her as merely a little grizzled man, and the
name, Mr. Purcell, meant nothing to her, until stepping toward the table
and thus coming under the light, some feature or gesture arrested her
attention sharply. She caught her breath and fixed her eyes on him in a
startled stare. George Jean Purcell. She knew him now. She had seen him
in his box at the opera one night. A girl sitting next to her in one of
the topmost balconies had pointed him out. A fabulously rich man, and a
discriminating collector. She had often longed to see the inside of the
little white marble gem which was his private museum.