It was Easter Sunday and Gita was strolling along the Boardwalk. Mr.
Donald had considerately sent her a check and she had bought a small
black sailor hat, which she wore on the back of her head that her
cropped hair should further demonstrate her complete indifference to
feminine allure. She had also invested in a black sport skirt that she
might be able to keep one hand in a pocket, and in the other she carried
a swagger-stick. A stiff white shirtwaist and black tie completed her
toilette. She flattered herself that she looked like a boy masquerading
as a girl and was somewhat disconcerted when no less than two passing
men murmured, “Cutie.” Then she was abruptly a haughty young woman—and
a Carteret—freezing impertinent libertines.
“But if I only _were_ a boy,” she sighed. “I don’t believe I’d even mind
work. And girls are ten thousand times nicer than men. Then I could fall
in love with one of them, and now that is forever denied me.”
But she did not really feel sad. The warm gold sun rode in an unflecked
sky. The sea rolled in to the white sands in long sparkling indolent
waves. Over the hard beach young people were riding horseback and
children were driving little carts, or building in the sand. A great
liner drifted on the horizon.
The Boardwalk was so crowded that Gita was forced to move at a far more
leisurely pace than her habit, and it seemed to her that in all that
vast throng there was but one expression: a composite expression of
vacant contentment. If they were subject to the common misfortunes and
cares of humanity, for the present they were unable to recall them.
Here and there she saw a woman fashionably dressed, but to what world
she belonged Gita did not hazard a guess. There were perhaps a hundred
tailor-made girls, as slim as laths, very trim, very conscious that they
were turned out by one of the autocrats of fashion. But the mass were
frankly tourists with no money to spend on anything but cheap imitations
of the prevailing styles. There were college boys arm in arm and walking
four abreast, and large carefully dressed males with roving predatory
eyes.
In the close monotonous procession of rolling chairs propelled up and
down the middle of the broad promenade by colored men or white
derelicts, were couples too fat and overfed to walk or too old and
tired. A few elderly ladies and gentlemen looked as if they may have
sauntered on the Walk in its heyday and still came for the ozone which
no change in fashion could alter.
Gita wondered what the façade of Atlantic City had looked like when
these devitalized relics were in their prime. Today hotels of varying
magnificence, with at least one triumph of modern architecture, were
connected by a flimsy chain of low-browed buildings: Japanese or Chinese
curio-shops; shops for linen, lingerie, sweaters and blouses;
candy-stores; shops devoted exclusively to salt-water taffy, “cut to fit
the mouth”; restaurants, motion-picture theaters, bookstores,
shoe-stores, milliners; displays of costumes unapproachable in elegance
and price; cigar stands, cheap rooming-houses, toy-stores, drug-stores,
auction-rooms, art-shops of highest and lowest quality; booths where
silhouettes were taken while you wait, stands for post-cards,
newspapers, magazines; jewelers; five-and-ten-cent stores. Interrupted
at set intervals by flights of steps or “inclines” leading down to the
avenues of Atlantic City. Opposite, reaching far out into the water, six
monstrous piers offering concerts, soft drinks, moving pictures,
tearooms, ballrooms, and long decks for chairs.
It was a scene both vulgar and splendid, extravagant and tawdry, mean
and aspiring. If a tidal wave washed away all but the hotels it would
have a certain stark magnificence, but the miles of pigmy shops gave it
the appearance of a chain of village Main Streets that made the great
hotels, not themselves, look alien.
Nevertheless the ensemble was gay and exhilarating. Above the
mass-murmur of voices rose the cry of the barkers and the deep surge of
the Atlantic. These slowly moving smiling crowds gave to the scene an
air of careless and unqualified leisure to be found nowhere else in the
world.
Behind and below the Boardwalk, between the Inlet and Iowa Avenue,
Atlantic City proper, a dignified town of a prevailing gray tone,
rambled back to the Thoroughfares and the salt marshes, and on the south
merged into the faubourg of Chelsea. It was a town with a life of its
own and regarded its façade as almost if not wholly negligible. Its
social life, like that of other small towns, revolved about its
churches, Episcopalianism representing the flake of the crust, and its
women’s clubs were often storm-centers of politics. The men had their
professional and business clubs, and some sixty leading citizens met for
a weekly luncheon at one of the city hotels either to talk business or
forget it, and to sing, with the abandon of boys, the sentimental songs
of their youth. Atlantic Avenue, a broad if unpicturesque thoroughfare,
had its enormous trolleys that went from the Inlet to Longport, at the
southern tip of the island; but Pacific Avenue, with its fine Public
Library, its churches and reserved private houses, relied on the humble
jitney.
It was not a bustling city but it had a constant surge of life, and
there was no apparent poverty except in the negro quarter, whose
denizens found compensation in a conscious political power. And it was a
proud city, for all its streets were avenues, its shops were serenely
independent of the extortionists on the Boardwalk, the best of its
private houses looked like dignified old folks, well preserved but with
no pretensions to youth, and its air was tonic. Visitors in the great
frontal hotels, looking down on the quiet little gray city, assumed that
oyster-dredging was still its main industry, and the humbler patrons of
the hundreds of hotels and boarding-houses of the town accepted it as an
annex to the Boardwalk and knew as little of its life as of its history.
Gita had often wandered about the town, which attracted her more than
Chelsea or Ventnor, for although far from contemporary with the manor it
represented the vision and enterprise of that group of men, including
her great-grandfather, who had founded it in the early fifties, and now
it had an elderly dignity and beauty of its own.
Her slow progress had brought her to the incline that led down into
States Avenue and she edged her way to the rail and looked over at a
large gray wooden house with a round pointed tower. It was on the north
side of the avenue—once but a footpath leading from the old United
States Hotel to the beach—and, like its neighbors, belonged to a
definite and debased period of American architecture. Many of her
enterprising great-grandfather’s friends had left Philadelphia to become
permanent residents of the new city, either for business reasons or for
fashion, and this street demonstrated their theories of comfort and
grandeur. A few of their descendants had magnificent houses out on the
avenues of Chelsea or Ventnor, others had succumbed to adverse fortune
and quietly disappeared. A very few perhaps still lived where their
fathers or grandfathers had built. Several of these old houses, once the
pride of Atlantic City, were boarding-houses for the better class of
vacationists who could not afford the palaces on the Boardwalk.
Gita had spent two hours on that famous promenade and not seen a
familiar face. Nor was she likely to see one if she spent the day there.
Polly and the girls she had brought to the manor during the past week
scorned it wholeheartedly. They might exercise there in the early
morning and swim off their secluded beach when the ocean recovered from
the chill of winter, but to show themselves in “that crowd” had no part
in their program of aristocratic democracy.
Gita, who had entertained her new friends in aired and sunny rooms from
which at least a third of the furniture had been removed to the stables
(by two stalwart sons of her farmers, the while Topper and Andrew
muttered a continuous protest) had lost her desire for solitude, and
wondered if the Pelhams were at home. Easter Sunday was no time for a
formal call, but Gita, whether fundamentally a Carteret or not, ignored
the conventions when it suited her purpose.
She descended the incline and strolled up the avenue to the least
remunerative of her possessions. The blinds were raised and several of
the windows were open. It was after twelve and if the Pelhams had
attended church, as no doubt they had—the church, if not religion,
playing so dominant a part in the lives of their kind—they would have
returned. The midday dinner and Easter Sunday! Gita shrugged her
shoulders and ran up the long flight of steps: the house, following the
rule, was built above a high cellar as a precaution against the rare but
always possible furies of the sea.
But the Pelhams had a late breakfast on Sunday and an early supper. When
the colored maid brought up Miss Carteret’s name they were in their
respective bedrooms enjoying the somnolent ease that followed a morning
well spent. Chelsea had no more contempt for the Boardwalk than States
Avenue.
Mrs. Pelham was the first to descend. She was offended at the
informality but as curious as her daughter to see this heir of the
Carterets, who had been the subject of much rumor and several newspaper
paragraphs.
She was a very tall woman, thin and austere, with iron-gray hair dressed
high and flat, and wore a gray dress over corsets as rigid as herself.
Even the gold-framed spectacles did not soften her expression. She was a
member of the church most active in local politics and all reforms, and
the president of a very important club.
Gita felt like making a face but advanced and held out her hand in
Millicent’s prettiest manner. “Mrs. Pelham? I am Gita Carteret and I do
hope you won’t mind the informality of this call.”
“Oh, not at all,” said Mrs. Pelham stiffly. “Won’t you sit down? It is
very polite of you to call so soon. I hardly expected to see you for
several weeks.”
An ambiguous remark, but Gita replied sweetly:
“I was feeling lonesome after two hours on the Boardwalk and had a
sudden desire to meet old friends of my grandmother.”
Mrs. Pelham looked as if about to thaw, then darted a suspicious glance
at her visitor. “Hardly that. I used to meet Mrs. Carteret occasionally
when we sat on the same charitable boards, and she was once very kind
when I was ill. But I did not feel that I had known her well enough to
attend the funeral. Of course I left cards.”
Is this class-consciousness? thought Gita. Do self-respecting Americans
really recognize county?
“You were lucky not to feel you had to,” she replied warmly. “It was
ghastly. Public funerals—and weddings—should be abolished; don’t you
think so? Both are indecent.”
“I certainly do not agree with you. I rank both among the _decencies_ of
life.” She looked at Gita as if she approved of nothing about her, but
it was a look to which Gita was inured and she merely smiled and crossed
her knees, swinging a foot conspicuous in an Oxford bought in the boys’
department of a shoe-store.
She broke a silence that threatened to induce hysteria, recalling the
gossip of Topper, who knew the lineage and habits of every family from
Egg Harbor to Cape May. “I hear you go in tremendously for good works.
That must get away with a lot of time.”
“My time is fully occupied and I certainly do my duty as I see it.”
“Oh—ah—yes. I’ve heard that Atlantic City is particularly fortunate in
its women citizens. . . .” And then she sprang into the arena. “I
suppose you always intend to live here?”
“Most certainly. I was born in Atlantic City—we once had our own house
but it burned down—and I expect to die here. I hope you will renew the
lease of this house when it expires—but of course you leave business
details to Mr. Donald?”
There was a hint of anxiety in her rasping voice.
“Not altogether. I——You wouldn’t like to buy the house, would you?”
“I should like nothing better, but unfortunately I am unable to afford
it.” There was a gleam of real apprehension in her hard gray eyes as she
stared at Gita.
“I am afraid I must sell it, then.” Gita was now completely indifferent
to the impression she was making on this disagreeable person as well as
to the fact of Easter Sunday. “You see, it brings me in no income
whatever and I really need more money.”
“I cannot give up this house!” Gita almost jumped. There was a note of
fighting passion in the woman’s voice. “I have lived in it for thirty
years. My children were born in it.”
“Oh—I’m sorry.” She felt curiously disconcerted, almost sympathetic,
but after all she was not turning paupers into the street. “Perhaps—I
hardly know what to say. Mr. Donald advised me——”
“I could take in paying guests. We have several spare rooms. I never
expected to come to that but I’d do it and pay you more rent.”
“It isn’t so much a matter of income——” And then she rose with a sigh
of relief. A girl was coming down the stairs, and she looked as unlike
her presumable mother as possible.
Mrs. Pelham stood up. “My daughter, Mrs. Brewster—Miss Carteret,” she
said in her stiff precise manner. “I hope you will excuse me for a few
moments.” And she hastily left the room.
“‘Mrs.!’” said Gita, smiling once more as she resumed her seat on a
chair as hard as any at Carteret Manor. “I was sure you were a girl like
myself.”
“I am only twenty-six, and I’m a widow. My husband died a few months
after our marriage. But that seems a long time ago—I was just twenty. I
hear this is your first visit East. I hope you like it.”
And they exchanged easy commonplaces on the fertile subject of the
Boardwalk and Atlantic City.
Mrs. Brewster was as slim as Gita and hardly as tall. She, also, held
herself erectly, but without stiffness; her dark blue frock was of
excellent material fashionably cut; and, observed Gita, who had an eye
for clothes, singular in one who disdained them, as well “put on” as
Polly’s. Her brown hair was cut short and brushed back from a brow of
unfashionable nobility, and her large light eyes were both intelligent
and humorous. Gita thought she had never seen a more emphatic little
nose nor a more determined chin. If she had ever suffered she bore no
trace and looked as if her vision would always be set toward the future
in confidence and hope.
As the conversation became more personal Gita learned that Mrs. Brewster
was buyer for one of the department stores on Atlantic Avenue, a
position that took her frequently to Philadelphia and New York. She felt
slightly bewildered. It was her first acquaintance with a girl of the
business class, and she had assumed vaguely that all members of that
order were hard and common. She had once dreaded a similar fate, and
although, she told herself, she could not be harder, she had wondered if
she would wholly forget the anxious training and admonitions of her
mother. But Millicent might have had the bringing-up of Elsie Brewster.
Gita wondered if she were a snob and felt secretly humiliated.
“But you don’t like work?” she asked, determined to get to the root of
the matter. “You—you look, rather, as if you were both a student and
fond of a good time like other girls. Once I thought I should have to go
to work, and, frankly, I hated the bare idea.”
Mrs. Brewster smiled. “If you have to do a thing it is better to like it
than hate it, don’t you think? But you are rather shrewd, you know. As a
matter of fact I am fond of reading and study, and my job leaves me a
good many hours of leisure. I also love good times, of course, but when
you have a certain object in life——” Her voice faltered and she
blushed and glanced hesitatingly at this odd visitor who looked like a
boy with an eager girl’s face, and whom she had thought at first she
should find detestable. But Miss Carteret was not in the least like
other masculine women she had met, and when she forgot to be hard and
crisp her voice had deep warm notes that were as attractive an anomaly
as those long black eyelashes under that awful sailor hat.
“Yes?” asked Gita, who was now neither the polite Miss Carteret nor the
aggressive lad but merely one girl interested in another. “Do tell me
what is the object.”
Elsie Brewster smiled as warmly in response and succumbed to the
revulsion of feeling. “You see—I lead a double life.”
“What!” Gita’s eyes sparkled. There was no mystery whatever about Polly
and her group. “What on earth do you mean? You’re not secretly married
again——Oh! No! That would be too commonplace.”
“I should think so. No—but this is quite a secret—my ambition is to be
a writer—a novelist, if possible. I’ve had a few things accepted by the
magazines: two or three by the best, others just anywhere my agent could
place them. Of course it will be a long time before I can make a real
income out of writing and give up my job—my mother’s income hardly
covers the rent of this house and her subscriptions to charities, and
club dues—what I make supports us very comfortably. Reputation—the
kind that is remunerative, at least—takes time; but I know I shall
succeed in the end!”
“You look as if you would.” Gita glowed with enthusiasm. “I’m
frightfully interested. I do wish I had a gift. But I should think that
after a hard day’s work you’d be too tired to write.”
“Sometimes I am, but as a rule I manage to put in three or four hours at
night.”
“I think you are wonderful! Where do you write your stories?” She
glanced around the stiff inhospitable room, furnished in the reps of the
seventies. “In your bedroom?”
“Oh, no, I have a real study. Should you like to see it?”
“Shouldn’t I! Lead me to it.”
She followed Mrs. Brewster down the long hall and into a small room
fitted up with a large flat desk to which a typewriter was firmly
attached, a swivel chair, revolving bookcases, stands for dictionary and
atlas, and a filing cabinet.
“Businesslike, isn’t it?” asked the young author. “I’m afraid system has
become a part of my nature, and am always wondering if it will cramp my
imagination.”
“Why should it? I’m horribly disorderly myself and can’t do a
thing. . . . Is—is this a story?”
She was standing by the desk and she passed her hand with a lingering
touch over a pile of manuscript, much as she had fingered her
grandmother’s jewels.
“Yes. I finished it last night, and it will start off tomorrow on what
may be a long and adventurous journey. But if it were rejected by every
editor in the country nothing could take away my pleasure in writing
it!” she exclaimed with sudden passion.
“I’ll bet it couldn’t.” Gita’s eyes roved over the little room; it
seemed to her the most personal room she had ever entered. “Do you write
all your stories here?” she asked.
“Yes. I don’t believe I could write anywhere else. If I used the word
‘atmosphere’ I suppose you would think I was talking cant.”
“No, I shouldn’t.” But her heart sank. And then she sighed. The manor
would have to wait. She would not turn Elsie out of this room if Mr.
Donald talked his head off, although it would have given her acute
pleasure to annoy that disagreeable old woman. “I—I really came today
to give a gentle hint to Mrs. Pelham that I intended to sell the house
when the lease expired, but you may tell her I’ve changed my mind. You
see, it tickles my vanity to think that great books may be written in a
house belonging to me.”
“Oh!” Elsie Brewster had turned white. “You——Oh, you wouldn’t! It’s an
ugly old shell but I love it, and I couldn’t write anywhere else. I’d
feel as if my roots had been torn up.”
“Needn’t give it another thought,” said Gita briskly. “Cut it out. Don’t
you want to come over and see my old tomb?”
“I should like it very much. I have always longed to see the inside of
that old manor. To tell you the truth I once made it the scene of a
story, although I had to make up the inside.”
“I am sure it was an improvement on the original. It couldn’t be worse.
Do get your hat and come along. I told my old butler not to have
luncheon until half-past one. Do you mind walking?”
“I’d love a walk. Just a moment.”