Elsie had never been able to refurnish her old house, but she could have
pink lights in the dining-room, and a bowl of pink roses on the table to
draw attention from the worn linen and serviceable plates. Colored
servants had long since relieved Mrs. Pelham of the “fine china” and
Bohemian glass of palmier days. The simple platters and vegetable-dishes
were of indestructible silver and she polished them herself.
Gita, whose table was overloaded with massive silver, fit only for a
banquet hall, and who had dropped one of the forks on a priceless dish,
the fragments removed by a muttering Topper, felt a sharp pang of
homesickness: she was reminded of her mother’s pathetic attempts to give
beauty to the homeliest surroundings, if the result were but a bowl of
wild flowers or a worn but embroidered kimono thrown over the bald sofa
of a pension.
There was a third at the table, for Geoffrey Pelham had met a friend on
the Boardwalk and brought him home. Neither of the men wore evening
clothes, but Mrs. Pelham, whose austere face shone with a light that
seemed to Gita nothing less than miraculous, wore her best black satin
(by no means the soft and clinging fabric of fashion), bordered at the
neck and wrists with Irish lace. Elsie’s gown of “Caribbean blue”
deepened the hue of her eyes, and the revealed pedestal of her neck gave
her head and throat a more girlish beauty. She looked barely twenty and
her cheeks were very pink, her eyes very bright. Gita, acutely conscious
of her own bare neck and arms, with a rosy glow on their ivory surfaces,
tried to concentrate her mind on the excellent food, and answered in
monosyllables the occasional remarks addressed to her. It was the first
dinner she had attended for over three years, and in San Francisco she
had persisted, despite Millicent’s tears, in wearing uncomely little
dark frocks with elbow-sleeves and a neck curve that fitted the base of
her throat.
The conversational ball rolled between Elsie Brewster and Eustace
Bylant. Mrs. Pelham merely beamed on her son, who devoted himself to his
dinner and rarely volunteered a remark. Gita, who was appreciative of
good looks, however grudgingly she might admit their waste, and whose
eyelashes were an effective screen for subtle observation, remarked that
Geoffrey Pelham had the hard outlines of his mother redeemed by a keen
intellectual life of their own, and a high head with an abundance of
fair hair, properly cut at the back but indifferently brushed. His eyes,
like Elsie’s, were gray-blue but darker, widely and deeply set; and he
showed his battle with fortune, his ambition, and his devotion to his
chosen science in a certain set grimness of mouth and nostril. His tall
figure had the look of recent affinity with a uniform, an expression
even doctors brought back from the war. But although Gita inferred he
might be found attractive by women if sufficiently responsive, she
dismissed this gift as negligible and concentrated her admiration for a
moment on his brow. Like his sister’s it was high and full and had the
same expression of intellectual nobility. Probably no lie, as she’d
tested out Elsie. . . . Below the eyebrows the face was that of a man
whose natural expression might have been nervous, eager, sensitive, but
trained to constant and severe repression. A man of a single purpose, no
doubt of that. Well, surgery could have him.
She turned her eyelashes on Mr. Bylant, who was still talking to Elsie.
Eustace Bylant was a novelist of considerable distinction, thirty-eight
in years, and admittedly the bridge across the chasm that divided the
“younger generation,” which had brought a new if somewhat strident note
into American fiction, and the stable group that went its serene way
based firmly on the traditions of England. His own base was as firm as
England’s Gibraltar, but his undiminished curiosity, the activity of his
mind, and his genuine interest in current life and thought, enabled him
without effort to be as modern as the youngsters. Sometimes more so, for
the youngsters were often ingenuously mediæval.
And his religion was art, words his flexible tools; he could create a
living picture of dire offensiveness without an offensive word. An
inexorable realist, he scorned to introduce beauty where beauty was not,
but when forced by the exigencies of the story to create an unclean
interior inhabited by persons who declined to wash, he conveyed his
meaning so craftily that the reader was uncomfortably aware of an
assortment of smells and raucous sounds and ugly images, which he
remembered long after dismissing the grease and grime and stenches of
less accomplished recorders of life at its worst.
Bylant had never made an effort to repress the mobile play of his
features and looked less than his thirty-eight years, in spite of the
fact that he was a bright light at sophisticate parties when they did
not interfere with his work. His long nose was sharp and investigating,
his mouth would have been sensuous but for an almost rigid firmness of
the lower lip, and his lively gray eyes sparkled with tolerance and
good-humor. He wore an infinitesimal mustache and a short pointed beard.
He was always meticulously groomed and radiated good health; his large
firm hands were as carefully tended as a fastidious woman’s, although he
was as masculine as Geoffrey Pelham and something of an athlete. Gita,
who, in her worst days, had polished her nails, compared the hands of
the two men. Dr. Pelham’s were long and sensitive and flexible, but no
doubt he thought it sufficient to keep them clean and disinfected and
wasted no time on a buffer.
Gita had arrived early by request, spent half an hour in Elsie’s
bedroom, and listened none too patiently to a brief biography of the
distinguished guest. “I’ve not seen so very much of him, considering
he’s a great friend of my brother,” Elsie had rattled on, “but he always
calls when he comes to Atlantic City; sometimes drops in on me at the
office. And I’ve met him at a few parties in New York. He’s known from
the first that I am the occasional Elizabeth Pelham of the magazines.
Shortly after my début as ‘E. B.’ he introduced me to Suzan Forbes, who
took me firmly by the hand and steered me into the haven of the Lucy
Stone League, where cognominal transitions from father to husband are
sternly tabu. Do I look all right?”
Gita had assured her she looked lovely, and they had gone downstairs arm
in arm.
Aloof and apparently absorbed in her “Maryland chicken,” she wondered
apprehensively if Bylant were in love with Elsie and decided he was not.
His eyes were merely bright with interest as they discussed current
tendencies and sophisticate personalities. He had darted a curious
glance at herself once or twice in the parlor, and there had been a
sudden glow in his eyes when they were introduced that made her stiffen
her spine—that unfailing thermometer of her moods—but he had favored
her with his notice no further.
At this point it occurred to her that she was acting like a “cub.” In
San Francisco, where she had been invited to dinners by girls who both
liked and pitied her, eccentricities were condoned and they had expected
no help at her hands. Tonight she was not only the guest of honor but
the only other girl present, and—she made a wild dive among the shades
of her ancestors—she was Miss Carteret of Carteret Manor. She may have
accepted the rôle under protest but accepted it she had, and to behave
like a sulky outlaw and cast a shade over the feast would no longer be
tolerated. Elsie loved her and if she were disappointed would give no
sign, but Gita imagined with a shudder the cold disapproval of Mrs.
Pleyden if she sat like a sphinx at her table with a picked man on
either side to entertain. She might as well begin now.
She turned to Dr. Pelham and asked a tentative question, imbecile, she
admitted, but she hardly could be expected to scintillate.
“Are you glad to be home, to have seen the last of the West?”
Pelham smiled slightly. “Oh, I rather liked Butte.”
“Mining town, isn’t it?”
“Rather.” He was in no mood for small talk, for his mind was full of his
suddenly dazzling future, but he recognized that he was host, and if
this hitherto agreeably silent guest were suddenly inspired to
conversation, it was his duty to humor her. “A very noisy town. There
are three shifts, you know, and groups of miners on the street corners
at all hours of the day and night. The city never seems to sleep.”
“Rather trying for those who want to sleep, I should think.”
“Decidedly. But I was generally too tired at night to be kept awake even
by the eternally bouncing trucks.”
Gita turned to him squarely. She felt no repulsion toward individual men
as long as they were impersonal, and Butte roused her curiosity. At the
same moment Dr. Pelham was enabled to observe that she had the largest
and fiercest black eyes he had ever seen and quite the most remarkable
eyelashes. “Please tell me something about Butte,” she said eagerly. “I
have lived in a good many places but never in a mining town. I always
thought I’d like to go to Johannesburg, but I never heard of Butte until
today.”
“The two cities are said to be much alike.” And he launched into a
description of the stark hill, once known as Perch of the Devil, for
unarguable reasons, where the inhabitants walked over copper-mines a
mile in depth and sometimes found outcroppings in their back yards. He
was grateful to her for introducing a subject which cost him no effort,
and he had been able to see the beauty as well as the smiting ugliness
of that ore-scorched region. In winter when the high valley was covered
with snow it had a cold loveliness of its own, particularly under the
blue dawn of Montana.
That phrase had occurred to him as he walked home before sunrise one
morning after a call to The Flat to patch up a woman so severely injured
in an amorous dispute that it was impossible to move her. His sentences
were brief and unadorned but it seemed to Gita that she had a complete
vision of that unique “camp” in the Rocky Mountains with its sinister
and unsleeping life underground and its scarred and feverish surface.
“I’ll go there some day,” she said, and not merely to be polite. “It
would be a new sensation to telephone to New York in a comfortable
office a mile underground.” Bylant and Elsie had fallen silent and were
listening, the latter with intense approval: Geoffrey was exerting
himself to entertain a woman, and Gita was hanging on his words. Then
she frowned. _That_ would be too obvious. One’s darling brother and
beloved friend. Old stuff. Wouldn’t do, anyhow. What Geoff needed was a
good old-fashioned wife to see that he got proper food at regular hours,
and soothing and sufficiently intelligent conversation when at home.
Whatever else Gita might become she never would be soothing and
adaptable. Eustace Bylant might manage her. But the distinguished author
had not manifested the slightest interest in this transitional friend of
hers.
Then she became aware that while leaning toward Geoffrey, Bylant was
covertly watching Gita Carteret. There was a curious expression in his
eyes . . . very curious. Not admiration; that would have been natural
enough. Not even speculation—more natural still. Not dubiety. Gita, now
that she had abandoned a hopeless pose, more especially when she wore
soft and luminous satin and a rope of shimmering pearls, did not look in
the least like a boy. She was still more handsome than beautiful,
perhaps, for there was no trace of softness in her spirited features,
and had it not been for her eyelashes she would have resembled too
closely the eagle-like countenance of Mrs. Carteret. . . . His eyes had
not even their “psychological look,” as when he was visibly admiring and
inwardly impaling some elated woman. . . . No, it was—it was—Elsie
almost lost her breath as the expression in Bylant’s eyes deepened to an
inner certainty. Expectancy? Hope? She had watched it dawn out of a
stare of keen appraisement, as if his critical faculty were determined
to make no mistake.
Then she saw him shrug his shoulders, shift his gaze, and give his full
attention to Geoffrey. A few moments later, to his friend’s manifest
relief, he took over the burden of conversation and talked of old and
abandoned mining towns he had seen in Nevada; and told stories both
orthodox and unusual, that clung to them. One made even Gita laugh
heartily; the tale of a man who had taken refuge in the office of his
manager high up and in the side of a mountain still full of silver,
which could be approached only by a narrow and precarious flight of
steps—from a lady of easy virtue, who, now that he owned much of the
mountain, was determined to marry him. While he was smoking a
congratulatory pipe his manager, passing the entrance to the eyrie,
cried out suddenly: “My God, Jim, she’s coming up the ladder with a
pistol in one hand and a priest behind her!” And, corralled and at bay,
the millionaire had married the lady, dowered her extravagantly, and
left her to her own devices. A few years later she had attained a high
and haughty position in European Society.
This time Bylant included Gita in the conversation as he did Mrs.
Pelham; with equal and charming politeness, and nothing more. She went
home with the sense of having had an agreeable and instructive evening,
and of enjoying it more than she deserved. Far more important, she had
pleased Elsie and was not compelled to anathematize herself as a boor.
Topper had been ordered to call for her in a taxi, lest Elsie should
insist upon her brother’s escort. Dr. Pelham, much relieved, pronounced
her a sensible young woman, and looked astonished when his sister went
off into a paroxysm of laughter.