"Marty!" cried Joan.
There was a curious glint in Martin's gray eyes, like the flash of
steel in front of a window. His jaw was set, and his face strangely
white.
"You said you were going to bed."
"I was going to bed, Marty dear."
"What are you doing here, then?"
"I changed my mind, old boy, and went out to dinner."
"Chucked me in favor of Palgrave."
"No, I didn't."
"What then?"
"He rang up after you'd gone; and going to bed like an old crock seemed
silly and feeble, and so I dressed and went out."
"Why with that rotter Palgrave?"
"Why not? And why rotter?"
"You don't answer my question!"
"Have I got to answer your question?"
"You're my wife, although you don't seem to know it; and I object to
Pargrave."
"I can't help that, Marty. I like him, you see, and humble little
person as I am, I can't be expected to turn my back on every one except
the men you choose for me."
"I don't choose any men for you. I want you for myself."
"Dear old Marty, but you've got me forever!"
"No, I haven't. You're less mine now than you were when I only saw you
in dreams. But all the same you're my wife, and I tell you now, you
sha'n't be handled by a man like Palgrave."
They were in the middle of the floor. There were people all round them,
thickly. They were obliged to keep going in that lunatic movement or be
run down. What a way and in what a place to bare a bleeding heart!
For the first time since he had answered to her call and found her
standing clean-cut against the sky, Martin held Joan in his arms. His
joy in doing so was mixed with rage and jealousy. It had been worse
than a blow in the mouth suddenly to see her, of whom he had thought as
fast asleep in what was only the mere husk of home, dancing with a man
like Palgrave.
And her nearness maddened him. All the starved and pent-up passion that
was in him flamed and blazed. It blinded him and buzzed in his ears. He
held her so tight and so hungrily that she could hardly breathe. She
was his, this girl. She had called him, and he had answered, and she
was his wife. He had the right to her by law and nature. He adored her
and had let her off and tried to be patient and win his way to her by
love and gentleness. But with his lips within an inch of her sweet,
impertinent face, and the scent of her hair in his brain, and the wound
that she had opened again sapping his blood, he held her to his heart
and charged the crowd to the beat of the music, like a man intoxicated,
like a man heedless of his surroundings. He didn't give a curse who
overheard what he said, or saw the look in his eyes. She had turned him
down, this half-wife, on the plea of weariness; and as soon as he had
left the house to go and eat his heart out in the hub of that swarming
lonely city, she had darted out with this doll-man whom he wouldn't
have her touch with the end of a pole. There was a limit to all things,
and he had come to it.
"You're coming home," he said.
"Marty, but I can't. Gilbert Palgrave--"
"Gilbert Palgrave be damned. You're coming home, I tell you, if I have
to carry you out."
She laughed. This was a new Marty, a high-handed, fiery Marty--one who
must not be encouraged. "Are you often like this?" she asked.
"Be careful. I've had enough, and if you don't want me to smash this
place up and cause a riot, you'll do what I tell you."
Her eyes flashed back at him, and two angry spots of color came into
her cheeks. He was out of control. She realized that. She had never in
her life seen any one so out of control--unaccountable as she found it.
That he would smash up the place and cause a riot she knew
instinctively. She put up no further opposition. If anything were to be
avoided, it was a scene, and in her mind's eye she could see herself
being carried out by this plunging boy, with a yard of stocking showing
and the laughter of every one ringing in her ears. No, no, not that!
She began to look for Palgrave, with her mind all alert and full of a
mischievous desire to turn the tables on Martin. He must be shown
quickly that if any one gave orders, she did.
He danced her to the edge of the floor, led her panting through the
tables to the foot of the stairs and with his hand grasping her arm
like a vice, guided her up to the place where ladies left their wraps.
"We're going home," he said, "to have things out. I'll wait here." Then
he called a boy and told him to get his hat and coat and gave him his
check.
Five minutes later, in pulsating silence, both of them angry and
inarticulate, they stood in the street waiting for a taxi. The soft air
touched their hot faces with a refreshing finger. Hardly any one who
saw that slip of a girl and that square-shouldered boy with his unlined
face would have imagined that they could be anything but brother and
sister. The marriage of babies! Was there no single apostle of common
sense in all the country--a country so gloriously free that it granted
licenses to every foolishness without a qualm?
Palgrave was standing on the curb, scowling. His car moved up, and the
porter went forward to open the door. As quick as lightning, Joan saw
her chance to put Martin into his place and evade an argument. Wasn't
she out of that old country cage at last? Couldn't she revel in free
flight without being called to order and treated like a school-girl, at
last? What fun to use Palgrave to show Martin her spirit!
She touched him on the arm and looked up at him with dancing eyes and a
teasing smile. "Not this time, Marty," she said, and was across the
sidewalk in a bound. "Quick," she said to Palgrave. "Quick!" And he,
catching the idea with something more than amusement, sprang into the
car after her, and away they went.
A duet of laughter hung briefly in the air.
With all the blood in his head, Martin, coming out of utter surprise,
made a dash for the retreating car, collided with the porter and stood
ruefully and self-consciously over the burly figure that had gone down
with a crash upon the pavement.
It was no use. Joan had been one too many for him. What, in any case,
was the good of trying to follow? She preferred Palgrave. She had no
use, at that moment, for home. She was bored at the mere idea of
talking things over. She was not serious. She refused to be faced up
with seriousness. She was like a precocious child who snapped her
fingers at authority and pursued the policy of the eel at the approach
of discipline. What had she cried out that night in the dark with her
chin tilted up and her arms thrown out? "I shall go joy-riding in that
huge round-about. If I can get anybody to pay my score, good. If not,
I'll pay it myself, whatever it costs. My motto's going to be 'A good
time as long as I can get it, and who cares for the price!'"
Martin helped the porter to his feet, stanched his flow of County Kerry
reproaches with a ten-dollar bill and went back into the Crystal Room.
He had gone there half an hour ago with a party of young people to kill
loneliness and forget a bad hour of despair. His friend, Howard
Oldershaw, who had breezed him out of the reading room of the Yale
Club, was one of the party. He was in the first flush of speed-breaking
and knew the town and its midnight haunts. He had offered to show
Martin the way to get rid of depression. Right! He should be put to the
test. Two could play the "Who cares?" game; and Martin, cut to the
quick, angry and resisted, would enter his name. Not again would he put
himself in the way of being laughed at and ridiculed and turned down,
teased and tantalized and made a fool of.
Patience and gentleness--to what end? He loved a will-o'-the-wisp; he
had married a butterfly. Why continue to play the martyr and follow the
fruitless path of rectitude? Hadn't she said, "I can only live once,
and so I shall make life spin whichever way I want it to go?" He could
only live once, and if life was not to spin with her, let it spin
without her. "Who cares?" he said to himself. "Who the devil cares?" He
gave up his coat and hat, and went back into that room of false joy and
syncopation.
It was one o'clock when he stood in the street once more, hot and wined
and careless. "Let's hit it up," he said to Oldershaw as the car moved
away with the sisters and cousins of the other two men. "I haven't
started yet."
The red-haired, roistering Oldershaw, newly injected with the virus of
the Great White Way, clapped him on the back. "Bully for you, old son,"
he said. "I'm in the mood to paint the little old town. I left my car
round the corner in charge of a down-at-heel night-bird. Come on. Let's
go and see if he's pinched it."
It was one of those Italian semi-racing cars with a body which gave it
the naked appearance of a muscular Russian dancer dressed in a skin and
a pair of bangles. The night-bird, one of the large army of city
gypsies who hang on to life by the skin of their teeth, was sitting on
the running board with his arms folded across his shirtless chest,
smoking a salvaged cigar, dreaming, probably, of hot sausages and
coffee. He afforded a striking illustration of the under dog cringing
contentedly at the knees of wealth.
"Good man," said Oldershaw, paying him generously. "Slip aboard,
Martin, and I'll introduce you to one of the choicest dives I know."
But the introduction was not to be effected that night, at any rate.
Driving the car as though it were a monoplane in a clear sky, with an
open throttle that awoke the echoes, Oldershaw charged into Fifth
Avenue and caught the bonnet of a taxicab that was going uptown. There
was a crash, a scream, a rending of metal. And when Martin picked
himself up with a bruised elbow and a curious sensation of having
stopped a punching bag with his face, he saw Oldershaw bending over the
crumpled body of the taxi driver and heard a girl with red lips and a
small white hat calling on Heaven for retribution.
"Some men oughtn't to be trusted with machinery," said Oldershaw with
his inevitable grin. "If I can yank my little pet out of this
buckled-up lump of stuff, I'll drive that poor chap to the nearest
hospital. Look after the angel, Martin, and give my name and address to
the policeman. As this is my third attempt to kill myself this month,
things ought to settle down into humdrum monotony for a bit now."
Martin went over to the girl. "I hope you're not hurt?" he asked.
"Hurt?" she cried out hysterically, feeling herself all over. "Of
course I'm hurt. I'm crippled for life. My backbone's broken; I shall
have water on both knees, a glass eye and a mouth full of store teeth.
But you don't care, you Hun. You like it."
And on she went, at the top of her voice, in an endless flow of farce
and tragedy, crying and laughing, examining herself with eager hands,
disbelieving more and more in the fact that she was still in the only
world that mattered to her.
Having succeeded in backing his dented car out of the debris, Oldershaw
leaped out. His face had been cut by the glass of the broken
windshield. Blood was trickling down his fat, good-natured face. His
hat was smashed and looked like that of the tramp cyclist of the
vaudeville stage. "All my fault, old man," he said in his best
irrepressible manner, as a policeman bore down upon him. "Help me to
hike our prostrate friend into my car, and I'll whip him off to a
hospital. He's only had the stuffing knocked out of him. It's no worse
than that.... That's fine. Big chap, isn't he--weighs a ton. I'll get
off right away, and my friend there will give you all you want to know.
So long." And off he went, one of his front wheels wabbling foolishly.
The policeman was not Irish or German-American. He was therefore
neither loud nor browbeating. He was dry, quiet and accurate, and it
seemed to Martin that either he didn't enjoy being dressed in a little
brief authority or was a misanthrope, eager to return to his noiseless
and solitary tramp under the April stars. Martin gave him Oldershaw's
full name and address and his own; and the girl, still shrill and
shattered, gave hers, after protesting that all automobiles ought to be
put in a gigantic pile and scrapped, that all harum-scarum young men
should be clapped in bed at ten o'clock and that all policemen should
be locked up in their stations to play dominoes. "If it'll do you any
good to know it," she said finally, "it's Susie Capper, commonly called
'Tootles.' And I tell you what it is. If you come snooping round my
place to get me before the beak, I'll scream and kick, so help me Bob,
I will." There was an English cockney twang in her voice.
The policeman left her in the middle of a paean, with the wounded taxi
and Martin, and the light of a lamp-post throwing up the unnatural red
of her lips on a pretty little white face. He had probably gone to call
up the taxicab company.
Then she turned to Martin. "The decent thing for you to do, Mr. Nut, is
to see me home," she said. "I'm blowed if I'm going to face any more
attempts at murder alone. My word, what a life!"
"Come along, then," said Martin, and he put his hand under her elbow.
That amazing avenue, which had the appearance of a great, deep cut down
the middle of an uneven mountain, was almost deserted. From the long
line of street lamps intermittent patches of light were reflected as
though in glass. The night and the absence of thickly crawling motors
and swarming crowds gave it dignity. A strange, incongruous Oriental
note was struck by the deep red of velvet hangings thrown up by the
lights in a furniture dealer's shop on the second floor of a white
building.
"Look for a row of women's ugly wooden heads painted by some one
suffering from delirium tremens," said Miss Susie Capper as they turned
down West Forty-sixth Street. "It's a dressmaker's, although you might
think it was an asylum for dope fiends. I've got a bedroom, sitter and
bath on the top floor. The house is a rabbit warren of bedrooms,
sitters and baths, and in every one of them there's some poor devil
trying to squeeze a little kindness out of fate. That wretched taxi
driver! He may have a wife waiting for him. Do you think that
red-haired feller's got to the hospital yet? He had a nice cut on his
own silly face--and serve him right! I hope it'll teach him that he
hasn't bought the blooming world--but of course it won't. He's the sort
that never gets taught anything, worse luck! Nobody spanked him when he
was young and soft. Come on up, and you shall taste my scrambled eggs.
I'll show you what a forgiving little soul I am."
She laughed, ran her eyes quickly over Martin, and opened the door with
a latchkey. Half a dozen small letter boxes were fastened to the wall,
with cards in their slots.
"Who the devil cares?" said Martin to himself, and he followed the girl
up the narrow, ill-lighted staircase covered with shabby carpet. Two or
three inches of white stockings gleamed above the drab uppers of her
high-heeled boots. Outside the open door of a room on the first floor
there was a line of milk bottles, and Martin sighted a man in shirt
sleeves, cooking sausages on a small gas jet in a cubby-hole. He looked
up, and a cheery smile broke out on his clean-shaven face. There was
brown grease paint on his collar. "Hello, Tootles," he called out.
"Hello, Laddy," she said. "How'd it go to-night?"
"Fine. Best second night in the history of the theater. Come in and
have a bite."
"Can't. Got company."
And up they went, the aroma following.
A young woman in a sky-blue peignoir scuttled across the next landing,
carrying a bottle of beer in each hand. There was a smell of onions and
hot cheese. "What ho, Tootles," she said.
"What ho, Irene. Is it true they've put your notice up?"
"Yep, the dirty dogs! Twelve weeks' rehearsals and eight nights'
playing! Me for the novelties at Gimbel's, if this goes on."