Mary returned to the office with a premeditatedly formal air toward
Steve. She had taken a New Year's resolution to refrain from letting
an impulsive expression of sympathy assume false meanings in her
heart. On the other hand, Steve felt a boor for having sent the books.
He was so used to being called cave man and told not to do this or say
that that he now pictured himself an awkward villain who had best
confine himself to writing checks and growling at the business world.
He almost dreaded seeing Mary lest she show she considered the gift
improper despite her delightful little note of thanks. This demeanour,
however, was of short duration. They became their real selves before
the morning passed, the medium being the question of keeping John
Gager, an old clerk pressed into service during the war period and now
superfluous.
"Are you going to let him go?" Mary reproached Steve.
"I think so; he's a doddering nuisance they tell me."
"But he's old and he has always served so faithfully. I don't think
it's right to send him away now. He does do what is expected of him."
Mary's vacation had somewhat dimmed her business sagacity.
"I suppose; but we'll be doddering idiots some day, too. No one will
keep us. No one can expect to be carried along indefinitely."
"It's the first time I have ever asked you to do such a thing," she
insisted, fearlessly. "To see him trying to act as fit as twenty-five,
wearing juvenile shirts and ties, struggling to be brisk, slangy, to
oblige everyone and step along, you know. Oh, don't turn him away just
yet; he is honest and he tries. I can't tell him, and can't you see
his old face quiver when he opens his envelope and finds the dismissal
slip?"
Steve's resolutions faded like mist before the sun. He found himself
saying: "You ought to be a little sister to the poor. I guess we'll
keep Gager for a while. He doesn't smoke cigarettes all day and try to
lie about it. How did you like those books?" he added, boyishly.
Mary laid a finger on her lips. "Sh-h-h. It's business. But I did like
them--so would you."
"I'd read them if I had an easy-chair and some homemade bread and tea.
Do you know what I had to do for my Christmas Day?"
"Please--I'd rather not----"
"I must tell someone, and ask if I'm all wrong about it," he said,
half humorously, half in earnest. "I told my father-in-law in part and
it struck him as a huge joke. He purpled with laughing and said: 'Gad,
she'll always have her way!'" Steve was thinking out loud. He was
realizing that Constantine was not even conscious he had raised his
daughter to be a rebel doll and he, apparently an honourable citizen,
encouraged and upheld her in her doctrine.
"Well, what did you have to do?" Mary asked in spite of herself.
"I had to officiate at Monster's Christmas tree, which was in the
boudoir, laden with the treasures of the four corners. I presented a
diamond-studded gold purse and a sable cape to my wife and received a
diamond-studded cigar knife--I have two others--and a mink-lined coat
in return. I was dragged to a half-dozen different houses to deliver
presents and collect the same, and witness the tragedy of Bea's
receiving a vanity case she had given someone else two years before
and which had evidently been going the rounds. It was a bit
disconcerting to have it turn up.
"I had a ponderous seven-course dinner at Mr. Constantine's, during
which I had to kiss Aunt Belle under the mistletoe and pretend to be
elated, hear several yards of grand opera torn off on the new talking
machine in its nine-hundred-dollar Chinese case, take my father-in-law
to the club, return to find Trudy and Gay having a Yuletide word with
my wife. Trudy brought a concoction of purple chiffon, jet beads, and
exploded hen which was entitled a breakfast jacket, and in return she
drew down a pair of silver candlesticks.
"After that we dressed in all our grandeur for the fancy-dress ball at
Colonel Tatlock's, Beatrice as Juliet and I as the young and dashing
Romeo! Shivering in our finery we drove to the Tatlock's to make fools
of ourselves until three A. M. and shiver home again with aching heads
and a handful of damaged cotillion favours. About the same sort of
thing happened on New Year's." He laughed, but it was not a pleasant
sound, inviting a response.
Beatrice dashed in, to Mary's relief, to bestow--over a week late--a
Christmas present of perfume and a black-silk waist.
"Mr. O'Valley has explained how rushed I have been with my classes,"
she began, prettily, "but I have thought of you in all your sorrow. I
lost my dear mother when I was too young to remember her, still it
means a bond between us.... Oh, you are not wearing black? Dear me,
that's too bad.... Well, you may have to go to somebody's funeral
where you feel you want to wear it--a black waist is always useful."
She managed to carry Steve off to look at a set of pink glass sherbet
cups she was to give her father for his birthday, and Mary was
conscious of a certain pity for the Gorgeous Girl--prompted not so
much by her present state of affairs as her inevitable future.
The last of January Steve was called away on a business trip through
the Middle West. Beatrice had no desire to go with him; she said she
simply could not conceive of having a good time in Indiana and
Illinois, and what was the sense in bearing with him in his misery?
But she was quite willing Steve should stay away as long as he was
needed by business entanglements. In fact, Beatrice now betrayed a
certain driving quality in trying to make him feel that as their
honeymoon was ended and everyone had entertained for them it was high
time Steve must retire from social life to a degree, and outdo her own
father in the making of a vast fortune. She seldom begged him to ride
with her or come home to luncheon to fritter away the best part of the
afternoon in a pursuit of silver-pheasant ornaments for the dinner
table. That phase of her selfishness was at an end. It was when Steve
demanded the luxury of merely staying at home with no chattering
peacocks of women and asinine, half-tipsy men playing with each other
until early morning that Beatrice refused her consent.
She did not wish any personal domestic life, Steve decided after
several experiences along these lines. She could not see the pleasure
in a Sunday afternoon hike; walking to see a sunset was absurd! All
very well to be whisked by at twenty miles an hour and give a careless
nod at the setting golden sphere, but to trudge through wintry roads
and up an icy hill and stand, frozen and fagged, weighted down by
sweaters, to----Dear me, Steve really needed to see a doctor! Perhaps
he had better start to play golf with papa!
Meals tete-a-tete caused her spirits to droop, and she soon fell into
the habit of waiting until Steve was away or having her luncheon in
her room. She was seldom up for breakfast, and when he protested
against this hotel-like custom she would say: "I don't expect you to
appreciate my viewpoint and my wishes, but at least be well-bred
enough to tolerate them!"
He was on the point of reminding her that his viewpoint and wishes
were treated only with argument and ridicule--but as usual he
refrained. Silence on the part of one who knows he is in the right yet
chooses apparently to yield the point in question is a significant
milestone on the road of separation. An argument with Beatrice meant
one of two outcomes: A violent scene of temper and overwrought nerves
with tears as the conquering slacker's weapon or a long, sulky period
of tenseness which made him take refuge in his office and his club.
He wondered sometimes how it was he had never before realized the
true worth of his wife, how he had been so madly infatuated and
adoring of her slightest whim during the years of earning his fortune
and the brief period of their formal engagement. Almost reluctantly
the anaesthesia of unreality and distorted values was disappearing,
leaving Steve with but one conclusion: That it had been his own
conceited fault, and therefore he deserved scant pity from either
himself or the world at large.
Mark Constantine, whose activities lessened each month, due to ill
health, began prowling about Steve's office at unexpected hours,
cornering him for prosy talks and conferences, under which Steve
writhed in helpless surrender. Since he realized the true meaning of
his marriage he began placing the blame on the culprit--Beatrice's
father. As he did so he wondered if it was possible that Constantine
did not realize the havoc he had wrought. His wealth and Steve's
speedily accumulated fortune via hides and government razors suddenly
seemed stupid, inane; and he no longer felt a sense of pride at what
he had accomplished. He never wanted to hear details of Constantine's
more gradual and bitter rise in the world; there was certain to be
slimy spots of which Steve in his new frame of mind could no longer
approve. He was weary of hearing about money, just as his good sense
caused him to be weary of socialistic prattling and absurd pleas for
Bolshevism. It seemed to him that the dollar standard was the
paramount means both magnate and socialist used to value inanimate and
animate objects. He longed for a new unit of measure.
He was keen on business trips. At least he could have the freedom of
his hotel and could roam about without being pointed out as the
Gorgeous Girl's husband, the lucky young dog and so on. Neither would
he be dragged from this house to that to sit on impossible futurist
chairs while young things of thirty-nine clad in belladonna plasters
and jet sequins gathered about to tell him what perfectly wonderful
times their class in cosmic consciousness was having.
Mary Faithful was keen to have him go. She dreaded any furthering of
the personal understanding between them. When one has become master of
a heartache and thoroughly demonstrated that mastery it is not
sensible to let it verge toward a heart throb, even if one is positive
of the ability to change it back at will into the hopeless ache. It is
like unhandcuffing a prisoner and saying: "Sprint a bit, I can catch
up to you."
On the other hand, Beatrice had any number of activities to take up
her time. Her period of being a romantic parasite--the world called it
a sweet bride--was ended. She was now bent on becoming as mad and
ruthless a butterfly as there ever was, and to the accomplishment of
her aim she did not purpose to stint herself in any way. She still
drew her own allowance from her father and accepted extra checks for
extra things necessary for her welfare and popularity.
More than once Steve counted the monthly expenditures, with the same
result--Beatrice was living on her father's income quite as much as on
his own. Her position was not unlike that of people who say to their
prosperous neighbours possessing a motor car: "We'll furnish the lunch
and the gasolene, and you take us to the picnic grounds!" Constantine
still owned the figurative motor car, or the substantial end of
Beatrice's expenses, while Steve furnished the lunch and the gasolene,
trying to delude himself that he was supporting his wife. Beatrice's
clothes were beyond his income, for he was not yet a millionaire.
Neither could he afford the affairs which she gave, with favours of
jewellery; nor the trips here and there in private cars.
Furnishing the lunch and gasolene and perhaps a possible tire or so
does not give one the sense of ownership that having the motor car
gives; nor was it Steve's notion of being the possessor of a home. He
spoke to Beatrice about it, only to be kissed affectionately and
scolded prettily by way of answer; or else to have those eternal
omnipresent tears reproach him for being cross "when papa wants me to
have things and he has no one else in the world to spend all his money
on."
After a few attempts he gave it up but resolved to make his fortune
equal to his father-in-law's, as Beatrice wished. He saw no other way
out of the situation. To do so in his present interests was
impossible--he had fancied that half a million was a fair sum to offer
a Gorgeous Girl--but he saw it was only a nibble at the line. He must
outdo Constantine. He cast about for some unsuspected fields of
effort, this time to strike out into work of which Constantine was
ignorant. He began to resent the fact that after his lucky strike on
the exchange he had played copy cat and gone mincing into the
hide-and-leather business, using Constantine's good will as his
stepping stone. The same was true of the stock bought in the razor
factory; he had merely paid for the stock; he did not know the steps
of progress necessary to the business.
This time he would prove his own merit, he would not take Constantine
into his confidence. Unknown to any one save Mary, Steve selected a
new-style talking machine to promote. He knew as much about talking
machines as Beatrice knew about cooking a square meal. But Steve had
lost his clear-headedness and he thought, as do most get-rich-quick
men, that, possessed of the Midas touch, he could come in contact with
nothing but gold.
He began backing the inventor and looking round for a factory site. He
sought it away from Hanover, for he wanted it to be a complete
surprise. He begrudged his father-in-law's knowing anything of it. He
went into the enterprise rather heavily--but it did not worry him, for
he was quite sure he possessed the luck eternal, and he must support
his own wife. Side speculating was the only way he thought it possible
to do so.
Meanwhile, Beatrice found Trudy to be both a good foil and a dangerous
enemy, one who was not to be ridiculed or set aside. Trudy had never
stopped working since the day Beatrice climbed the rear stairs of the
Graystone and had been bullied into buying the vanishing cream.
Beatrice scarcely knew the various steps which Trudy had climbed in a
figurative sense, dragging Gay after her, grumbling and sneering but
quite willing to be dragged.
"You see, aunty," she explained one stormy February afternoon while
they were having a permanent wave put in their hair, "Trudy is so
obliging and useful, and I'm sorry for her. She tries to do so many
nice things for me that I never have a chance to become offended. I've
tried! But she just won't break away. And I like to tease Steve by
knowing her, Steve is such a bear when he doesn't like people. Rude
is a mild term. He particularly hates Gay. Now Gay is quite a dear and
he always played nicely with me. I should hate to lose him--so how can
I offend his wife; particularly when she takes so well with older
men?"
Aunt Belle sniffed. "Men old enough to be her father--you'd think they
would appreciate mellowed love instead of a selfish little chicken."
The beauty doctor, who had spent the greater share of the day at the
Constantine house, suppressed a smile and stored up the remark for her
next customer.
"Oh, I don't know," Beatrice murmured as she consulted a hand glass.
"I am beginning to wish I had married a man about papa's age. It would
have been much jollier in some ways. Steve is so strenuous and rude. A
cave man is fun to be engaged to and keep a record about in your
chapbook--but when you marry him it is a different matter. I remember
how thrilled and enthusiastic about Steve I used to be when he was
working for papa and living in a hall bedroom. I knew he adored me yet
had to keep his place, and I used to dream about him and wonder if he
really would keep his word and make a fortune so he could marry me.
But now he has done it----" She shrugged her shoulders.
"I wouldn't be too disappointed. Elderly men usually have wheel chairs
and diets after a little, and you'd feel it your duty to play nurse."
"Oh, it's far better to be disappointed in one's husband than one's
friends," Beatrice agreed. "I know that. For you can manage to see
very little of your husband; but your friends--deary me, they your
very existence."
"Does Trudy ever mention the days she worked in Steve's office?"
"Yes. Clever little thing, she knows enough to admit it prettily every
now and then, so there is nothing to badger her about. She has even
trained Gay to talk of it occasionally. She has done wonders for him;
one of the clubmen is backing him to go into the interior-decorating
business. Of course he will make good because everyone will feel
morally obliged to go there. So the Vondeplosshes on the strength of
this have moved to the Touraine, a different sort of apartment house,
I assure you. They are entertaining, if you please; everyone asks them
everywhere. Gay is painting garlands of old-fashioned flowers in
panels for Jill's boudoir. I think I'll have the same thing done in
mine."
"Gay is painting them?"
"Oh, no. Some limp artist who could never get the commission for
himself. Gay stands about in a natty blue-serge effect and takes the
credit and the check. What's new?"--turning to the beauty doctor. "I'm
as dull as the Dead Sea."
Miss Flinks informed them of a labour revolt in the West.
"Horrid creatures, always wanting more! Well, they won't get it. I
think Steve is ridiculous with his banquets and bonuses and all, and
upon my word, Mary Faithful has as good an Oriental rug in her office
as I have in my house. Tell us something really important, Miss
Flinks."
Retrieving her error the beauty doctor whispered a scandal concerning
the newly married Teddy Markhams, who had had such a violent quarrel
the week before that Mrs. Teddy had pushed the piano halfway out the
window and police had rushed to the scene thinking it might be another
bomb explosion.
"How ripping!"
Beatrice was all animation, and she gave Miss Flinks no peace until
she learned all the details, and the rumour about the actress who had
rented an expensive town house for the season and a debutante who was
being rushed to a retreat to prevent her marriage to a gypsy violinist
who had already taught her the drug habit.
Trudy telephoned the latter part of the afternoon, and as it was a
gray, blowy day with nothing special to do to revive one's spirits
Beatrice urged her to come in for tea--tea to be cocktails and
buttered toast.
Within a few moments she appeared--a symphony of blonde broadcloth set
in black furs, very charming and chic, and so solicitous about Aunt
Belle's recently removed mole and the scar left by the electric
needle, and so admiring of the two newly beautified ladies that they
were quite won in spite of themselves.
"Were you near here when you telephoned?" Beatrice asked, curiously.
"You weren't ten minutes getting here and you look as spick and span
as if you had stepped out of a bandbox."
"Look outside and you'll see that Gay and I have had a true case of
auto-intoxication!"
Outside the window there proved to be a smart, selfish roadster,
battleship-gray with vivid scarlet trimmings.
"Well!" Beatrice said in astonishment. At this identical moment she
began to envy Trudy. She was really ashamed of the fact, nor did she
understand why she should envy this bankrupt yet progressive little
nobody in her homemade bargain-remnant costume. The reason was that
Beatrice's latent abilities longed to be doing something, achieving
something, capturing, inventing, destroying, earning if need be--but
doing something. The daughter of Mark and Hannah Constantine could not
help but have the germ of great ability within her, sluggish and
spoiled as it might be; and it must perforce duly manifest itself from
time to time. Beatrice realized that Trudy felt a greater joy and
satisfaction in displaying this not-paid-for cheap machine--having sat
up half the night to make the shirred curtains--than Beatrice ever
could feel in her tapestry-lined, orchid-adorned limousine. So she
began to envy Trudy just as Trudy envied her. Trudy had done nothing
but struggle to be able to live, as she termed it; Beatrice had never
been allowed to struggle!
"We owe for all but the left back tire," Trudy said before any one had
the chance to hint of the fact; "but Gay has to have it for his new
business, and it is such a joy! I hope you approve, Beatrice. And what
a darling gown!"
There was nothing left for Beatrice but to order the cocktails and
toast, and for Aunt Belle to agree smilingly with Trudy's clever
suggestions.
Trudy never came to see Beatrice unless she gained some material point
or had one in view, and the point she had come to gain this afternoon
was of no small importance. In her own fashion she managed to inform
her hostess that Gay had received an order from--well, it was a
tremendous secret and he would be terribly cross if he knew she told
even her dearest Bea and her sweet Aunt Belle, but she just couldn't
help it--he had an order from Alice Twill, who thought she was going
to beat everyone in town to the greatest sensation of the year: To
have the barn of a Twill mansion remodelled, decorated and so on, from
coal bin to cupola, until it was an exact copy of a French palace--she
really forgot just which one. ... Yes, Alice's aunt in Australia had
died and left her everything; Alice said she was not going to wait
until she was on crutches before she spent it. Gay was simply out of
his head trying to plan the thing and Alice was to move to a hotel for
several weeks until a newly furnished wing was ready to be inhabited.
There was no reason why New York persons should have their homes like
palaces and chateaux and so on, and turn their noses up at upstate
residences. Alice was going to show them. And--this very subtly--Gay
had said that if only Beatrice could have the authority to redecorate
her father's home into an Italian villa Alice Twill would be the loser
when comparisons were made--since the Constantine house had twice the
possibilities and so on, and Beatrice twice the taste. And what an
achievement it would be; a distinct civic improvement!... Yes, Gay was
working with the best firms in New York, and there was no doubt of his
success in the enterprise.
Before she left, Trudy had almost secured Beatrice's promise that the
Constantine house should be made into an Italian villa and that, if
she so decided, Gay should have the commission. There was a place at
Frascati she had always admired, and they could use some ideas from a
show place in Florida.
Had Trafalgar terminated differently Napoleon would have been no more
surprised or jubilant than Trudy, who fairly skidded home to the new
and more pretentious apartment, where she found Gay in one of his
sneering, sulky moods and quite angry to think Trudy was carrying the
day.
"How do I know Alice Twill will really come across?" he began. "And I
suppose you've got the machine covered with mud, too. Anyway, what do
I know about decorating? I work on my reputation and everyone's
sympathies and I'm in fear all the time some real decorator will turn
up and show my hand or else refuse to work under me and split
commissions. You're too damned optimistic."
"If I wasn't optimistic where would we be? Starving," she said with no
attempt at politeness. Common courtesies between them had long since
been dispensed with. "I've gotten you nearly everything you have, and
if you'll do as I say I'll go right on getting things for you. But
you're lazy and jealous--that's what's the matter."
He gave a sneering little laugh. "Why, you poor nobody, people only
tolerate you because of me. They roar behind your back."
"Do they? They pity me because I'm married to such a weak fish! Men
are nice to you because of me--and there isn't a woman I've met that I
have not made afraid of me. Beatrice hasn't the will power of a slug;
you can hand her flattery in chunks as big as boulders and she
swallows them without choking. It's her husband who sees through us."
"What--the goat tender? Oh, beg pardon--treading on someone else's
toes. Or didn't they have goats in Michigan?"
"We'll never hang together another year," she said, recklessly. "The
first chance I have to exchange you for a real man your day is over."
"You think any one else would marry you?"
"I don't think. I just go ahead grabbing everything I can, and when a
person has to grab for someone else as well as herself it keeps them
moving."
"You're a crude and impossible little fool."
Without warning Trudy's hand shot out, and on Gay's cheek rested a red
mark for the greater part of the evening.
A half hour later he was trying to apologize, having bucked himself up
to it with brandy, in order to borrow enough money to play pool with
that same evening.