The next morning she resolved to go at once to Blainey, to fling herself
heart and soul into her profession, to get an engagement in some stock
company. She hesitated, and ended by putting it off till the next day.
She said to herself that she must seek relief in flight, a new life, new
friends for a month at least, until she should be stronger. She said it
to herself each day, and each day she tarried. Perhaps she hoped for
some sign of weakness on Massingale's part, an overture that would give
her the confidence of a scornful rejection. But each day passed without
word or sign from him. This firmness, this regained control, this one
man who could steadfastly avoid her, obsessed her. She sought not to
think of him--and his image intruded itself every day, at every moment.
When the telephone rang its always mysterious call, she went to it with
a tense arrestation of her nerves expectant of his voice,
fearing--hoping. At the theater or the opera, in her first sweeping
glance over the audience, it was always his face she sought. She sought
it in the chances of the crowded streets, and with a restless glance
searched among the carriages as she passed alone, or in gay company, up
the avenue. She knew where he held court, following the calendar in the
newspaper, and often she was tempted to steal in at the back of the
dim, crowded court room, unobserved--just why, with what undefined hope,
she did not know. This impulse she resisted but never confidently
conquered. Each day she repeated that she must go; each day she tarried.
For two weeks she led a dulled and purposeless existence. She succeeded
in crowding the day, in shutting out opportunity for thought, in
consuming the night so as to return with enough fatigue to fall into
heavy troubled slumber. The bright moments were those when she went with
Snyder's little girl on brief excursions into the country, for a
moment's forgetfulness among the woods, an hour of willing slavery to
childish whims, throwing herself into foolish romping games that brought
a comforting sense of the world's unrealities. The sensation that
childish clinging brought her at times surprised her by its intensity.
She had never thought of having children, and yet this child awoke
strange yearnings. Troubled, she told herself that it was the weakness
of her suffering intensified by loneliness, and satisfied herself with
this reply.
Her days were curiously divided. She saw Harrigan Blood and Sassoon, but
to their assiduous pursuit she flung only crumbs. She saw them in the
tantalizing publicity of the down-stairs parlor--rarely, for an hour
perhaps; but she steadfastly refused further concessions. Busby, clearly
inspired, sought to entice her to many alluring entertainments, some
conventional, others not quite so. She refused all. She avoided all
parties where she might encounter the one man, avoiding too that
entourage of his which she had so eagerly sought with a sense of right
on the occasion of the luncheon to De Joncy.
Instead, she sought desperately to return to the light bantering
existence she had formerly known. The glimpses she had had into the
upper world frightened her. It laid before her crude vanities which she
would have preferred to ignore; it started temptations where she had
been conscious of none. In her present depression, an instinct bade her
flee all that dazzled her; a voice whispered to her that, in the mad
impulses of a groping despair, she might not always resist, or care to
resist--that it were better not to know that luxury and power lay so
easily at hand, ready on the feminine fingers of Sassoon or the
imperious clutch of Harrigan Blood.
Nor was the temptation a fancied one, for the hunger that had awakened
was an inner one. In her short glimpse of luxury she had become aware of
new longings, material cravings, vanities of the flesh. Occasionally in
the mornings, to escape from her moods, she went out for long walks past
tempting shop-windows--those shop-windows of New York, more devastating
than all the flesh hunters, on whose balances lie how many feminine
souls! She would stop breathlessly, hypnotized, hanging on visions of
gorgeous silks, imperial furs, opera-cloaks that might transform a
peasant into a queen, jewels that danced before her eyes, fascinating
them strangely with their serpentine coldness.
She could not prevent her lawless imagination from wandering,
visualizing another Dore Baxter, who swept gorgeously among the costly
women of the opera and the restaurants, compelling a startled attention,
luxuriant, radiant, triumphant with the sinister blinking eyes of
Sassoon always over her glowing shoulder. What constantly started this
torturing image before her was that she had now no doubt as to what she
could do with him. At first, incredulously, she could not believe that
his interest would survive a week--that he would not depart furiously,
once the scales had fallen from his hungry glance and he had realized
that in her mocking society nothing was reserved for him but humiliation
and deception. But, to her amazement, she found it was not so; that
something had penetrated profoundly into that chilled soul, and that the
passion which had been kindled was one that sweeps men on to
irretrievable follies, unthinkable sacrifices, at the hands of a calm
woman. Sassoon--no. But Sassoon and the lure of a thousand shop-windows
spreading before her their soft enwrapping mysteries of splendor....
Occasionally, gazing entranced before some bewildering evening gown, a
peignoir all lace and cloud, a rope of milky pearls, she felt this
sensation so compellingly that she would retreat breathlessly, trembling
from head to foot.
What made the temptation doubly insidious was her own awakened point of
view. She saw now the immense difference in scale between the upper
world and the semi-Bohemian state of the Salamanders. Their desperate
struggle to make both ends meet, their prodigies of imaginative
planning, their campaigns of economy, all to procure a few insignificant
dollars--this struggle of wits which had once exhilarated her now
depressed her fearfully. She had a sort of second sight; she saw now the
approach of failure, the inexorable famine that lay beyond the short
dominion of youth. She had always dimly perceived this danger, saying to
herself that she could cast the die before another cast it for her. But
now, thinking of her twenty-third year still six months away, she had a
feeling as if she were being hurried toward her choice, frantically
driven; and yet, she could not see where all this whirlwind force was
carrying her.
At this moment her mentality began. She felt a new birth of her
reason--that unquiet searching of the self so often child of grief. She
began to question--to analyze and to strive to penetrate the future. She
saw herself in others, the past and the possible future: Ida Summers,
arriving like a skipping child, all heedless laughter, inconscient,
holding out avid arms for flowers, and Winona, a figure with half
averted face, hand upon the latch, ready to depart. No, she would not be
like Winona; that was impossible, she said, with a shudder; Winona was
but a figure standing as a warning!
Winona herself, occupied with rehearsals, went out of her day,
momentarily. Dore took her to the opera on the Monday nights that Mr.
Peavey had placed at her disposal. She never made the mistake of seeking
a male escort. She felt always that Peavey's timid eyes were on her,
hidden somewhere in that vast concourse, spying on her actions, waiting
suspiciously to see if her companion were a man, a young and ardent man
of her own generation. Nor was this entirely surmise. The second Monday,
he had loomed at her side out of nowhere, happiness in his eyes, radiant
to find her so discreetly accompanied. He had taken them to supper
afterward. It seemed to her that Winona had put herself out to attract
him--excessively so, considering her proprietorship; for the etiquette
of Salamanders is imperious on such points. But then, Winona was in a
curious mood, brooding, gay by starts and as suddenly silent. Dore
sometimes wondered if things were working out well at the theater. In
her determination to resist this life--Massingale's world, into which
she had blundered so unluckily--she turned hungrily to the company of
the other Salamanders, with a new need of woman's sympathy and
understanding. Besides Winona and Ida, there were on the floor below
Estelle Monks, whom she knew well and Clarice Stuart and Anita Morgan,
roommates, whom she knew slightly, despite their repeated advances. They
were trained nurses, lately arrived from the far West, older than the
rest, but Salamanders by their craving for excitement and their fidelity
to the rule of never allowing business to interfere with pleasure. Dore
had always had that curiosity which each Salamander feels for another.
How did they play their games? Had they methods which she had not
divined? Above all, what was to be the end of the comedy? Readily
welcomed, she drifted into their society for a week or so. They engaged
themselves only for the day, and yet, despite the exacting strain they
underwent (and, to her surprise, she soon discovered that they were
passionately devoted to their profession), each night by half past seven
they came tripping down the steps to where Dore, with the escorts, was
waiting in an automobile to whirl them to the theater, to a long drive
into the country, dinner and an impromptu dance, and then home by the
midnight stars, ready to rise with the dawn and begin the day's toil.
They seemed made of iron.
They had their stories to tell, their analyses of men and life. Doctors,
it seemed, were sometimes human, especially old ones. Often they had in
the party men whose names were famous in the profession, abrupt incisive
tyrants, neither abrupt nor tyrannical with them, submitting to their
banter, prodigal of compliments, just as difficult to be kept in place
as other men. Dore listened in astonishment to their conversations,
amazed at the impertinence of the girls, and the ready laughing
acceptance of those who, in the day, commanded them.
"Why?" said Clarice Stuart, when she had once voiced this amazement.
"Putting a different coat on them isn't going to change them, is it? Lud
bless you, girl, I thought the way you did, once. I got over it quickly!
Do you want to know my first experience here, when I got to New York? An
eye-opener, let me tell you! I was substitute on a surgical
case,--private house, patient sleeping under opiates,--when Doctor
Outerwaite, the same we were with the other night up at the Arena, came
in for examination. 'Course, in that case, the family always go out of
the room until the examination is over. Outerwaite! Lord, we'd heard
nothing but Outerwaite all through the West! I was frightened stiff!
They say he's a devil in the operating-room, swearing like a trooper if
everything doesn't go like clockwork! Imagine me! First case in little
New York! Well, I shooed the family out, closed the doors and stood at
the patient's side--he quite out of his head, delirium and opiates; me
watching the Doc, and ready to jump at a sneeze. And what do you think
he did? Go to the patient? Nixie! He came straight up to little me,
slipped his arm around, and said:
"'Why, you beautiful creature! where did you come from?'"
She laughed in a superior worldly way, adding:
"They're not all that way; but there are some gay boys! Lord! I could
tell you some story! I say, Dodo, if you ever get appendicitis, let me
know. I'll fix it for you so it won't cost you a cent!"
So even distinguished surgeons, men of international reputation, had
their little excursions behind the scenes, vulnerable as the rest before
an impertinent, defiant Salamander! Curious, she asked questions,
seeking to know how such wardrobes grew from modest salaries. Clarice
was nothing if not direct.
"Graft!" she said, with a shrug of her shoulders. "Of course, the wages
are good, but they don't set up a wardrobe of Paris models, do they?
Well, it's a question of presents, see?" She laughed, shrugging her
shoulders. "A patient you've pulled through pneumonia, or a case of
trepanning, has a right to periodic fits of gratitude, hasn't he? And,
of course, when you leave there's always a present--money, if you're
supporting the family at home." She emphasized this with a wink. "When
you get a club man, a good sport who's been in a blue funk at dying, it
shapes up pretty well! Of course, when you strike a woman, it's a scarf
or a kimono. But we've been rather lucky!"
Then, become suddenly serious, she continued thoughtfully:
"I say, Dodo, it's real curious, the effect you get over a man when he's
pulling out of a smashing illness! You know, if I'd wanted to I could
have married--" She stopped, lost in a reverie. "A nice boy, too.
Sometimes I think I was a fool!"
"Will you marry?" said Dodo curiously.
"Anita says she will. Don't know about little me. I'm engaged, you
know." She held up two fingers and laughed: "But, lord! there's no
hurry. It's such fun as it is!"
As she grew more confidential (and secrecy was not her failing), Dore
herself was surprised at the daring of the nurse's life. She spoke
lightly of things that Dore did not approve of--now. She had met men in
unconventional ways, without introduction, according to a fancy--the
expression is "picked up." When Dore demurred, she said, with western
frankness:
"Say, how _would_ I meet them, then? Oh, I manage them all right--after!
That's where their little surprise comes in!"
And she began to tell of the time when she had flirted with two
well-known club men at the Horse Show, men who were dying to speak to
her, but were afraid on account of the presence of curious others. But,
in passing near them, they had slipped their cards into her pocket. Of
course, she had not written them--she had met them by chance afterward
at a restaurant; but she had not been offended by their advance. They
were of her steady acquaintance now.
But Dore's incursion into this curious society brought her small
amusement. She grew tired quickly of these too easily read admirers.
Then after what she had known, they were all second-chop. The company of
Estelle Monks interested her more. Since the morning she had surprised
her in the office of the _Free Press_, her curiosity had been stirred to
further investigation. Estelle Monks herself forestalled her. She came
into her rooms suddenly one morning, and plumping down, abruptly
inquired:
"Do me a favor, Dodo?"
"Any!"
"Don't mention to Mr. Harrigan Blood that I inhabit these quarters!"
Dore, puzzled, a little embarrassed too, moved away, saying:
"What do you mean? Why not?"
"No offense to you, bless you!" said Estelle Monks, with a curious
smile. "You see, I'm on the paper. He--well, he wouldn't quite relish
the idea of tripping over me when he turns up with a bunch of flowers."
"You exaggerate," said Dore nervously. "Harrigan Blood's not really
interested."
"H. B.'s a damned fascinating man," said Estelle Monks directly, "but he
doesn't like reporters about, whether he's serious or not--particularly
his own reporters."
"He's not serious!" said Dore.
Estelle Monks smiled.
"That is, he only thinks he is."
"I guess you understand him, don't you?" said Estelle Monks, still
smiling.
"Yes!" She looked at her friend, interested. "What are you doing on the
paper? You never told any one."
"Raise your hand and cross your heart!" said Estelle solemnly. "I'm
Ferdie Amsterdam."
"You?" said Dore in amazement. For under that pseudonym was conducted
the famous society column of the _Free Press_.
"Expert on the Four Hundred--social dictionary."
"Honest?"
"Since two months!"
"But how do you manage?"
She told her story. She had come from San Francisco, where she had done
some clever work on the papers. She had a few letters of introduction,
and she knew a few men of the journalist emigration. She had gone to the
_Free Press_ office with an article in hand, _Impressions of a Western
Girl_.
"What, it was you?" said Dore, suddenly enlightened.
"Don't wonder you didn't recognize the photo. Belonged to some one on
the coast. Wrote my article in Chicago--fake, of course, but highly
seasoned. I handed it over as if I owned a Middle West chain of papers;
told them I'd go out and work up the names. But the feeling was all
right, so it was! The stuff went big; I was fixed!"
Dore was on the point of divulging her own experience, and how she had
been outstripped; but she held her tongue with a new caution, asking:
"But the society game, Estelle--how do you know about that?"
"I don't!" she answered frankly. "It started as a joke; it made good!
The real Ferdie Amsterdam--that's to say, the last of the line, an old
maid called Benticker--got a pain somewhere and was carted off to the
hospital. I was put on the column and told to fill it up somehow. I sent
in a hurry call to a couple of my friends, Ben Brown and Will
Cutter--you know them, big magazine specialists--and we sat down with a
couple of weeklies, and doped out a cracker-jack story. It amused them.
They used to laugh themselves sick over being Ferdie Amsterdam. Since
then we lunch at Lazare's every day and dope it out. And say, the boss
is so tickled, he's raised my rates! What do you think of that? 'Course,
now I'm getting the jargon, going out and meeting people--"
"Going out?" said Dore, opening her eyes.
"Some! Ferdie Amsterdam gets a bid to any big affair that's pulled off.
Say, the way these leaders of society currycomb your back would paralyze
you! Trouble to get information? Why, they're dying to crowd into
print!"
"And so that's the way you worked it," said Dore musingly.
"Sure. Drop in to lunch with me and see the board in session!"
Dore liked Estelle Monks. There was something self-reliant and
businesslike about her that inspired confidence. She had a big point of
view, one who had unbounded charity and understanding. She invited Dore
to go with her as her guest to several affairs, musicales, large balls
and tableaux, but the invitation was always declined. As she knew her,
though, Dore was surprised to find how naturally this confident little
worker, with the slow and alluring smile, gathered about her men from
the most fashionable sets, men whom she converted into friends, firm in
their respect. She admired this gift, knowing how much more difficult it
is to establish a friendship than to begin a flirtation.
She went once or twice to luncheon with her, amused at the facile clever
way Estelle Monks enlisted the services of two such celebrities as Ben
Brown and Will Cutter, and that in friendship solely. It must be a
gift--a gift that was not in Dore's power. Even on the few occasions she
met them, Will Cutter looked at her with awakened fixity, very different
from the way he beamed jovially on Estelle Monks. A smile, and Dore
felt he would enlist under her banner. But she steadfastly resisted this
disloyalty; for among Salamanders etiquette is strict, and possession is
all points of the law.
For three weeks, then, she sought to immerse herself in this old
life--sharing the surface confidences of the Salamanders, playing her
part in little financial intrigues, running into pawn-shops with Winona,
or making profitable arrangements at Pouffe's for the crediting on
flowers withheld for Ida Summers, who was new; working up the birthday
game for Clarice and Anita, when consulted by admirers as to what would
please these difficult ladies; raising her own capital by the reselling
of the bi-weekly basket of champagne from Peavey, the flowers that
Stacey, Gilday and Sassoon assiduously offered, receiving her share of
convertible presents from chance admirers, hooked for a week or two--at
the bottom without zest, sick at heart, tired of it all. Then, all at
once, one morning after she had gone to the door of the court-house
where Massingale was holding court, in a sudden revulsion she fled to
Blainey's office, wildly resolved on escape.
Two days later she found herself in Buffalo, inscribed on the list of a
stock company, resolved to stay for months until her mental balance had
been regained and the deep wound in her heart had become but a faint
scar. She stayed just two weeks. The quiet, the relaxed air, life in so
many ruts of the little big town, awoke in her a fear of the past, of
being sucked back into the oblivion of early days, as if what she
feared night and day had already begun--retrogression. Was that the true
reason of her return, or was there some impelling magnet too compelling
to be resisted, or even to be acknowledged?
She came directly into Blainey's office, profiting by her entree which
carried her triumphantly past the crowded anteroom, where old and young,
the hopeful and the resigned, the restlessly impatient and the soddenly
passive, waited wearily, watching her with hostile eyes.
"Well, Blainey, I'm back!" she said abruptly, and nodding at the dapper
secretary, she added: "Send him out! I want to talk to you."
"Well, kid?" he said, studying her shrewdly when they were alone.
"Well, I'm going to be square with you!" she said, crossing her arms
defiantly. "I'm miserable, Blainey!"
"Trouble here?" he said, laying a fat forefinger on his heart.
"Yes."
"Em--bad!" he said solemnly. He flung away the half smoked cigar, chose
another and nervously turned it in his fingers. "So I'd sized it
up--well, we all get it. Why? Lord love me, of all I've watched and
stirred up, that's what gets me--why a damned clever girl like you, or a
cold-headed old son-of-a-gun like me should ever fall--I'm sorry, kid!
Are you going to make a fool of yourself?"
"I don't know, Blainey," she said, shrugging her shoulders. She had a
feeling, all at once, of confidence in his rough common sense.
"That's queer. I thought you were too keen!" He was thinking of Sassoon,
wondering if she would throw away such an opportunity for a short
romance. "Some youngster, eh?--without a cent--talking big!"
He lighted the cigar and puffed it reflectively.
"Kid, we Americans are a bunch of damned fools. Sentiment's our middle
name! Why should I hand you a line of talk? Haven't I fallen for it a
dozen times? Yes, and ready to begin all over again! We've got to love
some one, or we get to wabbling!"
He looked at her, and again he thought of Sassoon, and what the
situation might yield. He wanted to be honest with her, to give her good
advice according to his lights.
"So that's why you shot off to Buffalo, eh?" he said, with a long
whistle. "Bad theory! Stay by it; see the fellow ten times a day--that
sometimes cures. Say, I'm going to hand you the truth like a Dutch
uncle! You've got things going your way; you've got the whole game
before you, cinched." He hesitated. "Sassoon, ready to back you to the
limit, opportunity, money backing; you know the place."... He waved
contemptuously at the warring world of the Rialto below--"And you know
the game. Sassoon's good for thousands--in your hands. And then, there's
the advertisement! Don't lose your head over a couple of square
shoulders!"
She did not set him right. For her purposes she preferred that he should
entirely misconceive her. She allowed him to go on, volunteering his
worldly, well meant advice.
"All you say is true," she said finally, with an indefinable smile.
"Blainey, I've always said I would make up my mind at twenty-three. Be
patient. It may be sooner!"
"Wish I could take twenty-five years off my back," he said slowly,
without rising. "Take your time--take your time; and if you get weepy,
come in and use my shoulder. Understand?"
He rang the bell, waved his hand cheerily and watched her until she
disappeared. She went, strongly impressed by his kindness, half inclined
impulsively to return and begin in earnest.
She had gone directly to him from the station. Now she returned to Miss
Pim's. When she was back once more in her own room, the sensation of
homecoming was so acute that she could have sat down in the middle of
the floor and cried for joy. But in another moment Ida Summers rushed
in.
"Dodo! The Lord be praised! You saved my life! Dinner, theater and a
gorgeous cabaret affair afterwards. Vaughan Chandler's coming for me at
seven--I promised to get another girl. Every one you know is going.
Every one's been asking for you. Swear you'll come?"
"Come? You bet I will!" she cried with a great burst of relief, flinging
herself frantically in Ida's arms.
At eleven o'clock, after dinner and the theater they started in a party
of six, hilariously, for Healey's, where a dozen crowds were to
congregate for an impromptu cabaret dance. She felt elated, gloriously
happy. It seemed to her as if she had regained the mastery of herself
again, that the old zest had returned with the incipient flirtation
which she had already begun with two irreproachable youths who sought
discreetly to touch her hand in the confusion of the bumping ride, or to
gaze deep, with ardent soulful messages, into her mocking eyes of cloudy
blue. After all, the voluntary exile had served its purpose. It had
showed her the stupidity of moping. Life was too short to be taken
seriously. Admiration of ten men was better, more exhilarating, more
exciting, than ridiculous fancied passions _au serieux_. She was so
happy, so brilliantly gay, liberated in spirit, avid for excitement and
admiration, that even Vaughan Chandler, Ida's cavalier by rights,
watched her with amazed disloyal eyes.
Others were before them in the great Jungle Room which had been
reserved. From below they heard the barbaric swinging music of stringed
instruments, and divined the laughing, swaying, gliding confusion of
dancers. Dore, with brilliant eyes and impatient tripping feet, hurried
them on, eager to lose herself in the swirling throbbing measures, and
the first two persons she saw on entering, were--Lindaberry and Judge
Massingale!