I
It is one of Johnny Chipman's parties at the Harlequin Club, and as
usual the people the other people have been asked to meet are late
and as usual Johnny is looking hesitatingly around at those
already collected with the nervous kindliness of an absent-minded
menagerie-trainer who is trying to make a happy family out of a wombat,
a porcupine, and two small Scotch terriers because they are all very
nice and he likes them all and he can't quite remember at the moment
just where he got hold of any of them. This evening he has been making
an omelet of youngest. K. Ricky French, the youngest Harvard playwright
to learn the tricks of C43, a Boston exquisite, impeccably correct from
his club tie to the small gold animal on his watch-chain, is almost
coming to blows with Slade Wilson, the youngest San Francisco cartoonist
to be tempted East by a big paper and still so new to New York that no
matter where he tries to take the subway, he always finds himself buried
under Times Square, over a question as to whether La Perouse or Foyot's
has the best _hors-d'oeuvres_ in Paris.
The conflict is taking place across Johnny's knees, both of which are
being used for emphasis by the disputants till he is nearly mashed like
a sandwich-filling between two argumentative slices of bread, but he
is quite content. Peter Piper, the youngest rare-book collector in the
country, who, if left to himself, would have gravitated naturally toward
French and a devastating conversation in monosyllables on the pretty
failings of prominent débutantes, is gradually warming Clark Stovall,
the youngest star of the Provincetown Players out of a prickly silence,
employed in supercilious blinks at all the large pictures of celebrated
Harlequins by discreet, intelligent questions as to the probable future
of Eugene O'Neill.
Stovall has just about decided to throw Greenwich Village omniscience
overboard and admit privately to himself that people like Peter can
be both human and interesting even if they do live in the East Sixties
instead of Macdougal Alley when a page comes in discreetly for Johnny
Chipman. Johnny rises like an agitated blond robin who has just spied
the very two worms he was keeping room for to top off breakfast. “Well”
he says to the world at large. “They're only fifteen minutes late apiece
this time.”
He darts out into the hall and reappears in a moment, a worm on either
side. Both worms will fit in easily with the youthful assortment already
gathered--neither can be more than twenty-five.
Oliver Crowe is nearly six feet, vividly dark, a little stooping,
dressed like anybody else in the Yale Club from hair parted in the
middle to low heavyish brown shoes, though the punctured patterns on
the latter are a year or so out of date. There is very little that is
remarkable about his appearance except the round, rather large head that
shows writer or pugilist indifferently, brilliant eyes, black as black
warm marble under heavy tortoise-shell glasses and a mouth that is not
weak in the least but somehow burdened by a pressure upon it like a
pressure of wings, the pressure of that kind of dream which will not
release the flesh it inhabits always and agonizes often until it is
given perfect body and so does not release it until such flesh has
ceased. At present he is not the youngest anything, except, according
to himself 'the youngest failure in advertising,' but a book of nakedly
youthful love-poetry, which in gloomy moments he wishes had never been
written, although the _San Francisco Warbler_ called it as 'tensely
vital as the Shropshire Lad,' brought him several column reviews and
very nearly forty dollars in cash at twenty-one and since then many
people of his own age and one or two editors have considered him “worth
watching.”
Ted Billett is dark too, but it is a ruddy darkness with high clear
color of skin. He could pass anywhere as a College Senior and though his
clothes seem to have been put on anyhow with no regard for pressing
or tailoring they will always raise a doubt in the minds of the
uninstructed as to whether it is not the higher carelessness that has
dictated them rather than ordinary poverty--a doubt that, in many cases,
has proved innocently fortunate for Ted. His hands are a curious mixture
of square executive ability and imaginative sensitiveness and his
surface manners have often been described as 'too snotty' by delicate
souls toward whom Ted was entirely unconscious of having acted with
anything but the most disinterested politeness. On the other hand a
certain even-tempered recklessness and capacity for putting himself
in the other fellow's place made him one of the few popularly lenient
officers to be obeyed with discipline in his outfit during the war. As
regards anything Arty or Crafty his attitude is merely appreciative--he
is finishing up his last year of law at Columbia.
Johnny introduces Oliver and Ted to everybody but Peter--the three were
classmates--shepherds his flock with a few disarmingly personal insults
to prevent stiffness closing down again over the four that have already
got to talking at the arrival of the two newcomers, and marshals them
out to the terrace where they are to have dinner. Without seeming
to try, he seats them so that Ted, Peter and Oliver will not form an
offensive-defensive alliance against the three who are strangers to them
by retailing New Haven anecdotes to each other for the puzzlement of
the rest and starts the ball rolling with a neat provocative attack on
romanticism in general and Cabell in particular.