About eight that evening Annan knocked and entered, and found Eris
intent on beef tea.
“How are you?” he asked in his winning, easy way, leaning down to look
at her, and to inspect the broth.
Her awe of him and his golden tongue made her diffident. She tried now
to respond to his light, informal kindness,--meet it part way.
She said, shyly, that she was quite recovered,--sat embarrassed under
his amiable scrutiny, too bashful to continue eating.
“I’m having two or three people to dinner,” he remarked, adjusting the
camelia in his button-hole. “I hope we won’t be noisy. If we keep you
awake, pound on the floor.”
She thought that humorous. They both smiled. She looked at the camelia
in the lapel of his dinner jacket. He leaned over and let her smell it.
“Tell me,” he said with that caressing accent of personal interest
which in such men is merely normal affability, “do you really begin to
feel better?”
She flushed, thanked him in a troubled voice. Mustering courage:
“I know I must be in the way here,” she ventured; “I could get up and
dress, if you’d let me, Mr. Annan----”
“Dress? And go away?”
“Yes.”
“Go where?”
“You forget what you’ve given me. I have plenty of money to take a
room.”
“Do you mean that commission which brought me in five hundred dollars?”
“You pretend it is that way.... Yes, I mean that money.”
“You funny child, I don’t want you to get up and dress. You can’t go
yet. You’re not in the way here.”
She said, solemn and tremulous: “I’ll never forget--your kindness----”
“When you’re quite well again we’ll talk over things,” he said
cheerily. He was thinking that if she found him so persuasive he’d have
little trouble in starting her homeward.
The front doorbell rang. He got up, gave her arm a friendly little pat.
“I’ll look in later,” he said, “if you’re still awake.”
He went away, lightly. She followed him with fathomless grey eyes;
listened to his steps descending the stairs--heard his gay greeting,
the voices of arriving guests--women’s laughter--the deeper voice of
another man. After a little while she continued her interrupted dinner,
gravely.
Mrs. Sniffen arrived presently. She seemed as starched, as rigid, as
angular and prim as ever. But there was no disdainful tilt to her sharp
nose. For the Mrs. Sniffen who now approached Eris was not the chilling
automaton who had just admitted Annan’s dinner guests with priggish
disapproval.
Eris, shy of her, looked up at her in some apprehension.
“Well,” exclaimed Mrs. Sniffen with a wintry smile, “you _did_ eat it
all, didn’t you? That’s the way to grow ’ealthy _and_ wealthy, not to
say wise, isn’t it, now? ’Ome vittles ’elps all ’urts, big or little,
to my way of thinking.”
“I enjoyed it so much, thank you,” murmured Eris.
“And glad I am to ’ear you say it, Miss. ’Ave you quite finished?”
“Yes, thank you very much.”
Mrs. Sniffen took the tray, hesitated by the bedside:
“I ’ope,” she said, “that you will soon be well, Miss.... New York is
just as bad as London, every bit! I know them both, Missy; and they’re
both uncommon nasty.”
“I like New York,” said Eris, shyly.
Mrs. Sniffen’s nose went up with a jerk.
“And sorry I am to hear you say it,” she retorted severely. “Them that
has nice clean ’omes in the nice clean countryside don’t realise their
blessings, according to my way of thinking.”
“Did you ever live in the country?” ventured Eris.
“Turnham Green, Miss.”
“Where is that?”
“London. It was all dirt and gin and barracks when I was a kiddy. If
I’d a pretty ’ome in the nice clean countryside like you, Miss, I’d be
biding there yet, no doubt.”
Eris shook her bobbed head: “I _had_ to come where I can have a chance
to learn something.”
“And what, may I ask, Miss, would you learn ’ereabouts?” inquired
Mrs. Sniffen with elaborate irony. “There’s little to learn in
New York that’s good for a body. It’s only a big, ’ot, dirty
merry-go-round,--what with the outrageous noise and crowds and hurry
and scurry, and wild capers and goings-on. No, Miss, you’ll learn
nothing ’elpful ’ere, depend upon it!”
Eris said, thoughtfully: “Only where are many people gathered is there
the foundation for a real education.... Good and evil _are_.... Only
truth matters. The important thing is to know.”
“Who told you that?” demanded Mrs. Sniffen, amazed to hear such
authoritative language.
“Nobody. But I’m quite sure it’s so. Books alone do not educate. They
are like roughage for cattle. There is no nourishment in them but they
help to digest Truth. I wish to see and hear for myself, and learn to
understand in my own way.... What _my_ eyes and ears tell me is what I
ought to think about and try to understand. And I believe this is more
important than reading in books what other people think of what _they_
have seen and heard.”
“God bless her baby-face!” exclaimed Mrs. Sniffen, exasperated. “Where
does a kiddy find such notions, and the outlandish words for them, now?
What are young folk coming to, any’ow, gypsying about the world as they
please these crazy days? It’s a bad world, Missy, and the worst of it
settles in big cities like rancid grease in a sink.... Not that I’m the
kind to push _my_ nose into others’ business. I know better. No, Miss,
I’ve troubles enough to mind of my own, I ’ave. But when I see a polite
and well mannered young person turn her back on ’ealth and ’ome to come
to a nasty, rotten place like New York and sleep in the public parks at
that, ’ow can I ’elp expressing my opinion? I _can’t_ ’elp expressing
it. I’m bound to say you ought to go ’ome; and it would be a shame to
me all my days if I ’adn’t spoken!”
She seemed to be in a temper. She marched out with her tray, her
starched skirts bristling, her nose high. Opening the door, she looked
back wrathfully at Eris, hesitated, door-knob gripped:
“I’ll ’ave some chicken for you before you sleep,” she snapped; and
closed the door with a distinct bang.
* * * * *
Downstairs, Annan had entertained three friends at dinner--Coltfoot,
Rosalind Shore, and Betsy Blythe.
Of the making of moving pictures there is no end--until the sheriff
enters. And Miss Blythe helped make as many pictures as her rather
brief career had, so far, permitted.
She was to have her own company now. The people interested finally had
“come across”; Betsy talked volubly at dinner. Gaiety, excitement and
congratulations reigned and rained.
Rosalind Shore, another stellar débutante, already in her first season,
had won her place in musical comedy. She was one of those dark-eyed,
white-skinned, plumply graceful girls, very lazy but saturated with
talent. Which, however, would have meant little beyond the chorus
unless her mother, an ex-professional, had literally clubbed musical
and dramatic education into her.
Indolent, but immensely clever, little Miss Shore’s girlhood had been
one endless hell of maternal maulings. She was whipped if she neglected
voice and piano; beaten if she shirked dramatic drill; kicked into
dancing school, and spanked if she loitered late away from home. Yet
she’d never have been anybody otherwise.
She had Jewish blood in her. She was distractingly pretty.
“Mom’s a terror,” she used to remark, reflectively. “She thumped me
till I saw so many stars that I turned into one.”
She sang the lead in “The Girl from Jersey”--into which a vigorous kick
from her mother had landed her, to puzzle a public which never before
had heard of Rosalind Shore.
The show ran until July and was to resume in September.
The girlhood of Bettina--or Betsy--Blythe, had been very different. She
was one of a swiftly increasing number of well-born girls whom society
had welcomed as débutantes, and who, after a first season, and great
amateur success in the Junior League, had calmly informed her family
that she had made a contract with some celluloid corporation to appear
in moving pictures.
New York society was becoming accustomed to this sort of behaviour. It
had to be. From the time that the nation’s war-bugles sounded assembly
at Armageddon, the younger generation had taken the bit between its
firm teeth. Nothing had yet checked them. They still were running away.
* * * * *
In Annan’s little drawing-room, where coffee had been served,
the excited chatter continued to turn around Betsy’s brand new
company,--this event being the reason for the dinner.
Every capitalist involved was discussed, and pulled to quivering
pieces; every officer and director in the _Betsy Blythe Company, Inc._
was dissected under the merciless scrutiny of four young people who
already had learned in New York to believe only what happened, and to
turn deaf ears to mere words.
“Listen, Betsy,” said Rosalind Shore, “Mom says you’re all right with
Cairo Cotton and Levant Tobacco behind you.”
“The main thing,” remarked Coltfoot, “is to begin in a businesslike
way. Don’t start off staggering under a load of overheads, Betsy. Don’t
let them take expensive offices. The people who’ll use ’em would have
to sit in a Mills Hotel if you didn’t provide a loafing place for them.
“And don’t spill money down the coal hole for a plant. When you need
a studio, hire it for the length of time you expect to use it. Hire
everything. Spend your money on the people who’ll bring it back to you,
not on human objects d’art and period furniture.”
“I know,” said Betsy, “but I can’t control those things, can I?”
Annan said: “Perhaps you can. You know, socially, some of the people
who are putting up the money. Harry Sneyd has to account to them. He’s
handling you and you can handle him.”
“You can see to it,” said Coltfoot, “that Levant Tobacco isn’t used
to pension a bunch of bums and dumb-bells. You can see to it that the
money is spent where it ought to be spent. Your people have got real
money. You can’t buy a good story for nothing; you can’t buy a good
director or a good camera-man for nothing. Those are the people to pay.”
Rosalind nodded: “And low pedal on art-directors and carpenters,” she
added. “I’m not so sure that I need all I get. Scenery is on the
toboggan, sister Bettina. You don’t want expensive sets. Neither does
your audience. It wants you. And it wants your story. So don’t let
your bunch start rebuilding devastated France in your back yard when a
corner in a hall bed-room will do.... It will always do if the story
and the acting go over. I don’t have to tell you that, either.”
“No interior ever made a picture,” agreed Annan, “and no exterior ever
saved one. But I’d go as far as I liked on the scenery that you don’t
have to pay God for.”
Miss Blythe laughed: “Are you going to do a story for me, Barry?” she
asked. “You promised--when you were in love with me.”
“I am yet. But your people don’t like sob-stuff any better than does
Rosalind’s audience.”
“You don’t have to squirt tears into every story you write,” retorted
Betsy. “Did you ever see me cry? There are people, Barry, who manage to
get on without snivelling every minute.”
“I never cry,” remarked Rosalind; “Mom spanked the last tear out of me
years ago.” She rose and moved indolently to the piano.
Few professional pianists were better at her age,--thanks to “Mom,” who
had been a celebrated one.
Rosalind talked and idled at the keys, played, chattered, sang
enchantingly, killed loveliness with a jest, slew beauty to light
a cigarette, cursed with caprice the charming theme developing or,
capriciously and tenderly protected, nourished and cared for it until
it grew to exquisitive maturity. Then strangled it with a “rag.”
“You little devil,” said Betsy, tremulous under the spell--“I wouldn’t
strangle my own offspring as you do!--I _couldn’t_----” Emotion checked
her.
Rosalind laughed: “It doesn’t matter when one can have all the
offspring one wants.... You’ll never get on if you’re too serious,
Bettina mia.”
“That’s your friend Barry talking, not _you_,” retorted Betsy. “_He_
can get away with it--sitting all alone in a stuffy room where his
readers can’t see him writing sob-stuff with his tongue in his cheek.
But you and I had better wear faces that can be safely watched, my
Rosalinda child!”
“I want to ask you,” said Rosalind, turning to Annan, “whether an
audience can surmise what sort of private life one leads merely from
watching one on the stage or screen.”
“I think so, in a measure,” he replied.
“Then it does pay to behave,” concluded Betsy, walking to a mirror to
inspect herself. “Not guilty--so far,” she added, powdering her nose;
“--am I, Barry?”
“Old Jule Cæsar’s wife was a schmeer in comparison,” he agreed.
“I’ll tell you, young man,” she remarked, “I’ve found the Broadway
atmosphere healthier than it is in some New York younger sets.”
“Is that one answer to why do young men haunt stage doors?” inquired
Coltfoot.
“You miserable cynic,” retorted Betsy, “the sort of young man who does
that belongs in the sets I mentioned.”
“Anyway,” added Rosalind, with lazy humour, “you and Barry are spending
a perfectly good evening as close to the stage as you can get. Why?”
“Why,” added Betsy, “do men prefer women of the stage?”
“Good God,” said Coltfoot, “take any Sunday supplement and compare the
faces of Newport and Broadway. That’s one reason out of hundreds.”
“Few men chase a face that makes them ache,” added Barry, “even if the
atmosphere in some sets smells of the stage door.... Tell me, beautiful
Betsy, why you don’t canter about very much in your own gold-plated and
exclusive social corral?”
“Because,” she replied tranquilly, “I have a better time with the
people I meet professionally ... mavericks from the gold-plated corral
like you, for instance. You and Mike and Rosalind are more amusing than
Sally Snitface or Percy Pinhead. And you’re far more moral.”
“I wonder if I am moral,” mused Rosalind, shaking the cracked ice in
her glass.
“God, your mother and your native laziness incline you that way,” said
Barry, gravely. “You’re better than good; you’re apathetic. Inertia
will see you through.”
“It takes energy to be a devil,” added Coltfoot. “Your perfect angel
snoozes on a cloud. She’s too lazy to walk. That’s why she grew wings
and why you take taxi-cabs, Rosalind.”
“I do. I use my legs sufficiently on the stage, thank you. Also, I
admit I like to snooze.”
“Angel,” said Betsy from the mirror, “lend me your lipstick.” And, to
Annan: “May I ascend to the rear room and make up properly?”
“No, go into my room.”
“But there’s no dressing table there----” starting to go.
“You can’t go up there,” he repeated. “I mean it.”
The girl turned: “Oh, is there a lady there?” she asked with that
flippant freedom fashionable in certain sets, but mostly due to
ignorance.
“There is,” said Annan, coolly.
Rosalind did not believe it, but she said carelessly: “That’s rather
disgusting if it’s true.”
“It’s true,” said Coltfoot. He sketched the story. Rosalind, who
had been sagging picturesquely, sat up straight. Betsy listened
incredulously at first, then with knitted brows.
“I mean to ship her back to the old farm,” added Annan. “She needs a
wet-nurse----”
“I want to see her,” said Miss Blythe abruptly.
“Well, she isn’t on exhibition,” returned Annan in a dry voice.
“Can’t I see her?”
“Put yourself in her place. Would _you_ feel comfortable, lying in the
guest bed of a strange man? And would _you_ care to have a fashionably
gowned girl come flying in to stare at you?”
Betsy gazed at him scarcely listening. She turned to Rosalind:
“If she’s got as much nerve as that, couldn’t you or I do something?”
“All right,” nodded Rosalind.
“You’d better let her go home,” said Annan. “She has pluck and perhaps
talent, but she hasn’t the sense to take care of herself. You let her
alone, Bet, do you hear?”
Betsy’s nose went up. “Mind your business, Barry. If she works for me
she needn’t worry.”
“You’d better take her on, then,” said Rosalind. “Mom bangs me around
so that I’m too groggy to look out for anybody’s morals except my own.”
Betsy came up to Annan and put her hands on his shoulders:
“Let me see her; I shan’t eat her. I might use her. She’s a sandy kid.”
“She’s twenty. She told me so,” he retorted.
“It’s cruel to ship her back to the cows, Barry, when she’s gone
through such a rotten novitiate. I think you’re taking a great
responsibility if you use that easy and persuasive tongue of yours to
send her back to the stupidity she ran away from. Don’t you?”
Rosalind said to her: “There’s no point in your pawing Barry Annan.
I’ve done it. He lets you. Then he does what he pleases.”
Annan grinned faintly: Betsy suddenly slapped his face, not hard.
“That complacent smirk!” she said, exasperated.
Before Annan guessed what she was about, she turned and ran upstairs.
He followed, too late. The guest-room door opened and slammed, and he
heard the key turn inside.
He returned to the drawing-room, laughing but irritated.
“Little meddlesome devil,” he said, “talking to _me_ of responsibility!
Here’s where I wash my hands of the Eris kid. It’s Betsy’s deal now.”
* * * * *
It was.
Eris, listening to the laughter and music below, lying wide-eyed on her
pillow, sat up startled and wider yet of eye when a scurry and flurry
of scented skirts, followed by the clash of a swiftly locked door
landed Betsy Blythe at her bedside.
She stared at the breathless vision of flushed beauty, too astounded to
think of herself and her position.
Down on the bed’s edge dropped Miss Blythe, radiant, cheeks and eyes
still brilliant from her victory.
“I’m Betsy Blythe,” she said. “I heard about you. How fine and plucky
of you! What a perfectly rotten experience!... Tell me your name, won’t
you?”
“Eris Odell,” said the girl mechanically, still under the spell of this
sudden brightness which seemed to fill the whole room with rose colour.
“My dear,” said Betsy, “please forgive me for coming in on my head.
Mr. Annan tried to prevent me. You mustn’t blame him. But when I
heard how plucky you are I simply had to come up and tell you that
I’m going to ask my manager to take you on. I haven’t seen our first
script. They’re doing the continuity now. But I’m sure there must be
something--something, at least, to start you going--so you won’t need
to sleep in the park--you poor child----”
She impulsively caressed one of the hands that lay on the quilt;
retained it, looking at Eris with increasing interest and kindness.
Suddenly, for one fleeting moment, the subtle warning that a pretty
woman feels in discovering greater beauty in another, touched Betsy
Blythe. And passed.
“I’m in pictures,” she said, smilingly. “I should have told you that
first. I have my own company now. When you are quite recovered, will
you come and see me?”
“Yes, thank you.” The eyes of Eris were great wells of limpid grey; her
lips, a trifle apart, burned deep scarlet.
“You are _so_ pretty,” said Betsy,--“do you test well?”
“They thought so.”
“The Crystal Film people?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll have Mr. Sneyd give you another test. He’ll make you up. Or I
will. You know, of course, that it won’t be a part that amounts to
anything.”
“Oh, yes.”
“But it will be a part. We’ll carry you--not like an extra, you
see----” Betsy rose, went over to a little desk, wrote her address and
brought it to Eris.
“You do forgive me for coming in to see you this crazy way, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes--yes, I do----” Suddenly the grey eyes flashed tears.
“You sweet child!” said Betsy Blythe, stooping over her. “You’re nice.
A woman can tell, no matter what a pig of a man might think. I like
you, Eris. I _want_ you to get on. I’d love to have you make good some
day.” She added naïvely: “--If only to put Barry Annan’s nose out of
joint.”
Eris had covered her wet lashes with her fore-arm. Now she removed it.
“Mr. Annan has been wonderful,” she said in a tear-congested voice.
“Three cheers!” said Betsy, laughing. “You’re a loyal youngster, aren’t
you? Everybody likes Barry Annan. Several love him. But _you_ mustn’t,”
she added with a gravity that deceived Eris.
“Oh, no,” she said hurriedly, “I wouldn’t think of such a thing.”
At that Betsy’s clear laughter rang out in the room. Eris blushed
furiously; then, suddenly and swiftly _en rapport_, laughed too.
“He’s so nice and so spoiled,” said Betsy. “That bland grin of
his!--and he _is_ clever--oh, very. He knows how to make your heart
jump when he writes. In private character he’s kind but mischievous.
He’ll experiment with a girl if she’ll let him. It interests him to
try cause and effect on us. Don’t _you_ let him. He has that terrible
talent for swift intimacy. That caressing courtesy, that engaging and
direct interest he seems to take in whoever he is with, means no more
than a natural and kindly consideration for everybody. It misleads some
women. I don’t mean _he_ does, intentionally. Only any man, seeing a
pretty girl inclined to be flattered, is likely to investigate further.
I don’t blame him. We do it, too, don’t we?”
“I never did,” said Eris naïvely.
Betsy’s smile faded and she gave Eris a sharp look. Then, abruptly, she
took both her hands and sat regarding her.
“I’ll tell you something,” she concluded, finally. “Men won’t fool you:
you’ll fool them.”
“I shan’t try to,” said Eris.
“That’s how you’ll do it.... You’re unusual; do you realize it? What is
it that interests you most?”
“I want to learn.”
“I thought so. I’ve known one or two girls like you. Pretty ones....
Almost as pretty as you, Eris. They raise the devil with men.”
“How?” asked Eris, astonished.
“Merely by being what they are,--absolutely normal under all
conditions. Men are completely fooled. To a man, feminine youth and
beauty mean a depthless capacity for sex sentiment. My dear, you have
very little of that sort.... Or, if you have any, it’s the normal
amount and is reserved for the great moment in life.”
“What is the great moment in life?” asked Eris.
“Love, I suppose.”
“I do not think I shall have time for it,” said Eris, thoughtfully.
“Good heavens!” exclaimed Betsy, laughing. “Don’t be unhuman!”
“Oh, no.... I only mean that it’s--it’s a thing which has
not--occurred.... I have not thought about it, much.”
“Nor wished for it?”
“Oh, no.”
“Still,” said Betsy, smiling, “we’re made for it, you know.... That is,
if we’re quite healthy.”
“I suppose so,” said Eris absently.
After a silence Betsy pressed her hands, rose, looked down at her with
friendly gaze.
“I ought to join the others. You won’t forget to come? Please don’t:
I’d like to have you with us. Good-night, Eris. Get well quickly!”
As she was going out: “Make my peace with Barry Annan,” she added. “I’m
in dutch with that young man.”
* * * * *
The slangy girl really was not. Annan, at the piano, pounding out a rag
while Rosalind and Coltfoot danced, merely called out to her that the
responsibility for Eris Odell was hers from that moment and if they
ever found the girl in the river it was none of his doings.
Betsy smiled scornfully: “I’d trust that girl anywhere,” she said.
“Some day a girl like Eris will teach you a few new steps in the merry
dance of life, Barry.”
“What new steps?” He continued playing but looked curiously up at
Betsy, who had come over beside him.
“You’re so cocksure of yourself,” she said, “aren’t you, dear?”
“You mean I’m a prig?”
“No, just a very clever, good-looking boy with kind instincts and a
fatal facility. You think you’re real. You think you write realisms.
You’ll come up against the real thing some day. _Then_----”
“Yes, yes, go on!”
“Why,” she said, smiling at him, “then you’ll bump your complacent
head, my dear. _That_ will be reality. And maybe you’ll know it again
when you run into it. Maybe it will rid you of that bland grin.”
“That’s a melting smile, not a grin, darling,”--pounding away
vigorously. “But tell me about this ‘real thing’ that I’m to crack my
noodle on.”
“A girl, ducky.”
“Sure. I’m cracked already on ’em all.”
“The one I mean is named Nemesis and she’ll knock your silly head
off.... Like that child upstairs, for example.”
“She’s got a Greek name, too. I’d better remember to ‘fear the
Greeks’--yes?”
“Little Eris could double _you_ up.”
“Wh-at?”
“I don’t mean Eris in particular, dear friend. But one of her species.”
“What’s her species?”
“You, a writer!--and you haven’t even doped her out!”
“I have, however,” he contradicted her tranquilly.
“All right. Analyse her for me.”
“Quantitatively?”
“Certainly.”
“Here she is then: clean, plucky, uneducated, obstinate, immature; and,
like any other girl, perfectly pliable when properly handled by an
expert.”
“_You?_”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, tweetums----”
“You don’t have to say it. But I’m glad you think you’re an expert. For
it’s going to be _that_ kind of girl who will some day put a crimp in
you, Barry, and teach you what you don’t know anything about.”
“What’s that, Rose of my Harem?”
“Women,” she said maliciously, “and you make a living by writing about
them. And the Great American Ass believes you know what you’re writing
about!”
* * * * *
Coltfoot telephoned for his car after midnight and drove Annan’s fair
guests homeward.
Annan, born with a detestation for sleep, locked up and put out the
lights unwillingly.
As he passed Eris’ door on his way to his room, he halted a moment,
listening.
“Are you awake, Eris?” he asked in a modulated voice.
“Yes,” she answered.
“That’s fine!” he exclaimed. “May I come in for a moment?”
“Yes, please.”
Her light was on. She was sitting up in bed. When he caught the first
glimpse of the radiant face, flushed with happy excitement, he scarcely
recognised the pinched and pallid girl of the park. In his astonishment
he thought her the prettiest thing he remembered ever seeing; stood
silent, quite overwhelmed by the unfamiliar beauty of the girl.
Entirely unconscious of admiration, she smiled enchantingly--a piquant
and really charming picture in her bath-robe and bobbed hair.
“Thank you so much,” she said, “for asking Miss Blythe to see me. She
pretended you wouldn’t let her come, but I knew she was joking. Miss
Blythe asked me to join her own company. I simply can’t sleep for
thinking of it.”
He came over to the bedside and took a chair.
“Eris,” he said, “I really didn’t want Miss Blythe to see you. I
thought you ought to go home when you recover.”
She looked at him, startled.
“Maybe I’m wrong,” he said, “but I think so, still.”
After a silence: “You _are_ wrong.... But I know you mean it kindly.”
“Hang it all, of course I do. You’re an unusual girl----” Betsy’s
words, she remembered--“and you interest me; and I like you.... And
I know something about Broadway.... It worries me a little--the
combination of you and Broadway.”
“I--worry _you_?”
“In a way.... Your inexperience.... And you don’t know men.”
“No, I don’t know men.”
“Well--there you are,” he said, impatiently.
Yes, there she was,--in the guest-room bed of one of them.
She said, tranquilly: “It is kind of you to be interested in me. I
feel it deeply, Mr. Annan. It seems wonderful to me, that a man so--a
man like yourself--should have--have time to care what happens to a
perfectly strange nobody.... But I _can’t_ go home.... Not yet.... I
shouldn’t care to live if I can’t have an opportunity to learn....
So--so that’s _that_.”
He, finally, laughed. “Is it, Eris?”
“Yes,” she said, smiling at him, “I’m afraid it is.”
“And that’s _that_,” he concluded.
“Yes, really it is.”
“All right.” He got up, stood fumbling with a cigarette. “All right,
Eris. If ‘_that’s_’ the verdict, I guess I was wrong. I guess you know
your business.”
“No. But I hope to.”
“You fascinatingly literal kid!----” He burst out laughing, went over
and shook hands with her.
“Somebody else will have to milk the cows and feed the chickens. That’s
plain as the permanent curls on your bobbed head, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said, laughing, “--and you’re so funny!”
“Oh, I’m a great wit,” he admitted. “Well, little pilgrim, you require
sleep if I don’t.... I think I’ll go in and start a story.... Or
read.... _Your_ story is just beginning, isn’t it?”
She ventured a timid jest: “_You_ finished my story for me, didn’t you?”
“I did. When it’s published, and you read it, you’ll never stop guying
me, I suppose.”
She still ventured pleasantries: “So you didn’t tell how I left the
Park and walked straight into an engagement, did you?”
“My dear, I bumped you off to sneak-music. It goes, you know, with my
clients. They wouldn’t stand for what Miss Blythe did. Neither would
the _Planet_. I’d get the hook.”
They both were laughing when he said good-night.
He went into his room but did not light the lamp. For a long while he
sat by the open window looking out into the darkness of Governor’s
Place.
It probably was nothing he saw out there that brought to his lips a
slight, recurrent smile.
The bad habit of working late at night was growing on this young man.
It is a picturesque habit, and one of the most imbecile, because sound
work is done only with a normal mind.
He made himself some coffee. A rush of genius to the head followed
stimulation. He had a grand time, revelling with pen and pad and
littering the floor with inked sheets unnumbered and still wet. His
was a messy genius. His plot-logic held by the grace of God and a
hair-line. Even the Leaning Tower of Pisa can be plumbed; and the lead
dangled inside Achilles’ tendon when one held the string to the medulla
of Annan’s stories.
* * * * *
He rose at his usual early hour, rather pallid, and parched by too many
pipes.
When he left the house for down-town, Mrs. Sniffen reported Eris still
sound asleep. So Annan went away to deposit seven thousand words with
Coltfoot.
“Off the bat just like that,” he said, tossing the untidy bundle onto
Coltfoot’s desk.
“You mean that you did this story last night after we left?” demanded
Coltfoot.
“That’s what I do, Mike,--sometimes. And sometimes I’m two or three
weeks on this sort of thing. I think I’ll go back and do another. I
feel like it.”
“Probably,” remarked the other, “this is punk.”
“Probably not,” said Annan serenely. “Are you lunching?”
“Probably not if I read this bunk first. Is it really up to your worst
level?”
“Your readers will wail like a bunch of banshees over it. It’s dingy,
squalid, photographic. What more does the Great American Ass require?”
“That’s his fodder,” admitted Coltfoot. “Now g’wan outa here, you
licensed push-cart bandit!... By the way, how’s the park-bencher this
morning?”
“Asleep when I left the house.” He seated himself sideways on
Coltfoot’s desk:
“Mike, do you know she’s exceedingly pretty?”
“How should I know?... But trust you to pick that kind----”
“I forgot that you’ve never seen her. Well, last night after you left I
stopped to look in on her, and, honestly, her beauty startled me. She’s
beautiful thick chestnut hair and fine grey eyes, and the loveliest
mouth--its expression is charming!--and really, Mike, her arms and
hands are delicate enough for a Psyche. Maybe she milked and fed ducks,
but I can’t see any of the hick about her----”
He smiled, made one of his characteristic, graceful gestures: “It’s
funny, but there she is. And yet, I’d not venture to use her in a story
‘as is.’ Because my wise guys wouldn’t believe in her. I’d be damned as
a romanticist. And you’d chuck me out of the Sunday Edition.”
Coltfoot sat gazing up at him for a few moments, then put on his
reading-spectacles and pawed at a wad of proof.
“I’m going to chuck you out of this office anyway,” he grunted.
* * * * *
Exactly why Annan chose to lunch at home did not occur to him until,
arriving there, Mrs. Sniffen handed him a note and announced the
departure of Eris Odell.
“What!” he said irritably, “has she gone?”
“About eleven, Mr. Barry. And would you believe that child would ask me
to take five dollars for making her bed? And she with scarce a penny.
What’s one ’undred and twenty dollars in New York? I could ha’ birched
her----”
“Give me the note,” he interrupted, disappointed. Because that was
why he had come home to lunch,--to see this youngster who had so
ungratefully and rudely departed.
He went upstairs to his room, seated himself, slit the envelope with
a paper cutter, and leisurely but sulkily unfolded the sheet of note
paper within.
A hundred-dollar bank note fell to the floor.
“Dear Friend,” he read,--a rural form of address that always annoyed
Annan,--“please do not be offended if I leave without awaiting your
return. Because I feel keenly that I ought not to impose upon your
great kindness any longer.
“I am at a loss to express my gratitude. Your goodness has stirred
my deepest sensibilities and has imprinted upon my innermost mind a
sense of obligation never to be forgotten.
“I shall always marvel that so well known and successful a man could
find time to trouble himself with the personal embarrassment of an
insignificant stranger.
“What you have done for me is so wonderful that I can only feel it
but cannot formulate my feeling in words.
“And thank you for the hundred dollars. But please, _please_
understand that I could not keep it.
“Confident in the promise of Miss Blythe, I shall venture to take
the room that sometimes I have taken for a single night. It is at 696
Jane Street.
“So good-bye--unless you ever would care to see me again--and thank
you with a heart very full, dear Mr. Annan.
“Yours sincerely,
“ERIS.”