varietism about which Cornelia simply theorized. The only novelty was
that Cornelia now declared the charge to be a good excuse for parting
company. Mazie thought it a poor excuse. On this difference of opinion
there sprang up a tempestuous scene. Words flew high, and the checks
that polite society imposes on candid criticism of one's friends went
completely by the board.
The climax was reached when Cornelia offered the opinion that if Mazie
wanted to become a vulgar little copy of Camille, that was her affair;
but flat Number Fifteen was not the place in which to practice the part.
In vain did Mazie reply with an unexpurgated review of Cornelia's
history. Cornelia was unmoved. And her languid, cadenced retorts
floated serenely above Mazie's torrent of invective like a violin
obligato above the crashing brasses.
It did not take Mazie long to pack her most necessary articles into a
bag and go. On her way out, she said, with a good imitation of
Cornelia's sweetest tone:
"Good bye, Cornelia. I'd like to stay long enough to tell your next
dupe what a fraud you are. But what's the use? She won't thank me for
it, as I suppose she has a crush on you, like I had once. Well, it'll
do her good to learn by experience. Finding you out, my dear, is such a
complete education."
By the time Janet and Harry Kelly returned, all was quiet along the
Potomac.
*CHAPTER ELEVEN*
*I*
For the next few weeks, Janet lived excitedly in the glamor of the
Lorillard tenements. She could not well have imagined a bigger
difference than that between the complete orthodoxy of the Barrs of
Brooklyn and the complete heterodoxy of the model tenementers of Kips
Bay.
Her impression of the new life was put into words for her by Lydia
Dyson, the author of "Brothers and Sisters," (then in its twenty-fifth
big printing). Lydia, whose tall, thin form and pale olive skin lost
none of their spectacular qualities by the snake-like movements she
affected, the huge jet earrings she wore, or the gold-tipped cigarettes
she smoked, assured Janet, in a rich Kentucky drawl:
"We obey only one custom here, and that is to disobey all customs; we
hold only one belief, and that is to hold no beliefs."
Janet was fully persuaded that the first part of this statement was true
and that the second part was a vast improvement upon the Barr regime.
In truth, she found the Lorillardian absence of formality, constraint
and regulated behavior a decided relief after her long course of
Calvinistic repression at home. And, active though she was by nature,
she did not at first notice how the days slipped by with great ado, but
with very little done.
The Lorillard tenementers were not exactly lazy. They were merely idle.
Like the idle rich and the idle poor they were ceaselessly occupied--in
killing time.
Cornelia was in the habit of getting up somewhere between nine and
eleven. After breakfast, the two friends would set out to look for a
job. The spirit in which they proceeded was the spirit in which young
people go skylarking. Hunting for a job was an old pastime of
Cornelia's. If she ever came up to a job's requirements, the job never
came up to hers. Or if by chance it did, she discovered a bewildering
array of reasons for not taking it, or for speedily leaving it, when
taken.
At noon, the day's duty was considered fully done. After lunch, there
was another jaunt; this time to an art gallery, concert hall, theatre or
movie. Free tickets from Cornelia's theatrical friends were reasonably
plentiful, and when these failed, there were return calls to pay.
Thus, Charlotte Beecher's studio was a favorite stopping place, as Janet
soon discovered. Charlotte possessed a million dollars or more in her
own right, and she had three or four studios in totally different parts
of the city. She did her hardest work in her double Lorillard flat
every morning; her evenings were spent warding off fortune-hunting
suitors like Denman Page, who besieged her Fifth Avenue apartment; on
certain afternoons she served an "intellectual tea" in a studio
sumptuously fitted up in Washington Mews.
Janet was always taken to the studio _de luxe_ in the Mews. Cornelia,
invariably busy, would be sketching some new design of a hat, or pinning
together a one-piece dress, whilst she luxuriated happily amidst the
rich Chinese rugs and the soft silken cushions of Charlotte's show room.
The serpent in this garden of Eden was the "little group of serious
thinkers" (an element alien to Kips Bay) that met in the Mews by virtue
of Charlotte's encouragement.
"These intellectuals!" Cornelia would say scornfully to Janet on the way
home. "Did you ever hear such bumptious talk?"
"I find them rather amusing," Janet would perhaps reply.
"Araminta, what nonsense! They positively put the furniture on edge.
But that's Charlotte all over. There's a nigger in every woodpile, and
there's a jarring note in every one of Charlotte's rooms. My dear, it
bores me cruelly."
Still, Cornelia went on visiting the Mews, intellectuals, cruel boredom,
and all. It puzzled Janet for a time. She had still to learn that a
perfect Kipsite is prepared to suffer no end of martyrdom in the sacred
cause of luxury.
Every evening was like a new party to Janet, flat Number Fifteen being
one of the chief rendezvous in the tenements. After supper, visitors of
both sexes dropped in unannounced and uninvited, until by midnight, a
dozen people, more or less, were sure to be occupying the whole flat.
Generally, the guests split up into small groups and spent the time in
play. Some played at dancing or at music, others at clever repartee or
giddy flirting. To this play, the counterpoint was enthusiasm. A
magnificent enthusiasm for self. In a rapturous torrent of words, each
Kipsite painted a roseate future that led by startling steps to a
supreme moment in which the world lay prostrate at the enthusiast's
feet.
It was a cosmopolitan gathering. All the arts and sciences and
occupations, all the moral and immoral standards, and all the races and
nationalities of New York were represented. A dancer from the Hindoo
Kush, several would-be Fokines or Stravinskys, two or three imitation
Oscar Wildes, Theodore Dreisers or Frank Harrises--these were sure to be
there. Even the solid banker (or aspiring Pierpont Morgan), who kept a
quiet flat and a lady in it, was an occasional visitor. No one was
excluded who was piquant or picturesque.
Cornelia's specially privileged guests were a scanty handful. Among the
men were Claude Fontaine, Robert Lloyd, Denman Page, and Harry Kelly,
the "Harlem Gorilla." Soon after Janet's coming, Mark Pryor, immaculate
and unobtrusive, joined the ultimate circle and began mysteriously to
appear and to disappear.
Still fewer were the women admitted to the inner ring. Of these the
chief were Lydia Dyson, the spectacular, and Charlotte Beecher, the
industrious. The novelist came in silks, the heiress in calicos.
Charlotte's cheap but natty working costume was looked upon among the
Outlaws as an affectation. Her blouses and skirts gave Cornelia the
horrors.
So did her marked preference for Robert Lloyd.
Janet had an idea that these evening visitors came chiefly to admire
Cornelia or to be admired by her. She assumed that Cornelia was "the
whole show." It was a pardonable assumption. Cornelia sat in a rocking
chair in the central room and was feline, and languid, and observant,
while the excitement eddied and swirled around her. To all appearances
she held the reins of her party with the masterly skill of the Borax man
who drives the celebrated twenty mule team.
Robert would have it that Cornelia was neither the star nor the manager
of the nightly performance in Number Fifteen. According to him, the
only management she displayed was in the skill with which she focused
attention upon herself. The cadenced laugh, the sugary stab, the artful
question--these were not the subtle devices of a clever hostess; they
were merely the centripetal pulls of an egomaniac against the
centrifugal interests of her guests.
Janet dismissed this explanation lightly and begged Robert not to
analyze every joy until its very essence had been probed--and destroyed.
She laughed at his attempt to convince her that these gay evenings of
Cornelia's were a kind of renaissance. His theory was that the light of
Cornelia's splendor had been getting dim of late, as it had got dim on
several previous occasions. But the impact of a new partner against
her, like the impact of an astral visitor against a dying sun, now as
always gave her a new lease of brilliance.
In short, Robert asserted that it was the replacement of Mazie by Janet
which had caused a tremendous revival of interest in Cornelia's flat.
Everybody in the inner ring of the Outlaws or in the outer ring of the
tenements, everybody indeed, that had any shadow of a claim to an
entree, had come trooping in to sun themselves in the restored glory of
Number Fifteen.
To most of Robert's remarks, Janet paid little attention. But she
carefully treasured up one of them.
This was that never before had Claude Fontaine been such a constant
visitor.
*II*
Yet for a few days after the Outlaws' Ball, Claude had behaved as if his
confession of love had never been made, or had merely been the
expression of an impulse, for which he disclaimed responsibility. There
had been no return to the intimacy that instantly abolishes all the
formulas of mere politeness and all the prescriptions of mere etiquette;
there had been no recurrence of that world-without-end moment at the
ball or of that other moment in the limousine next day.
At the ball he had treated her as he would have treated any respectable
middle-class girl who might take his fancy. That is, he had stretched
the conventions as far as an impressionable young woman will usually
allow a dashing young man to stretch them, but not further.
After she joined Cornelia, however, his attitude changed. He treated her
with a certain wariness of manner by which he appeared to convey the
following:
"I took you to be a girl who strictly observed the moral customs
established and honored in Brooklyn, but long fallen into disuse in
certain parts of Manhattan, and nowhere less respected than in Kips Bay.
It amused me to tempt you to violate these customs, especially as I had
little hope of meeting with success. But now that you have become a
Lorillard girl, what spice is there in tempting you? Either you never
were the girl I took you for; or, at any rate, you soon won't be.
"At all events I shall be on my guard. You are the first girl to work
upon me so mightily with a single glance. But you are not the first girl
who has looked as innocent as a dove and acted as subtly as a serpent.
Be warned! Neither your innocent subtlety nor subtle innocence can make
me forget that a Claude Fontaine is in the habit of forming but one sort
of friendship with a girl in the Lorillard tenements."
Janet, always very sensitive to atmosphere, got the effect of this train
of thought, and in consequence kept Claude at as great a distance as her
naturally cordial nature would let her.
In one of the evening gatherings at Cornelia's the talk turned on
marriage, and it came out that Janet had adopted Cornelia's views on the
wickedness of marriage in its modern form. Claude, with the common
failing of lovers, promptly referred her action to himself.
Was this Janet's way of announcing that she meant to make no greater
demands on a rich man than any other girl in the Lorillard environment?
At first, it seemed so to Claude, and he felt relieved. But, on second
thoughts, another question occurred to him. Might not Janet's
conversion to Cornelia's beliefs in free love be a mere blind? A
pretended dislike of wedlock was a recognized bait for landing a man at
the altar. Was her conversion of this type or was it of the franker
type of Mazie Ross, who asked all that was due to a Lorillard tenement
girl but asked no more?
On the whole, it seemed fairly safe to treat Janet on the Mazie Ross
plane, and this he proceeded to do.
Mazie, by the way, had returned as a visitor to Number Fifteen within a
week of her spectacular exit. Her doll-like face had recovered its
pretty smile and her baby blue eyes gave no clue to whether she was
seeking vengeance or merely currying favor again. No one asked or
cared, hatred, like love, being a very fluctuating stock in the model
tenements.
Janet had not failed to notice that Claude made little difference
between his manner to her and his manner to Mazie. She did not like it,
but she had to wait some time for the chance of showing how much she
scorned his judgment.
*III*
The opportunity came at one of Cornelia's gayest parties given at the
end of Janet's second week in Kips Bay. It was really a sort of "coming
out" party for Janet. All the Outlaws, both of the inner and the outer
ring turned out to hail the new favorite. Even Mark Pryor put in an
appearance and actually remained on deck until the end, perhaps because
the trio of Cornelia's friends who provided the music played Lehar,
Straus, and more recent dance tunes without the customary sentimental
whine.
Contemptuous of the fitness of things, Claude did his best to monopolize
Janet. When the gayety was at its highest and the music at its most
intoxicating, he danced her into a room which, for the moment, proved to
be nearly but not quite empty.
Pushed out of the way against a corner stood a screen. Behind this he
whirled her, and then swiftly took her in his arms and kissed her
passionately. As swiftly, she pushed him away with an expression of
extreme distaste.
"I don't like my friends to imitate Hutchins Burley," she said, her
voice quiet and cool, her gray eyes full of life and scorn.
The others in the room laughed in mockery or applause. For an instant,
Claude's all-conquering look was replaced by a crestfallen one. But he
quickly regained his poise and spirits.
"Just a kiss to try," he said jauntily, as he attempted to recapture her
arm.
"It's much too trying for gentle Janet," blithely chirped Mazie, who had
danced into the room and taken in the situation, as Janet again turned
away from Claude.
AS a matter of fact, it was Janet's sense of propriety in public that
was offended more than anything else. As for Claude, he was only less
mortified by the affront to his vanity than by the haunting fear that
Janet's rebuff came from genuine dislike.
No girl had ever given the brilliant, impetuous Claude Fontaine a glance
of undisguised repugnance.
Janet spent the rest of the evening chiefly in conversation with Robert
Lloyd and Mark Pryor. Meanwhile, Claude affected a complete
indifference to her actions. He threw himself into the party with a mad
abandon, and whipped up the conviviality with a riotous, headstrong
wildness until everybody voted it the merriest evening in years.
Amongst the other sex, he exploited to the utmost his patrician graces
and masculine daring, and was so much the center of the occasion that
the party might have been his rather than Janet's.
The women thought him magnificent, graceful, cruel--in a word,
irresistible; the men laughed at his impudence, and envied or admired
his readiness, effrontery and ease.
And yet, as he showed his fine points triumphantly now to this adoring
girl and now to that, his voice vibrated towards Janet.
Janet took it all in, and continued talking to Robert with undisturbed
satisfaction. She saw Claude pass recklessly from one favorite to
another, and guessed easily that none of these was his real aim.
When the party broke up, Claude induced Janet to listen to him alone for
a moment. He was suddenly all contrition. To his whispered plea for
forgiveness, she said, in a not unkindly tone:
"Forgiveness for what? For advertising your emotions?"
"For the kiss," he said, his voice full of sensuous charm. And he added,
on a more audacious note: "I wish I could take it back."
"Oh, do you? You'd better begin with the publicity."
"Please forgive the kiss _and_ the publicity, Janet."
"I'll forgive the second when I forget the first," she replied, much
more gaily than she intended, thus proving that Claude was not the only
one in the grip of a resistless passion.
Claude went home, satisfied that his daring had once again enabled him
to snatch victory out of the arms of defeat.
*CHAPTER TWELVE*
*I*
And so it had. None the less, the experience had taught Claude a lesson
which, for once, he took to heart. He never again supposed that Janet's
friendship was to be had on the same terms as Mazie's or even
Cornelia's.
True, he remained in the dark as to what precisely her idea of
self-respect was. Conflicting and irreconcilable inferences were the
only ones he could draw from the conduct of a girl who lived in the
Lorillard tenements, moved in the Outlaws' circle, professed to be
hostile to marriage, yet stood on her dignity withal, in quite a
traditional womanly way.
But Claude was not the man to waste time on psychological conundrums.
Besides, he was too happy to be critical. He was back in the good graces
of Janet, or rather, as he soon paraphrased the case, she was back in
his. He flattered himself that he was the dominant influence over a
girl who was a piquant, if puzzling, amalgam of Brooklyn and Bohemia.
In the next two weeks, his position as Janet's particular friend was
established beyond dispute. Few afternoons passed in which his motor
car did not drive up to the Lorillard and whirl her away to a place of
gayety or recreation. The chief rival claimant upon her time was Robert
Lloyd. But as Claude, in point of social advantages and personal
graces, far outdistanced him, this rivalry was not taken seriously by
any of the three persons concerned, least of all by Claude.
One day, to Cornelia's astonishment, Janet announced that she had
planned to spend the afternoon, not with Claude, but with Robert. She
made the announcement from a tuffet on which she sat soberly, while
reading a book by Mrs. Beatrice Webb.
"Is this your pensive day?" asked Cornelia, ironically.
"Yes," replied Janet. "Robert complains that I'm neglecting him, and
consequently my education. I think I ought to give him a chance to
prove both assertions. So I've asked him to come here this afternoon.
I can't spend all my days in sky-larking, can I?"
"My dear, 'youth's a stuff will not endure.' If you choose Mrs. Sidney
Webb and Robert Lloyd rather than Claude Fontaine, the choice is your
own. Of course, Robert is very entertaining. He pledges you with facts
and figures. But when I was a rosebud like you, Araminta, I preferred a
man who drank to me only with his eyes."
"Cornelia, I adore being made love to; yet I get horribly tired of
it--even of Claude's love making--when it's kept up too long. And I
hate facts and figures; yet Robert's never bore me."
"What a morbid symptom, my dear!"
"Oh, don't say that. I feel sure it's quite a natural condition, in my
case. But perhaps there's a quality left out of me, a quality that
other women possess."
Janet was clearly eager to carry on her self-analysis, but Cornelia gave
no sign of sharing this eagerness.
Cornelia, in fact, was far from pleased. Her unconscious game was to
keep Robert revolving in an orbit around herself. He was such an
excellent drawing card! For had he not the rare power of raising the
value of any object or person he admired? Not that people ever credited
him with unusual discernment or insight. Yet the fact remained that
Robert had only to praise a human being or a work of art hitherto
undervalued or overlooked, and presto, the article or the person
instantly became subject to an urgent popular demand. This was one of
the reasons why Cornelia (who felt that she had been handsome enough in
surrendering Claude without a murmur) did not wish Robert as well to
gravitate from her stellar system to Janet's.
But, seeing no way of cancelling Robert's visit, she determined not to
be a spectator of it.
"I must run in next door, Janet," she said, "and ask the Gorilla to do
an errand for me."
She left, omitting her customary lyrical phrases of affection. Janet
did not suspect the jealousy behind this omission. But she was
undeniably disappointed because Cornelia had not encouraged her to
discuss her friendships with Claude and Robert about whom her heart and
her thoughts were brimful.
Thus quickly did Cornelia damp down the fire of intimacy by treating the
exchange of self-revelation as a strictly one-sided transaction. She
had (so it struck Janet) a very low opinion of all confidences--other
than her own.
*II*
When the bell rang, Janet opened the door wondering why Robert had come
an hour before the appointed time.
But it was Claude who entered! He came in, like the god of the glorious
spring without, in his gayest, most engaging mood.
"What luck, to find you in!" he cried. "Janet, I've come in an open car
on the chance of taking you for a spin to Mineola to see the start of
the great Cross-Continental airplane race."
"Oh, Claude, how nice of you. But--I'm afraid I can't go."
"Why not?"
"Well--you see--I've promised to go out with Robert this afternoon."
His face clouded.
"And you never told me!" escaped from him.
"You are not my diarist," she said, faintly ironical.
"Please forgive me, Janet," he said, dropping his possessive tone, as he
reminded himself how touchy she was about her independence. "But I'm
disappointed, bitterly disappointed. I planned the excursion as a
surprise for you. And how I've counted on it!"
"Not more than I long to go, Claude. But what can I do?"
He took her hands in his, and said eagerly:
"_Must_ you keep the engagement? Can't you think of some excuse? Where
on earth was he going to take you to?"
"To the Japanese Industrial Exhibition at the Grand Central Palace."
He made a contemptuous grimace.
"A stuffy exhibition!" he exclaimed. "Good Heavens, Janet, why hesitate
to change your plans? It isn't as if Robert wanted you for himself, as
I do. He'll understand."
Janet wondered whether Claude would understand if she confessed that she
was actually more interested in the Japanese Exhibition than in the
cross-continent air race. But though she kept silent on this point,
because she really wanted greatly to go with Claude, she was rather
troubled. It was not easy for her to gratify a private desire at the
expense of a social obligation.
"I don't like to hurt Robert's feelings," she said, turning away in her
indecision.
"Oh, very well, if you don't wish to come with me!"
He flung himself sulkily into a chair.
Janet was astonished at his complete change of mood. She might have felt
hurt, had she not had a woman's instinctive weakness for spoiling the
man she was fond of.
She sat down irresolutely, and reflected that this would be the second
time she had broken an engagement with Robert.
"It's idiotic," he said, rising, with a sense of deep injury. "Here is
the most sensational race in a century, on a perfectly glorious day.
And I'm mad to be with you."
"Perhaps Robert is, too," she said, a merry light dancing in her eyes.
"Of course, he's no fool. He'd rather be with a wonderful girl than an
ordinary one. But what he wants more even than a wonderful girl is a
chopping-block, any chopping-block, for his sociological theories. Why
on earth did you leave your home, if all you crave is more instruction,
and if the only freedom you want is the freedom to stand on more
ceremony than before?"
"That has nothing to do with the matter, Claude," said Janet, refusing
to ignore the truth simply because it was disagreeable. "Robert may not
be offended at finding me away, but he is sure to be offended at finding
me rude."
"It seems to me that you are far more concerned with Robert's feelings
than with mine," said Claude, changing to a tone of melancholy reproach.
"But I really haven't a good excuse, Claude," she said, troubled, but
still indecisive.
"I know girls who wouldn't take two minutes to find an excellent one,"
he said, with a return of his superior authoritative air.
Janet's temptation was great; greater yet when Claude, in his most
handsome and daring manner, drew her out of the chair and put an arm
around her waist.
"It's an occasion in a million, Janet. I've set my heart on this ride
with you. What does it matter what Robert may think, or what anyone may
think, as long as we two want so much to be together? You must come. I
shall believe you don't care a straw for me, if you don't."
His flawless form and vibrant voice annihilated argument. With a happy
heart but a guilty conscience, Janet dismissed her scruples.
On the way out, she stopped in at Number Thirteen to beg Cornelia to
smooth matters over with Robert.
Cornelia, serene and all smiles again, promised to do her best.
*III*
Robert came home soon after and, getting no response from Number
Fifteen, went to his own room in Kelly's suite next door.
He got all the news from Cornelia, who politely tried not to gloat over
his disappointment. She professed to see no reason for finding fault
with Janet's easy submission to the force of an irresistible attraction.
As it was fairly plain that Robert would have preferred to be alone,
Cornelia perversely lost no time in proposing that he carry out his
original intention of visiting the Japanese Industrial Exhibition, she,
of course, to take Janet's place as his companion.
She had another reason for inviting herself out with Robert. This
reason was the Harlem Gorilla. He, though almost superstitiously
devoted to her, sometimes had to be "managed," in accordance with
Cornelia's view that love makes the most constant of men uncertain, coy,
and hard to please. Luckily, the treatment that Harry Kelly's case
required was not a subtle one, and so it was Cornelia's practice to
alternate a little encouraging discouragement, with a little
discouraging encouragement. On this occasion, by accompanying Robert
who didn't want her, and deserting Kelly who wanted her very much, she
neatly killed two birds with the same stone.
On the way to the exhibition, Robert gave Cornelia an account of his
latest occupation. He had been made organizing secretary of a body
called the League of Guildsmen. Was this a fanciful name for another set
of Outlaws? No, the Guildsmen were servers of the community, the
Outlaws were spongers on it.
"You have golden opinions of us," said Cornelia, theatrically. "I marvel
that you soil your garments by staying in our midst."
"It's nothing to marvel at, Cornelia. I had to learn what Kips Bay and
its slum population were at first hand before I could desire in earnest
to destroy them, root and branch. Familiarity, which sometimes breeds
contempt, often breeds homicidal mania. Do you recollect how Caesar
spent a short vacation among a band of desperate pirates and how the
experience filled him with a conviction that it was his duty to
exterminate them? Well, I am filled with the same conviction about Kips
Bay."
"What a passion you have for reforming everybody and everything, Cato!
I am sure it is a very noble passion, though it does include poor me in
its program of extermination. Still, I wonder whether reform, like
charity, oughtn't to begin at home?"
"I used to think so," replied Robert, unmoved by her sarcasm. "In my
schooldays, my elders obliged me to hack my way through obsolete French
tragedies or the differential calculus instead of allowing me to gain a
working knowledge of current English plays or of modern political
economy. And when I made a fearful hash of their instruction, they
voted me a miserable failure. Whereupon, I determined to reform myself
in order that I might reform the world. I am wiser now. I know that I
must reform the world before I can hope to reform myself."
"Cato, you are a perfectly gorgeous mixture of building air castles and
of seeing things upside down! One can never tell whether your head is
in the clouds or on the ground."
Robert indulgently proceeded to say that the Guildsmen were young people
of like sentiments with his own. In a general way, their aim was to
advance the idea that the producers and servers of society, being the
rightful possessors of the earth, must eliminate the profiteers and the
parasites who have usurped possession.
"If that is your aim, Robert, I predict that your league and your
secretaryship will have a short life and a merry one."
Robert laughed and admitted that he did not expect a long tenure of
office. The Guild plan was a European idea for which America was by no
means ripe.
"I fancy we are as progressive in industrial matters as the Europeans
are," said Cornelia, on her mettle.
"Oh, more so," replied Robert, drily. "Our giant industries lead the
world in maximizing the production of things of a mediocre quality and
the creation of human life of a contemptible quality. Yes, in crude
capacity, we are ahead of our European competitors. But in political
capacity, we still lag far behind. Hence the difficulty of
transplanting to our soil a high-class social policy like that of the
Guildsmen."
"But when this Guild plan dies a natural death, what forlorn hope will
you champion next?"
"I fear there'll be nothing left but to throw myself on the mercy of a
rich uncle."
"What, an uncle in a fairy tale?"
"No, an uncle in California, a real live one."
Cornelia evinced little more than a languid interest in Robert's
information. Fabulously rich relatives--who were cast for the parts of
_Deus ex machina_, but who never materialized in flesh or cash--made a
golden splash in the 'scutcheon of too many veteran Lorillard
inhabitants. She preferred a conversation dealing with more tangible
personages. Truth to tell, she rather hoped that Robert would try to
undo the painful impression he had made on her by his recent criticism
of her affair with Percival Houghton.
All the greater was her chagrin when he brought the talk around to the
subject of Janet.
*IV*
He began adroitly enough by complimenting her on the success with which
she had made Janet alive to the galvanic interests of contemporary life.
It was a miracle of education, he assured her, and he begged her not to
spoil the achievement by converting Janet to her favorite theory of free
love. He hoped she would rather warn her friend of the folly of
contracting a free union under existing social sanctions.
"Like the majority of men, you believe love and sex emotion to be one
and the same thing," she retorted, cuttingly. "That's why you have no
understanding of what freedom in love means."
"Now, Cornelia, I won't be drawn into a controversy on the merits of
free love."
"Then don't sneer at it."
"I don't. In fact, like every healthy young human being, I am by nature
something of a varietist myself. But, as a civilized member of society,
I'm bound to take the institutions of my country and generation as I
find them. I believe Janet will be better off, if she does so too. Let
her set out to alter or revolutionize our institutions, but not to defy
them."
"My poor Cato! Don't you know that numbers of the young women of today
are quietly doing what numbers of the young men have always done?"
"Living in illicit relations, you mean?"
"That is what a ridiculous man-made custom calls it."
"But, Cornelia, although many of the Lorillard girls have admittedly
flung a glove in the face of social conventions--"
"I'm not talking of Lorillard girls, Robert. I'm talking of teachers,
lawyers, stenographers--the 'respectable' girls who remain in their
schools and offices without any loss of self-respect or public esteem,
and who merely do what the 'respectable' men do, that is, pay a mock
tribute to outward appearances, and go scot free."
"Exactly, Cornelia," said Robert, triumphantly. "They pay a tribute to
appearances. They quietly disobey existing conventions. But they don't
defy them, much less try to alter them. They are frequently their
staunchest supporters."
"Just like the men."
"Just like the men. But you are wrong when you say they go scot free.
You are wrong again when you say that the tribute they pay is a mock
tribute. It is anything but that. It is an endless payment by
installments, a payment in degrading stealth and harassing secrecy."
"What are you driving at?"
"Janet is not the girl to pay a tribute of this kind," he said, with
emphasis. "If she champions the cause of free love, she won't do so
merely to experience the ups and downs of an underground existence. She
will do so, believing it to be a wise or progressive departure. And she
will defend her championship in the teeth of the whole world, regardless
of its effect on her future."
Cornelia received this speech unmoved.
"Well, why shouldn't she?" she said. "Others have endured much more for
their beliefs. To be candid, I really don't see how Janet's behavior
concerns you, any way."
"You forget, Cornelia, that I, too, talked modernism in a blue streak to
her before she broke with her people. And so I feel that I share with
you the responsibility for her present course."
"Oh, do you?"
"Yes. There's a lot of moonshine in Kips Bay that passes for modernity.
I think the least we can do is to show Janet that modernity is not
simply a new watchword for moonshine. We ought to prevent her from
being taken in by the illusion which the Outlaws produce of easy,
satisfying intimacies between the sexes."
A stream of silvery laughter escaped Cornelia. Then, in a studied tone
of superiority, she replied:
"My dear boy, the love relation between two individuals is strictly
their own private affair. It is nobody else's business whatever. I
have no right to interfere in Janet's intimacies, and neither have you.
Anyhow, I believe she is quite competent to stand on her own feet."
"I'm not so sure, Cornelia. Janet is utterly different from the
Lorillard Outlaw girl, or the Greenwich Village Bohemian girl. The
effect of Greenwich Villageism is to make irregularity (what regularity
so often is) a bore. The purpose of Lorillardism is to make irregularity
pay. But Janet is not likely to adopt a radical creed merely as a pose
or with an eye to its profit. She will adopt it in a spirit of sheer
blind self-sacrifice. And every advantage will be taken of her,
precisely because she's not a sex profiteer."
"Cato, the beginning of wisdom is self-knowledge. Have you ever heard
of any gain in self-knowledge without some loss of happiness? No. It
is a law of life which neither you, nor I, nor Janet can escape."
"But," he urged, "you must admit that Janet's case is a special one.
She has just left a home where purely private gratifications dictate
which conventions shall be _kept_; and she has entered this model
tenement life where, again, purely private gratifications dictate which
conventions shall be _broken_. She may not grasp this difference all at
once. Are we to let her inexperience cause her unnecessary suffering?"
"I, too, have suffered for my convictions, Robert!" she said, with a
conclusive gesture of impatience.
Robert felt like telling her that, at this moment, she reminded him
forcibly of the fox that had its tail cut off. But he didn't quite dare.
Naturally, under the circumstances, the visit to the Grand Central
Palace was a complete failure. Cornelia, loathing the exhibition,
seized the first available excuse for asking to be taken home.
The resentment she harbored was too strong to be hidden beneath the
ordinary civilities of polite intercourse. Her affection for Robert,
which had long been hanging by a slender thread, was now sharply snapped
through the complete revulsion of feeling she experienced towards him.
From her point of view, the fault was entirely his. She had always
hated what she termed his moralistic nature. But never before had he
shown such a callous want of sympathy with her past misfortunes or such
a frank hostility to her present outlook on life. What she did not
acknowledge to herself was that his concern for Janet had given her
_amour propre_ a mortal wound for which she could never forgive him.
On their return to the Lorillard tenements, she promptly called Harry
Kelly into Number Fifteen. The Harlem Gorilla (renicknamed Hercules as
a mark of favor) was highly flattered and only too willing to be a
listener and a comforter.
"Robert is getting to be quite impossible!" she exclaimed, with a lurid
Belasco intonation. "I can't imagine what has come over him, or why he
continues to honor the Outlaws with his presence, seeing that he is now
an enemy of freedom and not a friend of it. Hercules, will you believe
it, he cannot hear the word Lorillard so much as mentioned without
showing the cloven hoof."
*CHAPTER THIRTEEN*
*I*
While Robert and Cornelia were going to and from the Grand Central
Palace, Claude's car was carrying its occupants through pleasant
stretches of Long Island country to the Mineola aerodrome. The day, the
air, the landscape, and the man conspired to make the occasion an
intoxicating one for Janet.
Claude's gayety and personal charm were fully matched by his perfect
ease. This was the quality that magnetized her, it was so new in her
experience of American men. The men she had known in Brooklyn,
struggling professional and business men, wore their manners as they did
their Sunday clothes, with a painful effect of unfamiliarity. Their
behavior was as different from Claude's as a sputtering torch is from an
arc light.
In the company of women, these men were nearly always ill at ease.
Sometimes they acted obtrusively protective or aggressively possessive,
more frequently they were apprehensive, timid or even pitiably afraid.
Whatever they did, they did with constraint. And they never seemed able
to forget the towering fact that their manhood had an economic value.
They were as painfully conscious of this asset as an elderly maiden is
of her chastity--and they guarded it with the same zeal.
Janet was inexpressibly thankful that Claude had never treated her as if
she belonged to an unknown or unclassified species, and that he was not
constantly filled with a nervous dread that she might at any moment
begin picking his soul, if not his pocket.
They talked of everything under the sun; she of her childhood, her
school days, her aspirations; he of social or artistic doings in and
about New York, with the more notable and distinctive of which he had a
first-hand familiarity. But no matter how sober or philosophic the
topic chosen, it was sure, in some mysterious way, to be sidetracked
into the catechism of love.
Janet had all she could do to keep matters from taking too amorous a
turn. It was delicious to be made love to as audaciously as only Claude
could. It was great fun to tremble on the quicksilvery margin between
how much he dared and how little she permitted. And it was her native
mother wit rather than her instinct that set a limit to his impetuous
wooing.
As soon as they reached the aerodrome, Claude became a more
conventionally courteous cavalier again. And Janet got a glimpse of a
section of his life to which she had hardly given any thought.
*II*
The Trans-Continental Air Race had been widely advertised, and the
gigantic aerodrome was jammed with excited crowds. Claude at once
plunged his companion into the thick of things. Anybody and everybody
appeared to know him, and he knew everybody who was anybody. In swift
succession Janet was introduced to the superintendent of the grounds,
the president of the Aero Club, the chief contestants of the day,
several foreign aviators of renown, the naval officer who commanded the
first "blimp" across the Atlantic, and to so many other notabilities
that her head began to whirl.
Once or twice Claude left her to pay special homage to some lady,
frequently an elderly one and a personage of uncommon account. In these
intervals, while standing a little away from the throbbing, bewildering
spectacle around her, she attempted to give some perspective to her
impressions.
It was gradually clear to her that the spectators resolved themselves
into two classes: first, the _hoi polloi_ whose teeming throngs pushed
along the common passageways and packed the benches in the stands to the
point of suffocation; and then a small, compact group of men and women
whose breeding, dress and carriage would have differentiated them from
the other spectators even if the weather-beaten air of superiority with
which they promenaded within the fenced-off and sacrosanct places, had
not sufficiently done so.
Superficially, the attitude of these chosen ones towards the gallery was
the attitude of actors towards an audience: they affected to be
oblivious of its existence, and yet it was patent that they were
greedily conscious of the snobbish admiration and flattering envy which
the crowd radiated collectively and in its component parts.
Janet watched these bankers and railroad directors and senators with
their wives and daughters urbanely encircling the placid airplanes, the
restive airmen and the little extra demonstrations for the elect. And
it seemed to her that they appropriated the special privileges
inseparable from the governors of a democracy with an affably paternal
air which was as much as to say: "What a very democratic ruling-class it
is that runs this very democratic nation."
Of course she knew that they were not really thinking this. Seeing that
they were the ruling class, they ought to have weighty, superior
problems of finance, transportation or statesmanship at the back of
their minds. Had they? Or were they merely thinking that unless they
were on the _qui vive_ they might be caught in an awkward pose by one of
the brigade of camera men who were photographing celebrities for the
Sunday pictorial supplements and the cinema current topics.
Janet perceived also that the faces of the ladies and gentlemen of the
plutocracy, though set in hard lines and wreathed in hard smiles, were,
on the whole, much less hard than the faces of the poorer middle-class
people among whom she lived and moved and had her being. Their
complexions were far better, too. And they were healthier and robuster
and decidedly cleaner and politer.
Politer, but not better mannered. Temporarily, Janet might have been
deceived by the surface courtesy with which the men approached one
another and the ceaseless vehemence with which the women talked and
smiled, or rather, exhibited the whole of a fine set of front teeth from
the top of the upper row to the tip of the nether gum. But when she had
mingled with them at Claude's side, these same ladies that paraded their
toothful smiles so amiably for the photographer's benefit, had politely
but uncannily looked her through and through in the most literal sense
of the words. To put it bluntly, they had instantly sized her up as an
intruder from a sphere they had no personal contact with. True, they
murmured the necessary courteous phrases, but they did so to a creature
whose common humanity with themselves their glances insolently and
emphatically denied.
Had Claude sensed this, and left her alone to spare her (and perhaps
himself) embarrassment? The question made her feel uneasy and
disconcerted. It also made her wish him back, in the hope that his
presence would restore her confidence. What was keeping him so long
this time? By way of finding an answer, her eyes searched him out among
the machines.
She saw him, not very far away, in the midst of a group of three other
people: a couple in the prime of life, who were obviously the parents of
a young lady of about Janet's own age. The attention of the daughter
was fixed detainingly on Claude; that of the parents was fastened
proudly on their daughter.
Thanks to a fine eyesight, Janet was enabled to get an excellent view of
the young lady's appearance.
She was a tall, light brunette, and her frock, her sulky discontented
mouth and her affectation of stateliness were all highly fashionable.
So was her face, which had a tolerably clear skin and otherwise neither
a noticeable blemish nor a spark of fire. It was the kind of standard
feminine face just common enough in America to fit the popular
conception of beauty and just enough above the common to be in constant
request by illustrators as a model for the covers of monthly magazines.
It struck Janet that she was making some demand upon Claude which was
taxing his charm and diplomacy to the utmost. Eventually, as he took
leave of the group, she abruptly turned away from him, the back of her
shoulders expressing the most intense vexation.
*III*
Soon thereafter he was at Janet's side again, looking somewhat harassed.
"Those were the Armstrongs and their daughter, Marjorie," he said, in
answer to her look of curiosity.
"Who are the Armstrongs?"
Claude was taken aback by this question. In his world, where everybody
knew everybody else, the bare name of Armstrong had a very definite and
compact meaning.
"Dear little ignoramus! The Dupont Armstrongs, of course."
This addition meant very little more to Janet, although it rekindled a
vague memory that she had seen the name somewhere in the newspapers.
Politely concealing his wonderment, Claude explained more at length.
He said that Colonel Dupont Armstrong came of an old Southern family,
and was the active head of the great firm of Harmon, Armstrong & Co.,
the international bankers whose financial power had built golden bridges
between continents. His wife had a passion for collecting exquisite
jewels; he had a mania for hoarding Chinese vases. But the operation of
his esthetic taste being unreliable, he had struck up an intimacy with
Claude's father soon after he discovered this gentleman to be a
thoroughly dependable guide. In time, he became a regular patron of the
Fontaine galleries and his purchases of diamonds, necklaces and
porcelains had contributed appreciably to Mr. Fontaine's fortune.
Janet's curiosity in respect of worldly matters was much more quickly
satisfied than her curiosity in respect of people.
"Is Mr. Armstrong's daughter as charming as she looks?" she asked Claude
at the end of his explanation.
"Well, most men think so," said Claude, smiling. "Marjorie is
undoubtedly very beautiful and fully conscious of the fact. You may
have seen her portrait by Ben Ali Haggin in the last Academy exhibition?
It was a tone poem in russet brown, quite the stir of the season."
"Oh, I'm sorry I missed it. I've never been to an Academy exhibition,
Claude."
"How amazing! Not even to one?"
"Not even to one. Imagine how hopelessly ignorant I am of art!"
"Art! People don't go to the Academy in quest of art, you dear
innocent. It would be a waste of effort. They go as a compliment to
their friends whose portraits have been painted, not as a tribute to the
men who painted them."
But Janet was not to be deflected from her purpose.
"I played the spy whilst your back was turned," she said, "and watched
your pretty friend closely. She was evidently displeased with you.
What had you done?"
"Absolutely nothing. That's just Marjorie's way when she can't have all
she wants--which seldom happens."
"Then she wanted _you_?"
"Yes, for some party or other. But I'm not going to leave you merely to
gratify a passing whim of hers. Anyhow, it isn't so much a case of
wanting me to be with her, as of wanting me not to be with anybody
else."
"Rather dog-in-the-mangerish, isn't it?"
"Oh, all the tyrants of the earth are like that, especially the
fascinating feminine tyrants," replied Claude, in an attempt to
recapture his good spirits.
But it was plain that his mood had radically changed. For the remainder
of their stay he was preoccupied and his gayety was forced.
The cloud that this cast over their outing was not fully lifted that
day. Outwardly Claude recovered his equipoise and, on the way home,
tried to make up for his earlier abstraction by a deepened tenderness
towards his companion. But something was manifestly weighing on his
mind. Janet herself was in a pensive mood. She had been quick to
discern that in Claude's manner towards Marjorie Armstrong and the other
young women of his own set there was an inexpressible something which
was absent from his manner towards her.
This troubled and dissatisfied her. True, Claude no longer ventured to
treat her as flippantly as he treated Mazie Ross. But neither did he
treat her as finely as he treated Marjorie Armstrong. Why was this?
Did Claude still misinterpret her considered expression of disbelief in
marriage? She had a passionate longing to give love and to receive love
on a plane worlds above material considerations. Could no masculine mind
grasp the reality of this simple passion in a modern girl's heart? Was
it possible that her freedom from the vulgar commercial associations of
love was precisely what cheapened her to such as Claude?
The thought was ironic, it was maddening, it burrowed into one's soul.
But it did not rob Janet of her self-approval. She set a high value on
her integrity, and she was secretly resolved that by no mere man should
this value lightly be set aside.
*CHAPTER FOURTEEN*
*I*
The Fontaine galleries occupied a conspicuous building on Fifth Avenue
above the Forties. It was one of the show places in New York's
principal show street, and it received a daily stream of visitors as
much for the sumptuousness of its interior appointments as for the worth
of its stock and its exhibitions.
Mr. Rene Fontaine had inherited the business from his father, who had
left France in his boyhood and had begun in a small way as a jeweler on
lower Sixth Avenue. The founder of the house had built up a fashionable
trade in pearls and precious stones and, having a strong private fancy
for certain kinds of ceramic ware, had been led into adding a department
of rare porcelains.
After the death of the founder, the business was incorporated. Mr. Rene,
as president of the firm, continued his father's twofold policy with
such success that, when the uptown trend of high-class trade
necessitated a change of quarters, Fontaine and Company transferred
their establishment to one of the choicest corners of Fifth Avenue. Here
the ceramic and other works of art were displayed in galleries on the
second floor. And the patronage of these galleries was so profitable
that Claude had persuaded his father to open a gallery for paintings on
the third floor and let him conduct the new department.
Mr. Fontaine was a fastidious man and a stickler for appearances,
particularly British appearances. The fashionable set in New York aped
English manners, and consequently, the door attendant at Fontaine's was
an English youth and the salesmen in the art departments were Englishmen
with consciously superior airs fortified by British university
educations, Oxford accents and modish London clothes.
A humble art lover on a visit to the galleries might easily have been
frightened off by the sumptuous appointments, or overawed by seven or
eight swagger young gentlemen who would eloquently ignore him as he
crossed their several posts. They might have been so many heirs to
dukedoms engaged in a feeble game of passing themselves off as prosaic
American commoners. Yet they could pay a very flattering attention to
multimillionaires, especially of the feminine gender; and these, as
their astute employer knew, they attracted in considerable numbers.
Moving in and out among his father's young men, Claude might readily
have passed for one of them. He was like them in the ingratiating,
physical appearance that comes from a systematic cultivation of the
body, and his accent, if not of an Oxford, was of a Harvard flavor. The
only real difference was that he was several degrees less arrogant--not
that humility was one of his specialties, by any means.
*II*
About ten days after the Mineola outing he was seated at his desk,
opening the morning's mail. Two letters caught his eye. One, from
Marjorie Armstrong, supplemented Mr. Armstrong's invitation to the two
Fontaines to attend a week-end party in the Armstrong's Long Island
home. The other was a note from Cornelia, reading:
"Lothario, remember your appointment with us this evening. We shall sup
_al fresco_ in the Japanese pagoda on the Lorillard roof--Araminta,
Hercules and you will be the guests of honor. Only the chosen few are
invited: Lydia, Charlotte, Robert and the invisible Pryor. A special
attraction has been provided after supper--if indeed you need an
attraction other than the piteous spectacle of Araminta pining away for
you.
Cornelia.
This operatic reminder was much more welcome to Claude than Marjorie's
frigid message. Cornelia's latest party--parties trod on one another's
heels in the model tenements--was in celebration of Janet's admission to
the society of the Outlaws. Everybody counted on Claude to be the
bright particular meteor of the occasion. Yet how was he to follow his
natural inclination without offending his father, to say nothing of
Colonel Armstrong and Marjorie?
He turned over a volume of Muther's _History of Painting_ and, while
staring vacantly into its pages, raked his mind for a diplomatic escape
from attendance at the Armstrongs' party. He was still far from
successful, when his father approached to transact a little business.
This settled, Claude referred to a Van Gogh he had lately bought for
$5,000. Mr. Fontaine's face puckered quizzically.
"You are worse than the prodigal son," he said. "That young man
squandered his patrimony on real extravagances, while you fritter yours
away on unreal mockeries."
"Did you look at it, father?"
"Bless my soul, no. Its mere presence in the house is enough to upset
me. As soon as I learned of its arrival, I looked at a copy of
Ruisdael's "Mill" for ten minutes to steady my nerves. Whenever I hear
of one of your modern pictures, I steal comfort from an ancient one."
"But you can't judge a picture without seeing it," remonstrated Claude.
"My boy, you once induced me to spend ten minutes at a Matisse
exhibition in Stieglitz's Little Secession Gallery. What I saw there was
one horrible libel on humanity after another. That will last me a
lifetime, thank you."
Claude laughed. He and his father got along admirably by rarely
pursuing an argument beyond its illogical conclusion.
"What have you done with my particular 'libel'?"
"I had it sent upstairs, to join your other atrocities in the Chamber of
Indecencies."
This was a nickname Mr. Rene Fontaine applied to a little room on the
top floor where Claude had hung various "finds" in the later
Impressionist, Cubist and Futurist styles.
"Tomb, not chamber," said Claude. "Everything there is practically
buried."
"Not at all. Your friends are forever trotting upstairs. I even send
people there myself. Only yesterday I invited J. Tuyler Harmon to go
up. He said he enjoyed himself hugely."
"What brought the old rogue in here again?"
"His mistress. She's one of the chief patronesses of the Religion and
Forward movement. She had to attend a committee meeting downtown. He
escorted her from her apartments in the Plaza and waited here for her
until the committee adjourned. Out of that waiting I made several
handsome sales--but not of your pictures."
"Thus religion and art," said Claude, "are reconciled by the Mammon of
Unrighteousness."
*III*
This reflection was lost on Mr. Fontaine, whose thoughts had switched to
another line. He reminded Claude of the party they were to attend on
the Armstrong estate in Huntington, Long Island.
"Can't you lunch with me at one, Claude?" he asked in an excellent
humor. "Then we'll take the train together."
"I'm sorry, father, but I have another engagement this afternoon."
He elaborated the urgency of the matter with an anxiety that Mr.
Fontaine was quick to detect.
"An invitation from Armstrong Hall, Claude, is like an invitation from
Windsor Castle," he said, smiling. "It cancels all previous matters
except matters of life and death."
"I never felt less like breaking my word," countered the younger man
obstinately.
Mr. Fontaine did not press the point. His easy life and lucrative
business had enabled him to cultivate certain expensive reticences. It
pained him to drive anyone into a corner. As regards the three stages
of paternal activity--the interrogative, the declarative and the
imperative--he held that a competent father need rarely go beyond the
first two. Besides, he had found by experience that, if he took a
determined stand, his son frequently yielded to the mere pressure of
silent expectation.
Mr. Fontaine, who had been a widower for ten years, habitually gave
great latitude to Claude, his only son, of whom he was genuinely fond.
He frankly made "keeping up appearances" the basis of all conduct.
Apart from that, he had a naive Rousselian theory of education, to the
effect that, if you let a young man indulge all his whims and passions
to the top of his bent, he will settle down at thirty or thereabouts to
a sane and steady career.
As refined tastes and good physical habits came natural to Claude, the
operation of this theory had done him no bodily harm; but it had trained
him to an exaggerated concern for his own desires and an enormous
ignorance of other people's. Opposition to his stronger wishes was so
rare that, when it occurred, he was tempted to regard it as wicked, and
hence to crush it with a close approach to a feeling of
self-righteousness. To put it shortly, he had the makings of a
first-class tyrant, and he would have become a vicious one if his will
had been as pronounced as his desires.
"You haven't had a tiff with Marjorie?" asked the father, with a casual
air.
"No," said Claude. "We haven't quarrelled in three months."
"But you haven't seen her more than once or twice in that time."
"That's why, father!"
"Well, I'm glad you're not on bad terms with her, anyhow," repeated Mr.
Fontaine, a deep interest beneath his affected unconcern.
"Oh, no. On as good terms as she'll allow. I don't know whether you've
observed it, father, but it isn't easy to break through Marjorie's
reserve."
"You don't mean she's a cold nature!"
"Only when Lord Dunbar is around."
The trace of petulance in this reply was the scar of an old wound.
Claude, always first among his rivals on the battlefield of love, had
once been obliged to yield the supremacy. This had happened about a
year before, when the young Earl of Dunbar came to Newport in Marjorie's
train. With two fine strings to her bow, Marjorie actually made Claude
her second string. This sensation had been the talk of the smart set
from Bar Harbor to Palm Beach. And Claude had never quite forgiven the
very serious blow to his pride.
Mr. Rene Fontaine had no fault to find with Marjorie's supercilious airs
and snobbish predelictions. He liked and admired her unreservedly and
thought it quite natural that, in choosing a husband, she should prefer
a titled Englishman to a Yankee commoner. Why not? That London was the
real capital of American fashionable society was, after all, a fact no
socially ambitious American girl could be expected to ignore.
"I don't think she ever cared for Dunbar," ventured Mr. Fontaine. "At
all events, he's gone."
"Gone!"
"He sailed for England yesterday. I've just heard it from Mr.
Armstrong."
"Good Lord!" exclaimed Claude, walking up and down in marked agitation.
"My dear boy!" cried Mr. Fontaine, uncertain as to the cause of his
son's emotions, "she didn't take him after all."
"No. Probably she couldn't. I dare say she means to take me, now."
"Why, Claude, everybody supposed you two were as good as engaged long
before this Englishman came over."
"So we were--before he came."
"Well?"
"Well--he came."
"Really, Claude--"
"I mean, she preferred him to me. I don't blame her. He had more to
offer."
"What had that to do with it?"
"Everything. He's a British nobleman. I'm only an ordinary American.
He's got the entree of the best London circles. I've only the entree of
the best New York."
"That's a very unkind thing to say of Marjorie. I've known her since
she was a baby. She has her faults. But heartless calculation is not
one of them."
Mr. Fontaine's indignation did not sound convincing. Like Claude, he
knew that Marjorie would not hesitate to sacrifice her feelings to her
social ambitions.
"I don't say it's a fault," protested Claude. "She had the right to
change her mind. For women, the business side of marriage is the most
important side, since marriage establishes them in life positions. I
find it perfectly natural, therefore, that they should knock themselves
down to the highest bidder."
This was a sentiment he had adopted, with his own modifications, from
Robert Lloyd.
"Don't be cynical, my boy," said Mr. Fontaine. "Business is business,
but family life is quite another thing."
"I agree with you, father," said Claude, pacifically. "As I said
before, I don't blame Marjorie. And I'm not too proud to be her second
choice."
"That's the way to talk. Second choice, like second thought, is often
the sounder."
"Only, it happens that when _she_ changed her sentiments, _I_ changed
mine, too."
"You mean there's some other girl?"
"In a way--yes," replied Claude, awkwardly.
Then, on the impulse of the moment, he plunged into an account of Janet
Barr.
*IV*
Mr. Fontaine was distinctly uneasy. But he concealed his emotion as
well as he could.
"You haven't any wild plan of marrying this young woman?" he said,
adopting the air of a judicious outsider.
"I like her better than any girl I ever met."
"My boy, is that a good reason for marrying her? Take the word of an
elderly man: It isn't worth while to marry _solely_ for love, because
you are bound to fall in love with somebody else as soon as the
honeymoon is over."
"If not for love, what is one to marry for?"
"Why, for compatability, position, money--these are the considerations
that wise men weigh."
Both were silent for a while, Claude thinking sardonically of his
father's charge that his view of family life was too materialistic.
Then Mr. Fontaine resumed his objections.
"How do you intend to support the young lady?"
"Surely my interest in the firm is enough."
"You never made a bigger mistake, Claude. Perhaps the fault is mine,
though. For I have never driven home to you the relative value of an
income of twelve thousand a year. That is what you've been spending."
"Good Heavens, father! You exaggerate, surely."
"Not in the least. I am in the habit of keeping very careful accounts,
a habit it would do you no harm to acquire. Let me remind you that your
new car cost five thousand dollars. That puts your weekly outgo roughly
at a hundred and fifty, of which your chauffeur alone gets fifty."
"I'll cut down my extravagances! Besides, two can live more
economically than one."
"Can they? Well, just try it, my boy! I fear you've picked up that
idea in some novel. But don't forget that all novels are written by
middle-class people and reflect middle-class notions of economy.
Possibly a middle-class couple can save if they double up in one sordid
flat, sleep in one bed, limit their amusements to the few which please
both, compromise on the one or two friends whom neither dislikes too
much, and generally lead the spiritual life of the Siamese twins. But
this can't be done in our class! With us, the diverse activities and
needs of husband and wife make expenses for two run four times as high
as expenses for one."
Mr. Fontaine returned significantly to the assertion that he was in no
position to play the benevolent father. He would not deny that the firm
was doing business on a magnificent scale. But magnificence was costly,
on the debit side as well as on the credit side. There were ferocities
of competition that were slicing off the safe margins of profits,
besides pressing the management into transactions involving a peculiar
risk.
"Risk!" exclaimed Claude, greatly surprised.
Ha begged his father to remember the huge dividends recently declared on
Fontaine & Company's stock.
"I didn't say financial risk. There's a tremendous legal risk."
Mr. Fontaine felt that the time had come for Claude to learn more of the
technique of a big business in jewelry and the fine arts. He pointed
out that the war had caused a substantial reduction in the demand for
luxuries accompanied by a substantial increase in the tax upon them.
And he asked his son if he had never wondered why, in the face of this
handicap, the firm's post-war profits had exceeded the records of
pre-war years.
"Yes, it did puzzle me," admitted Claude. "But there's so much wizardry
in your management of the business--"
"No wizardry at all. One or two of the biggest firms land their prizes
without the Customs House being a penny the wiser."
Claude made a wild movement to rise, but fell back in his chair again.
"Then that blackguard was right," he cried, his face ashen.
"What on earth do you mean? What blackguard?"
"Hutchins Burley! He called me a diamond smuggler right out before
everybody at the Outlaws' Ball."
In the greatest agitation Mr. Fontaine pressed Claude for particulars.
When the whole story had been told, he breathed a sigh of relief.
"Nothing to worry over, thank goodness!" he said, reassuring his son.
"Nobody will pay the slightest attention to what a tipsy man blurts out
against the Fontaines."
"No?" Claude's tone was decidedly skeptical.
"No, they won't dare to."
"Anyhow, we're actually _in_ this smuggling game--" Claude went on
gloomily.
"Our competitors call it slight-of-hand organized."
The ghost of a smile flitted over Claude's face.
"And what do they call being at the mercy of a drunken cur's venom?"
"Don't rub it in, Claude. I blame myself severely for your
embarrassment. I ought to have forewarned you earlier. But it won't
happen again. Depend upon it, I shall lock that fellow's tongue, good
and tight."
"Is it really necessary for us Fontaines to have truck with such
degraded scoundrels?"
"Well, my boy, it isn't exactly easy to get certificated gentlemen for
the work," said Mr. Fontaine, stung into irony. "But don't let's go
into that now, Claude. You must have confidence in me. One of these
days I shall give you the history of the whole matter from A to Z."
"But look here, father. Suppose we were caught!"
Mr. Fontaine sat down in an armchair opposite his son and lighted a
cigar with leisurely grace.
"It's a possibility," he said, "a slim possibility. But we have
excellent friends."
"Government officials?"
"H'm--yes. More especially--there's Colonel Armstrong."
"Mr. Armstrong! You don't mean to say he dickers with backstairs
political grafters?"
"'Dickers' is hardly the word. Colonel Armstrong stands above, about
and underneath the political machines--both of them."
"Mr. Armstrong in the boodle game! I can scarcely believe it."
"Boodle game! Don't talk like a grocer or a reporter, Claude. Mr.
Armstrong is a lover of fine art who, like all sensible people, thinks
it monstrous to tax foreign works of art destined to do an educational
service here. By virtue of his influence at Washington, he has been
able to use his good offices to our advantage. The result is that the
Customs House officials are wise enough not to go behind our list of
import declarations."
"Does he get much out of it?" inquired Claude.
"What a brutal question, Claude! Armstrong is so rich that he has
nothing to live for except the luxury of being disinterested."
Mr. Fontaine added that there had never been any outright verbal
understanding between himself and his protector. Mr. Armstrong might be
said to have slid into the protectorate insidiously. He was chiefly
interested in the exquisite vases and textiles handled by Fontaine, and
he was probably ignorant of the fact that it was not these articles but
the precious stones that comprised the larger and more profitable
fraction of the smuggled goods.
"For the rest," said Mr. Fontaine, "he is, as you know, a steady
purchaser here. He buys whatever suits his fancy at cost price. We
needn't begrudge him the bargain."
"I wish our relations with the Armstrongs were not complicated in this
way," said Claude, with an ominous feeling that he, too, might be
knocked down at a bargain if the influential banker should fancy him as
a bridegroom for Marjorie.
Claude had always taken special pride in the irreproachable origin of
the Fontaine riches. He had looked up to his father as a convincing
example of the possibility of making trade both clean and aristocratic.
Mr. Fontaine's disclosures now robbed his son of this illusion, besides
confronting him with the sordid hazards of reality.
One of these sordid hazards was barely a week old. A new customs
inspector, in a fit of unsophisticated fervor, had stumbled upon an act
of smuggling in which the complicity of the Fontaines appeared in the
course of investigation. Only the lucky fact of Mr. Armstrong's nephew
being the Collector of the Port of New York had saved Fontaine & Company
from scandal, public exposure and humiliation.
"By Heaven!" said Claude. "We're indebted to Mr. Armstrong for being
out of prison!"
"Quite so," replied the father. "An American business man who desires
to keep out of prison must take one of two hygienic precautions. One is
to form a friendship with a leading financier or a political boss; the
other is to avoid being caught. I have done both."
Mr. Fontaine looked significantly at his son.
"Those plans of yours," he said, "about the William Morris art center
and all that--there can't be anything in that line if you marry a poor
girl, you know."
Claude was silent for a while. His father, watching him keenly and
sympathetically, supposed him to be in the throes of a fierce emotional
contest between his sense of duty and his love for Janet. Claude was
under the same delusion. In reality, the willful force that swayed him
was not so much inclining him to marry Janet as pushing him not to marry
Marjorie. For the moment, the easiest course to pursue was to yield on
the minor issue and gain time on the major one. He would give up the
evening with Janet and go to Huntington, but he would refrain from
committing himself definitely as regards Marjorie and marriage.
"I'll be in Huntington for dinner, father," he said briefly.
Mr. Fontaine, greatly relieved, patted his son's back affectionately and
walked away with a satisfied smile.
*V*
That evening, just before the theatres opened, a tall, thin man in a
taupe-colored flannel suit and a soft beaver hat came out of the
Commodore Hotel walked westward along Forty-second Street, and took an
uptown bus at Fifth Avenue.
Mark Pryor, in a very unprofessional mood, had the air of one who is
determined to be seen rather than to see. Considering the constant use
he made of his knack of fading out of his surroundings to the point of
almost total invisibility, this was not as easy for him as it sounds.
Easy or not, it was his mood. Mr. Pryor, whose gift for self-effacement
amounted to a miracle, needed a change. And he sought it by trying to
make himself manifest, as other people seek it by trying to hide.
He had not deserted Kips Bay. But the growing inquisitiveness of his
neighbors, and particularly of the acquaintances he had struck up in
flat Number Fifteen, had driven him to the expedient of running two
domiciles and of dividing his time between them. The choice of a room
in a first-class hotel had been dictated not by a craving for luxury but
by a sense of domestic propriety. "There are two things I can't live
without," he had once told Robert Lloyd. "One is an unfailing supply of
hot water, the other is perfect freedom to come and go as I choose. A
man can always get these treasures among the model poor or the unmodel
rich, but never in a middle-class home."
Robert had heartily endorsed this sentiment without any suspicion that
Mr. Pryor--whom some of the Outlaws suspected of being a fugitive
counterfeiter and others of being a shrinking novelist in search of
local color--perambulated from an army cot in his Lorillard flat to a
Circassian walnut bedstead in the Commodore Hotel. On the evening in
question, Mr. Pryor decided to explore a section of Manhattan which he
had hitherto neglected. Accordingly he boarded a cross-town bus going
east and alighted at the corner of Second Avenue and Seventy-second
Street.
Between this point and East End Avenue, he took a zig-zag course along
several side streets and main roads. Thus he sauntered past the
Vanderbilt tenements--the aristocrats of their kind--and through the
German and Czechoslovak colonies, which were remote enough from Times
Square to have retained some of their European flavor.
Presently he found himself in a very prettily lighted shopping section
of First Avenue, a section which reminded him faintly of the chief
street in some of the Teuto-Bohemian towns he had once traveled through.
Reaching the Eighties, he strolled westward again, not without a sigh of
regret as he noticed that the few quaint German or Slovak spots left on
the East Side were fast being submerged in the uniform drabness which
inevitably descends on all the quarters of an American city.
The cross street into which he turned was dimly lighted and quite
deserted except for one other pedestrian on the opposite footway. This
was a man whose hippopotamine dimensions instantly chained Mr. Pryor's
scrutiny.
Surely there were not two people in New York with the aggressive waddle,
the labored locomotion of Hutchins Burley? Pryor was in a holiday frame
of mind; but here, as usual, was opportunity knocking at his door when
he was in a mood to be "not at home."
"What must be, must be," he murmured, resigning himself to his fate.
He kept his eyes glued on Burley, and followed him slowly until he had
watched him enter a cigar and stationery shop at the corner. Walking
hurriedly past the shop window twice, he observed Burley, in a rather
secretive manner, handing the proprietor a small bundle of letters.
Then Pryor acted with lightning speed.
In less time than it takes to tell, he had darted down the dark basement
steps of the closed shop next to the tobacconist's and, after a brief
disappearance, had emerged again.
The man who came trudging up the steps, however, was not the agile,
immaculate gentleman who had descended a few seconds before. At least,
to outward view, it was a middle-aged man with stooping shoulders, a
painful limp, clothes that looked trampish and untidy, and a round hat
rammed Klondike fashion far down over his forehead.
This ugly looking customer lurched past the tobacconist's shop a moment
later, just brushing the sleeve of Hutchins Burley on his way out.
Wholly absorbed in himself, Burley paid no attention to the incident or
the cause of it. He plodded on up the street; but the man who had so
nearly collided with him went into the shop, made a quick
purchase--during which he took a good look at the shopkeeper--and then
came back to the street again with a haste that was scarcely in keeping
with his limp. By this time Burley had almost turned the corner of
Third Avenue, and Mark Pryor was obliged to throw his limp to the winds
and strike into a lively clip in order to keep his quarry within view.
Eventually, he contrived to be a passenger on the bus that carried
Hutchins Burley downtown, and got off with him at Seventeenth Street.
There he watched his man waddle heavily towards Irving Place and enter a
dingy old house in the middle of the block.
Mark Pryor followed slowly. As soon as the coast was clear, he crept
cautiously up the front stoop to look at the name plate on one side of
the doorway. With the aid of a pocket flashlight, he read the words:
"Japanese Consulate General."
"What in thunder has the Mikado got to do with Hutchins Burley's
smuggling adventures?" he asked himself, greatly perplexed.
An hour or so later, he repeated this query to a brisk, florid-faced
gentleman in the prime of life who was seated in what purported to be an
actor's agency in the heart of Times Square. The florid gentleman, who
looked much less like a theatrical agent than like a military man in
mufti, offered no solution to the enigma.
"Major Blair, I think I'm on the trail of something big at last,"
volunteered Mr. Pryor, hopefully.
"Possibly, sir, possibly," replied the gentleman, briskly.
But he paid only a languid attention to his visitor's spirited account
of how he had gradually wormed himself into the confidence of Hutchins
Burley. When Pryor finished, he said:
"Somebody else will have to take up the trail of Burley. Orders came
from headquarters this evening that you are to sail for France the day
after tomorrow. You will report in Paris to Colonel Scott at the
address in this letter."
"Foiled again," exclaimed Pryor, veiling his real feelings with assumed
good humor. "Whenever I'm on the point of nailing a case down,
headquarters steps in and calls a halt, as if I were the villain in the
piece."
He added sardonically: "What is the use of information fairly breezing
into my hands, so long as headquarters' notion of Secret Service is that
the only conduct becoming an officer or a gentleman is to keep a secret
dark."
"Mr. Pryor, orders are orders! The first duty of an officer of the
Secret Service is never to ask questions."
"Quite so, sir," returned Pryor coolly. "And yet the first duty of a
crack Secret Service officer is to ask questions all the time."
Major Blair stared at this independent, gifted member of his staff.
Nothing daunted, Mark Pryor took his sealed orders, saluted and left.
*PART III*
*JANET ON HER OWN*
*CHAPTER FIFTEEN*
*I*
Earlier in the same day, a special messenger from Claude had brought two
notes of regret to the Lorillard tenements, one for Cornelia and one for
Janet. A little before evening, these notes were followed by quantities
of flowers and fruit, which were for Janet alone. But Cornelia went
into ecstasies over the presents and caused the rooms of Number Fifteen
to ring with her _arpeggio_ laughter.
The note to Janet read:
Darling Janet:
Business interests and a promise made long ago make it imperative for me
to go to Long Island today. The worst of it is, I shall be away for
three days, and how unhappy this makes me, you can't conceive. Six days
without you will have loitered by when next we meet! Six endless days
away from the miracle of your soft voice and the wonder of your heavenly
smile.
I came back from Washington late last night, not knowing that I should
be prevented from seeing you today. Even so, I had my car driven, far
from its regular course, past the Lorillard houses. How I prayed that a
light from your little corner room would invitingly tell me that you
were still awake! But all was dark, and I had to be content to let my
fancy play around a certain maze of curly bronze hair, two eyes as
limpid gray as an Adirondack lake before dawn, and a pair of ruddy lips
that smile divinely or talk with so much sense and charm.
You are not like any other girl I have ever known, dearest Janet! I
think of you as a rare and delicate flower whose perfume holds my senses
as your spirit engrosses my soul.
I want you to have a happy evening, dear girl, despite my absence.
Only, every now and then, you are to give a passing thought to
me--disconsolate, forlorn impatient to be with you again.
Ever your
Claude.
Of course, in Claude's absence the party was declared off, all but the
supper in the pagoda.
Cornelia read the letter over twice. The second time, she uttered some
of the more lyrical passages aloud, rendering them with a faintly
exaggerated stress or mock-heroic inflection as the case might be.
"Exquisite!" she carolled, handing the note back to Janet. "A perfect
love letter! By what an expert hand!"
Lydia Dyson came in just then and had to be told all about the
disappointment. The author of "Brothers and Sisters," in an abbreviated
accordion pleated frock, a necklace of jade beads, and very French
shoes, looked as professionally Cleopatrish as ever.
"Janet," she said, knowingly, "Claude has gone to Huntington, to that
Armstrong girl, Marjorie--the one that was hotfoot after the Earl of
Dunbar. She didn't get the Earl, you know. Now they all say she'll
marry Claude. I bet she will, too."
"He doesn't love her," protested Janet.
"As if that made any difference! Every man needs a woman to represent
him in social life and to advertise the dignity and solidity of his own
rooftree. Any woman who can do these things satisfactorily qualifies as
a suitable wife. Men, you see, are more conventional than women. Or
perhaps I should say, more businesslike."
"Businesslike!" Cornelia interposed. "Say disgusting, and you'll be
much nearer the truth. Didn't I tell you, Janet," she continued, "that
men think of women in only one way--and that a beastly one?"
"On the contrary, they think of women in two ways," contended Lydia in
her drawling Southern tongue. "To a man, all womankind is divided into
two groups: the woman who stands for his home, and all the others--the
women who stand for his pleasure. The one woman is a necessity; all the
others a luxury. Every man gets the first at any cost, and then bids
for one or more of the second, if he has the price."
"Don't be bizarre and crude, Lydia," said Cornelia, not relishing this
analysis in Janet's presence.
"Crude?" said Lydia, repelling the charge as melodramatically as it was
made. "It is not I who am crude. It is man. It is man who divides our
whole sex crassly into these two groups. It is man who sees in every
woman either a housekeeper or a wanton. It is man who fixes a trade
price for affairs of the heart and rates marriages by their market
value. Call _this_ crude, if you like! Or call it an incurable
blindness to the differing blend of vital forces that makes each woman
unique. In this respect, how unlike men are to us, who see in every man
a new, mystic union of protector, lover and father of our children!"
"The new trinity!" chanted Cornelia, with a significant laugh. "But I'm
sure, dear Lydia, that not every woman has _your_ gift for discovering
this mystic trinity in so many unique specimens of the other sex."
"Dear Cornelia, you flatter me. My only advantage over other women lies
in the prudence which caused me to get a husband before I set out to
make the discoveries you allude to."
"Don't let us talk about marriage as it exists today," said Cornelia,
parrying the blow as best she could. "Marriage is so banal."
"Yes, and so convenient," drawled Lydia, who reluctantly supported her
husband in idleness and luxury. "Also, so expensive. Husbands now come
dearer than ever before in the history of family life, while lovers
never were cheaper."
"Lydia is joking," said Janet, sending her clear, mollifying voice into
the breach.
"No, I'm not joking," said Lydia, with the utmost gravity. She lit a
cigarette, adding as she did so:
"I'm making hay while the sun shines."
"Does your husband agree with you on this point?" asked Janet,
curiously.
"My dear, he's used to me. He takes my word for everything. Also my
money. But I'm frank to say that I don't hold with Cornelia's notions
about free love. They're too fantastic and impractical. I hold with the
French system: Marry first and experiment afterwards. It's not logical,
Janet, but it works well. If you experiment first, you are sure to be
done out of marriage, and you may even be done out of love."
"Really, Lydia," said Cornelia, now thoroughly incensed. "You must know
that Janet believes, as I do, that love is a surrender, not a sale. She
isn't offering her affections to the highest bidder."
Janet, intervening, remarked that this was true; but, as she found
Lydia's views very interesting, she begged Cornelia to let their visitor
have her say.
"Oh, very well," said Cornelia, biting her lip.
"That's right, Janet," said Lydia Dyson, grateful for her support. "I'm
sorry to disagree with Cornelia. But in this matter, she's all at sea.
Believe it or not, in modern life, love is a commodity for sale, like
any other commodity. What else can you expect? Do you know of any other
gift in the possession of man, woman or child which is not sold to the
highest bidder? Doesn't a playwright subdue his creative faculty to the
requirements of the manager who offers the most royalties? Doesn't the
novelist or the musician or the engineer do the same in his line? How
indeed can they help it in a country where everything is bought and
sold, where the greed and gluttony of men put everything under the
hammer, from a glass of water to a draught of genius? Why marvel that
women have to sell their bodies, when poets and artists have to sell
their souls?"
"Take it from me, Lydia," Cornelia burst in, caustically, "when you
apply the oratorical powers of Robert Lloyd to the moral principles of
Mazie Ross, the product is hard to beat!"
"Cornelia, you wouldn't say spiteful things like that if you only knew
the truth about sex relations. I forgive you because you don't."
"If _I_ only knew!" said Cornelia. She gave a florid operatic laugh.
"Do you really suppose I _don't_ know?"
"No woman does who hasn't been married to a man. Not until she has been
chained in wedlock for some time does she see the cloven hoof or feel
the mark of the beast, or get her fanciful pictures about love put in a
proper perspective. That's one thing marriage does for a woman."
"By your own admission, then," remarked Janet, "Cornelia is right in
thinking that the game isn't worth the candle, isn't she?"
"Dearie," said Lydia, with unction, "ask the most wretched wife on
earth, and she'll answer: 'Tis better to have wed and lost, than never
to have wed at all.'"
*II*
Cornelia, observing that Janet took Claude's absence with surprising
composure, wondered whether it was a case of still waters running deep.
It was partly that, but there was another reason. The apparent ease
with which Claude had yielded the preference to Marjorie's claim upon
his time carried with it an unflattering implication as regards the
value he set upon Janet's friendship. To be sure, there was the
rapturous love letter. But fine words buttered no parsnips; they
pleased the ear but they neither explained Claude's course nor justified
it.
Thus Janet was as much nettled as disappointed by her lover's absence.
Yet it was not her way to stew in misery. And her control of her
feelings was made easier by the pressure of some secretarial work for
which she had just been engaged by Howard Madison Grey, the playwright.
Immediately after supper, therefore, Janet left her friends in the
Japanese pagoda on the roof, having arranged to spend the evening in
Harry Kelly's office in flat Number Thirteen, where she proposed to
practice on the athlete's typewriter.
Her object was to "increase her speed" so that her most recent position
might be made securer.
Through the Collegiate Bureau, to which Cornelia had introduced her, she
had already been given two opportunities in business offices downtown.
She had lost them both within a week, her refinement and charm of manner
having been voted poor substitutes for the experience that she still
lacked.
The fault was not wholly Janet's. Before she left home, she had taken a
course in shorthand and typewriting (in the teeth of her mother's
opposition) at an Evening High School. It was one of those carefully
pasteurized courses for which the American educational system is famous;
it was showy, time consuming, and totally useless. But how could Janet
have known that high-school stenography was as pitiably inadequate to
the practical needs of a modern mercantile office as high-school French
or German to the practical needs of a tourist on the Continent?
Not wanting to get into the bad books of the Collegiate Bureau, Janet
was anxious to avert a third discharge. Moreover, her post with the
playwright had the intrinsic merit of being more congenial, as well as
more lucrative than any she had filled before.
Janet was thankful that Cornelia would be occupied with the party, for
her efforts to make herself more competent invariably excited her friend
to derision. Cornelia, like a true-blue Kipsite, was no devotee of good
workmanship. Endowed with the makings of success in any one of half a
dozen professions, she had achieved failure in all of them, her
inveterate lack of industry and application having botched a promising
career in turn as an author, singer, painter, dancer, decorator and
dress designer.
A born worker, Janet stood in no danger of imitating Cornelia's business
vagaries. She could not have afforded it, anyway. Unlike Cornelia, she
had no private income, her only resources being a small bank deposit (a
relative's bequest), which was dwindling with alarming rapidity. Thus,
inclination and necessity were as one in spurring her on to making a
success of her new post as typist and amanuensis for Howard Madison
Grey.
*III*
The keys of the typewriter were going at a merry gallop when Robert
Lloyd, who had a desk in Kelly's office, came in.
"What do you mean by breaking the commandments of the Lorillard
Tenements?" he said, putting a sheaf of papers on his desk and getting
ready to attack them.
"Which commandments, Robert?"
"All ten. The first five prohibit any useful work in the daytime on
penalty of loss of caste. The second five prohibit the same at night on
penalty of excommunication, if not expulsion."
She laughed and asked him why he hadn't joined Cornelia's supper party
in the Japanese pagoda. He explained that he had been detained at a
meeting of the Guildsmen's League, of which he was now the organizing
secretary. He added that he had brought home a quantity of raw material
to be hammered into a tract on Waste in Industry, a job which would take
him all night.
They each buckled to the task in hand. Janet liked to work in the same
room with Robert, who knew when to be silent as well as when to talk.
He treated her like a fellow worker of his own sex, paying her none of
that exaggerated show of consideration which most men give to women
outside their own family circle. Thus his presence stimulated her and
in no wise interfered with the concentration demanded by her typewriting
practice. When she reached a good stopping point, she offered to help
him. He accepted the offer eagerly and dictated several letters to her.
"A good job," he said, after she had handed him the typed sheets to be
signed, "and a quick one, too. You're improving by leaps and bounds.
Indeed, you might develop into a 'speed demon,' but for your un-American
weakness for accuracy."
"I've got to be accurate. I do all sorts of work every morning, for Mr.
Grey, the playwright."
"Grey? The author of 'The Love that Lies' isn't he? The play that ran
for two seasons. Is he very exacting?"
"No, but his wife is. She keeps an eagle eye on all the typing that's
done for him."
"Why?"
"Why? Well, she serves him as a sort of combination mother, nurse,
watchdog, and general superintendent. Just as most wives do."
"And just as most wives will continue to do, until they choose an
independent living in preference."
"Do you think that women are solely responsible for the social
arrangement by which two distinct things like motherhood and
housekeeping are tied indissolubly together?"
"No. And I don't believe that men are solely responsible, either."
"Aren't they?"
"No. Remember, marriage was not always what it is today. In the middle
ages, the home was also the place of business, and the wife was her
husband's business associate as well as his mate. Later, when business
went out of the door, slavery came in through the window. This was not
exclusively man's doing. Men and women muddled things up together.
Honors are very nearly even on that score."
"Be fair, Robert! Hitherto, men have had all the power."
"Yes, and women have had all the glory. They were every bit as well
satisfied to belong to the fair, privileged, and law-evading sex, as men
were satisfied to belong to the coarse, responsible, and law-making sex.
As soon as the majority of women follow the lead of Lady Cicely in
'Captain Brassbound's Conversion,' that is, as fast as they 'scorn
death, spurn fate, and set their hopes above happiness and love,' they
will be able to cope with man's supremacy as successfully outside the
home as they have already done within it. What is more, they will work
their will in public much more openly and honorably than they have so
far worked it in private."
"Men are always declaring that women could easily get full independence
if only they would go about it in the right way. Clearly, men know the
right way and women don't. Cornelia says that if they are so very much
cleverer than we are, it is a pity they don't set their wits to work so
as to help instead of hindering us in the struggle for equality."
"Never mind what Cornelia says," exclaimed Robert, energetically. "She
is crazy on the subject of men; that is why she keeps forever harping on
it. One way of doing this is to accuse men of everything evil under the
sun, from the creation of God to the invention of the cardboard
kitchenette flat. Please don't join her in the vulgar senseless game of
pitting one sex against the other."
"You do Cornelia an injustice. She doesn't maintain that all women are
angels and all men devils. Nor do I. But suppose some men are angels.
I shouldn't care to be a housekeeper for the archangel Gabriel."
Robert hoped that any lady who consented to share Gabriel's bed and
board would find the archangel up-to-date and gentlemanly enough to
excuse her from washing dishes and scrubbing floors. Why should an
archangelic or any other sort of gentleman shortsightedly insist that a
talented bride on her way to becoming an excellent banker, merchant, or
politician, should transform herself into a mediocre woman-of-all-work?
Why should he consider his own bargain bettered by such a questionable
transformation?
"On the other hand, Janet," he added boldly, "why should an up-to-date
young lady jump from the devil of housekeeping into the deep sea of free
love, as I fear you will end by doing if you follow Cornelia's
suggestions?"
She knew that he had Claude in mind. But she was unable to take offence
at his uncandid candor and his disinterested interest.
"Robert, what a tantalizing mixture of the liberal and the conservative
you are!" she exclaimed, refusing to take up his challenge.
"I am merely the child of my age, Janet. I was born with reactionary
habits and nursed on radical ideas. All logic counsels me to become an
enemy of existing institutions; all instinct drives me to conduct
operations within the enemy's camp. I betray under two flags."
"You can't make me believe that. If you were all kinds of a traitor,
you wouldn't be such a jolly companion to work with or to talk to. Do
you know the most delightful thing about you, Robert?"
"Modesty forbids me to say--but not to hear. Tell me."
"It is the fact that you can behave towards a woman friend as frankly
and decently and unsentimentally as you would towards a man friend. You
can't imagine what a relief it is to a girl to know one man who'll
always treat her man-to-man fashion."
"Will I? Janet, if you were perfectly sure of my future conduct you'd
find me an insufferable bore. Besides, no fascinating woman ever wanted
to be treated like a man--at least not for long at a time. You won't be
the first exception."
"Don't be silly, Robert. If ever I should get married--which Heaven
forbid!--it will be to a man like you, one who can work with me without
constantly remembering my sex."
"Oh almost any man will be able to do that, as soon as being your
husband loses its novelty for him. Still, I'm grateful to you for your
well-meant opinion, Janet. I shall try to deserve it by offering you a
small business partnership."
He rapidly sketched the plan he had in mind, pointing out that, as only
her mornings were engaged by the playwright, Grey, she might help him
afternoons with the Guild League's work. He was hard pressed for
assistance; the League could just afford a part-time worker; there was a
good deal of editing and typewriting which he was sure she could
undertake.
Janet begged to be taken on trial. The bargain was struck amid the
sounds of merrymaking that came, none too faintly, through the walls of
flat Number Fifteen. She remarked that Cornelia's party appeared to
have been a huge success after all.
"Yes, it has given birth to the firm of Barr and Lloyd," said Robert,
jestingly.
He was aware of the conflict in Janet between the temptations of the
love chase and the attraction of the force that moves the sun and the
stars. And he fondly believed that this conflict no longer existed in
himself. The love of man for woman against the love of life! He had
made his decision, she had not.
Two questions remained uppermost in his mind. One was: "Could he
capture Janet's great natural talents for his own side, the side, not of
the fires of sensuous gratification but of the flame that burns at the
heart of the world?" The other was: "Did Janet really want him to act
towards her precisely as towards a man?"
Curiously enough, the irrelevance of the second question to the first,
did not strike him.
*CHAPTER SIXTEEN*
*I*
In the days that followed, Janet's morning duty as Mr. Grey's secretary
and her afternoon employment as assistant to Robert left her with very
little leisure. Such time as remained on her hands she spent chiefly
with Cornelia or with Claude.
Neither of these friends exhibited much enthusiasm over Janet's
determined effort to earn her own living. Cornelia looked with
ill-concealed disfavor on an exhibition of diligence which, besides
being foreign to the atmosphere of Kips Bay, used up so much of her
protegee's time that the burden of housekeeping in flat Number Fifteen
was inevitably shifted to Cornelia's own shoulders. As for Claude, his
reaction, equally cool, was governed partly by the scarcity value which
now attached itself to Janet's leisure hours, partly also by another
reason which he hardly dared to face.
Somewhat daunted by the lukewarm attitude of her friends, Janet
nevertheless kept courageously on with the task of making her
independence secure.
Howard Madison Grey, the playwright, was then composing his fourth play,
"Cleopatra's Needle." His practise was to dictate rapidly to Janet for
an hour and a half, after which she was expected to typewrite the
sketchy dialogue, changes in grammar and syntax and even in diction
being left, as time went on, more and more to her discretion. As the
work appealed to her interest as well as to her skill, she despatched it
with zest.
Bit by bit, two drawbacks emerged, however. One was Janet's liability
to mistakes because of an absorption in the plot, an absorption so deep
as to interfere seriously with quick mechanical transcription. The
other was Mrs. Howard Madison Grey.
This lady had opened a correspondence with her future husband during the
short run of his first play, "The Spice of Life," for the hero of which
(a masterful but incorrigible polygamist) she had conceived an unbounded
admiration. The correspondence ripened into matrimony, Mrs. Grey
bringing her spouse the money and influence that lifted him swiftly to a
solid place in the theatrical world.
When his second play, "The Love that Lies," financed by her father,
scored a big hit, she noticed that he became the gratified recipient of
a good deal of feminine attention. Mindful of the polygamous experiments
of his two masterful heroes, she remembered that precaution is the
better part of safety. Marriage had considerably modified her point of
view, and she now had a conviction that there should be a yawning gulf
between the pluralistic imaginings of the dramatist and the monogamic
behavior of the husband.
To give this conviction shape, she enframed him in a watchful
chaperonage. Chaperonage was not the name she used. She called it,
"being a helpmeet."
The helpmeet's first official act was to place Mr. Grey's communications
with the world beyond-the-home under a strict censorship. She looked
after his correspondence, registered his engagements, and kept in
telephonic touch with him when he went to a club or directed a
rehearsal. Let the enemy idolaters capture him (if they could) through
the barbed-wire entanglements of her devotion!
In the same spirit, she threw cold water on his business-like proposal
to do his writing in an office building. Such an environment, she said,
would kill the soul of his art. Her substitute was a study, comfortably
fitted up in his own home; and there, accordingly, he and Janet were
obliged to work.
Mrs. Howard Madison Grey was a woman of fixed opinions. She was firm in
the belief that a transcendent artistic talent was lodged in her
husband; she was equally firm in the belief that a transcendent
executive talent was lodged in herself. On the principle that it pays
to specialize she held it to be no more than right that any power or
glory acquired by the name of Howard Madison Grey should be exercised by
the executive branch of the family. About this opinion she was entirely
frank.
"I've made him," she said to Janet, one day. "Why should I let others
enjoy the fruit of my labors?"
This was said as much in warning as in confidence. Janet was greatly
amused, inasmuch as her feelings toward her employer were unsentimental
to the point of prosiness.
None the less, Mrs. Grey's never ending readiness to suspect Janet of a
design on her vested interest in Mr. Grey soon became a great bore. It
was also somewhat trying to the nerves. At the most unexpected moments,
the good lady would shoot in upon her husband and his assistant like a
cartridge from a noiseless gun, and explode into embarrassing
explanations.
Until, at length, Mr. Grey's perfectly correct and unemotional attitude
towards Janet underwent a dangerous change.
*II*
By the time Claude returned from his visit to Huntington, Janet had
already settled down to her new routine. Claude did not seriously
object to her morning engagement with Howard Madison Grey, but her
afternoon work in Kelly's study--the work she did for Robert's
league--this he viewed as an intolerable encroachment on his privileges.
Out of regard for Janet's warm espousal of the cause of woman's
independence, he concealed his feelings as best he could. But he used
his prodigal gifts without scruple to lay siege to Janet's hours of
employment, especially to her afternoons. Four or five days out of
seven, on one excuse or another, his imposing car would draw up to the
Lorillard tenements, and its owner, handsome, dashing, persuasive, would
tempt Janet away from laborious tasks to the delights of an excursion.
In vain did Janet upbraid herself each time she yielded, or school
herself diligently against the next occasion. When the next occasion
came, she found, as likely as not, that she was as helpless as ever to
resist his thrilling voice, his ardent eye, and his magnetic wooing.
In Cornelia, Claude had a subtle and insidious agent on his side. If
Janet gave a crushing refusal to one of Claude's incitements to truancy,
Cornelia would flash a reason in his favor as unanswerable as a sword.
Or if Janet, persuaded, but not convinced, gave signs of an uneasy
conscience, Cornelia was always ready to annihilate doubt with some apt
quotation (or misquotation) such as "Work no further, pretty
sweeting--youth's a stuff will not endure."
Naturally, this spasmodic holiday making was the cause of frequent
delays in the performance of the work for the Guildsmen's League. Janet
tried to make up for lost time by working late at night, a practice that
drew upon her the reproaches of Cornelia who alleged that it interfered
with her sleep. Needless to say, Cornelia exhibited no compunction for
the serious inconvenience that all this caused Robert. Far from it.
She appeared to get a lively satisfaction from seeing his partnership
bedeviled and his remonstrances ignored.
As a fact, she feared that Robert's influence over Janet was quietly
undermining her own ascendancy. But what was there to justify this
fear? Janet's enthusiasm for the free life of the model tenements had
not yet abated and her admiration for Cornelia's talents was still very
strong. But a straw showed Cornelia which way the wind was blowing.
Janet was gradually but steadily cutting down the amount of housework
she did in Flat Number Fifteen!
The terms on which Cornelia chummed up with her successive companions
always included an agreement to have the housework done, share and share
alike. In practice, the adoring friend took over most of Cornelia's
share, at least while the friendship was in its early stages. As time
went on and illusions were shattered, the unequal burden was slowly
whittled away by the active partner until Cornelia's shoulders stood in
grave danger of having a full half of the cleaning and marketing thrust
upon them. At this point, she generally unearthed a new adorer as well
as excellent reasons for breaking with the old one; and then she started
the whole cycle afresh.
Like her predecessor, Janet had begun by doing far more errands, dishes
and cooking, than a strictly fair division called for. At first, the
respective proportions had stood at about three-quarters for Janet and
one-quarter for Cornelia. After a few days of this arrangement, however,
Janet had begun so to manipulate matters that her allotment fell rapidly
to one-half. And the pendulum had swung gaily on. In fine, within a
few months of her arrival, this new convert to modernity had reversed
the original proportions so that they now stood at about three-quarters
for Cornelia and one-quarter for Janet.
If this was feminism--Cornelia confided to Hercules ("among the
faithless, faithful only he")--it was feminism with a vengeance!
The situation was without precedent in the history of the Outlaws of
Kips Bay. Even more unprecedented was Cornelia's acceptance of the
situation. But this compliance of hers was in no wise dictated by
generosity or affection, as some innocents conjectured. Cornelia was
simply shrewd enough to see that Janet was the magnet which had drawn
back to Number Fifteen its departed splendor and had restored to herself
the position of the first lady of the Lorillard tenements, a position
she greatly prized.
One question that Cornelia put to Hercules was: Had Janet's repugnance
for housework merely kept pace with her growing appetite for women's
rights, or was Robert Lloyd at the bottom of all the mischief? How
should the mute and glorious Hercules reply to a purely rhetorical
query?--Cornelia favored the second explanation, a fact which boded
Robert no good.
*III*