BAD GIRL
BY
VIÑA DELMAR
[Illustration]
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
Published, April, 1928
Second printing, April, 1928
Third printing, April, 1928
Fourth printing, April, 1928
Fifth printing, May, 1928
Sixth printing, May, 1928
Seventh printing, May, 1928
Eighth and ninth printings, July, 1928
Tenth printing, August, 1928
Eleventh printing, August, 1928
Twelfth printing, September, 1928
Thirteenth printing, September, 1928
Fourteenth printing, October, 1928
Fifteenth printing, October, 1928
Sixteenth printing, December, 1928
Seventeenth printing, March, 1929
_To_
GENE
WHO WAITED DOWNSTAIRS
BAD GIRL
PART ONE
CHAPTER I
“Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main,
Many a stormy wind shall blow
Ere Jack comes home again.”
Some one had brought a ukulele. Some one who hit the strings with a gay
discordancy, a gleeful insolence that seemed to say, “Sure, it’s out of
tune. Who cares?”
The last agonizing chord rode out on the Hudson, and a voice falsely
keyed and tuneless followed with a startlingly lengthy “agai-ain.” A
burst of high feminine laughter completed the grotesque performance.
The famous and beloved excursion steamer _Burma_ glided on through the
shining night. One fancied that she tossed her head disdainfully at
the private boats that fluttered by like small, graceful birds. They
were snobs who offered the silver river and the gleaming sweet-smelling
night to a small, select company. The _Burma_ was the real aristocrat
of the Hudson. Her gentility was not so easily blasted that she feared
the touch of the rabble. She could afford to open her doors to the
sweltering hordes and give them music, dancing, refreshments as the
advertisements reported. She gave them the magic of a river moon and
romance, too, and all for a dollar twenty-five.
The passengers of the _Burma_ danced and sang snatches of current songs
that were born to live for one rollicking hour like the vows that were
whispered in darkened recesses of the boat. Sizzling sodas, red and
gold, leaped up through yellow straws to the moist and smiling lips
of bobbed-haired damsels. Cigarettes gleamed in the darkness, and here
and there an adventurous maiden bared white knees to the cool air. The
flat-dwellers of New York were forgetting factory and office in the
tolerant laws of the gold and white _Burma_.
Eddie Collins stood at the rail of the boat with his back to the water.
Both hands were in his pockets, and across one arm a woman’s cape, a
frail black wisp of silk, trailed dejectedly.
He scanned the faces of the laughing couples who drifted past him, and
on his own face was a confession of anger that simmered darkly within
him.
“Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main”--the unmusical voice had
resumed its chant, and Collins turned toward the rail and looked down
into the glimmering river. He was very young. His hair was a sandy,
disorderly crown, for he scoffed at the pomades that brought hard
and shiny tidiness to the hair of the other youths. Collins’ eyes
were blue. They were sharply questioning eyes that proclaimed a keen
intelligence that still groped blackly and unsatisfied within itself.
The line of his chin was strong and firm. It was a chin that had taken
blows and had proudly thrust itself upward at knowing the man who could
give them. His mouth was large. There was a suggestion of obstinacy in
his lips.
Somewhere a girl screamed with laughter. Eddie Collins clenched his
jaws, and his eyes became hard blue chinks. The laughing girl’s voice
was raised now in mocking supplication. “Oh, Billy, ple-ease. I just
combed my hair.”
More laughter. Other voices mingled with the girl’s. Eddie Collins spat
contemptuously. “God-damn fools,” he said.
An adventurous breeze sprang up from the river and in passing touched
lightly the black wisp that lay on Eddie’s arm. The wrap stirred
languidly, a trifle impatiently, and slipped from Eddie’s disinterested
hold. It lay on the deck of the _Burma_, an aromatic heap of silk. A
wrap with a Lanvin green lining that was splotchy and torn but still
defiantly Lanvin green.
He left it there for a moment; then, regretting the childishness of the
deed, flung it carelessly over his arm again.
“Many a stormy wind shall blow....”
And now the player of the untuned ukulele was drawing nearer, and Eddie
listened to her song with a lazy interest.
“Ere Jack comes home again.”
She rounded the corner of the boat and stood not three feet from Eddie
Collins. Her voice was young and husky, her mouth wide and red.
“Sailing, sailing--”
The ukulele dropped to her side. She reached into the pocket of her
flame-colored sweater and brought forth a chocolate almond.
An older girl, tall, thin, indifferently blonde, with her hair
decorously imprisoned beneath a net, came from around the corner as
though she had been following gay, fleet steps at a distance and had
just caught up.
The two stood together wagering on the endurance of a candy-box cover
that leaped the waves happily unconscious of the fate that would
soon overtake it. Then the girl with the ukulele saw Eddie, and her
breeziness suffered a momentary squelching under his sullen scrutiny.
She was resentful of that moment, and her eyes beneath piquantly
narrowed brows questioned his right to quench her buoyancy. Then she
smiled. At herself, perhaps, for the moment she had stood with her
laughter paralyzed on her lips and the angry gaze of the sandy-haired
boy upon her.
The green of the cape lining caught her attention, and with a gleeful
impudence she struck a chord on her ukulele and sang:
“Sweetie went away and she didn’t say where,
She didn’t say why, oh, I hope that I die!”
Eddie concentrated his whole attention on a cigarette. He would be
damned if she’d drive him away.
Far down the deck a voice suggestive of soiled Lanvin green was once
more begging “Bill-ly” not to muss her hair, and the ukulele continued:
“Sweetie went away.”
Eddie’s cigarette described a fiery arc on its way to the river. He
lit another, and the girl made a funny little clicking noise with
her tongue and told her companion in disconcertingly loud tones that
she just loved nervous men. The older girl was still watching the
river. She was completely unaware of Eddie’s existence, and therefore
the remark seemed pointless. She did not answer, and apropos of her
friend’s silence the incorrigible ukulele player turned to Eddie and
sang:
“You know I’m lonesome,
You’re lonesome, too.”
Eddie shrugged his shoulders noticeably and took a step toward the
girl. There was a fatalistic acceptance of her advances in his mien.
She wanted to know him, and, after all, the atmosphere discouraged
solitude.
“What makes you think I’m lonesome?” he asked. His question was not
put in a softly inquiring manner, but truculently, after the manner of
Harlem swains.
She was practiced. Her determination to establish social relations did
not shrivel at his tone. She laughed at him. Her wide red mouth and the
eyes that were dark and glowing gave themselves up to a great hearty
laugh at Eddie Collins.
“I knew I’d get you to talk to me,” she said.
“Oh, that was it?”
“Sure. You didn’t think I wanted the pleasure of your company, did you?”
“Gee, you’re fresh, aren’t you?”
“Just fresh enough,” she responded.
Her teeth flashed whitely behind the generously proportioned scarlet
lips. Her eyes frankly revealed the idea that lay so close to them.
She wanted to be kissed. Not at that moment, of course, but Eddie knew
the routine. At first they would toss mildly insulting wisecracks back
and forth; then gradually the artless phrasing of their speeches would
take on a slightly yellowish tinge. Significant smiles and glances
would accompany the degeneration of their chatter. It would become
quite the thing to place smutty interpretations on every word passed
between them. Then she would move with him into a darkened corner
and permit him to kiss her, to paw her unrestrainedly. The limit?
No, she would not go the limit. She would lie against his shoulder,
moist-lipped, panting, but ever alert lest the purely physical barrier
that guaranteed her self-respect be taken from her.
Oh, yes, Eddie knew, but he was not conscious of having so gloomily
detailed how far one could presume on the somewhat vulgar virginity of
the lower middle-class girl.
“Who’s with you?” he asked.
She motioned carelessly toward her companion. “Edna, my brother’s lady
friend,” she replied.
The older girl, hearing her name, turned curious eyes upon the two.
Flushed with self-consciousness at the importance of her social
obligation, the girl with the ukulele made the one-sided introduction.
“This is Mrs. Edna Driggs.”
Eddie touched his hat and said, “I’m pleased to meet you.”
Edna did not move from her position at the rail. She smiled at Eddie,
exhibiting teeth that had gone to the dentist too late. The mutual
friend suffered great embarrassment at Edna’s silence but overcame it
by assuring herself that she had done the proper thing. So reasoning,
she turned her back on Mrs. Edna Driggs and said to Eddie, “Who’s with
you?”
She was looking at the cape, and Eddie frowned. “A bimbo,” he told her.
“Picked her up on Seventh Avenue. She wanted to go for a sail so I took
her. She met somebody she knew on the boat and canned me.” He smiled
ruefully. “Didn’t even know her name,” he added. “What’s yours?”
“Dot.”
“That’s not a name,” he said. “That’s punctuation.”
She laughed and gave him a playful little push suggestive of long
familiarity. He didn’t mind. The hard blue chinks had widened into
palely pleasant eyes. On a Sunday excursion one slim round-breasted
girl is as desirable as another slim round-breasted girl, for they are
all misers.
“Of course, my name’s Dorothy. Dorothy Haley. What’s yours?”
“Joe,” he replied. Mysterious and unexplainable is the urge in
extremely young men to conceal their real identities. He was not
thinking that he had lied, so mechanically and absently had the name
leaped to his lips.
“Joe,” she repeated. She was standing close to him now, and her eyes,
dark and thoughtful, were considering the glittering river. “Aren’t you
going to tell me your last name?”
“Sure. It’s Williams.”
“Joe Williams. I use to know another guy named Joe. He had a dandy job
at the Chevrolet service station.”
Without reasonable excuse or preamble, Eddie suddenly pulled her close
to him and kissed her. She was not surprised or angry, and he had known
that she would not be. He liked her. The routine leading up to the kiss
had been different with her. She had not insisted on a conversation
replete with double entendres. It was not delicacy in Eddie that made
him welcome the change, just that he was tired of the other.
There was no embarrassment between them now. Nothing in their words,
facial expressions, or actions suggested that they had kissed.
Edna, the lady friend of Dorothy’s brother, left off staring at the
river and shifted her gaze to them. It was frankly inquisitive, but not
unkind.
“Think she saw us?” Eddie whispered.
“Don’t care if she did,” Dot responded blithely. “She won’t tell my
brother. She says you can’t watch a girl hard enough to keep her good,
if she don’t want to be.”
Eddie nodded gravely. That sounded like brilliant summing up of a
situation to him. He surveyed Edna interestedly. “She looks kind of
young,” he decided at last.
“Oh, no,” Dot said, smiling faintly at the blindness of man. “Edna’s
twenty-eight. She’s got a kid four years old. His name’s Floyd. Her
husband was killed on the railroad two months before the kid was born.
She got ten thousand dollars for his death.”
“That’s fine for your brother,” Eddie remarked.
Dot laughed shortly to show her appreciation of his sally and hurried
on. “Oh, my brother isn’t after her money. He gets seventy-five dollars
a week himself. He won’t let me put a penny in the house. Some brother
I got.”
“I’ll say,” Eddie agreed. “Where do you work?”
“On Twenty-third Street.”
“Stenographer?”
“No, just a typist.” Her lashes, soft and silky, fluttered as she
raised an anxious gaze to his face. Her eyes were pleading, her tone
apologetic, as she said, “I could ’a’ learned shorthand. My brother
wanted to send me to school, but I was crazy. You know how it is, I
wanted to get to work.”
He nodded understandingly.
“What do you do?” she asked him.
“Radio,” he replied laconically.
“Gee,” she said. There was admiration and awe mingled in her
exclamation. “Hard work, ain’t it?”
“Naw,” swiftly and emphatically.
“We got a set. My brother built it.”
“Everybody’s got a set,” Eddie said crushingly.
“Yeh, I guess that’s so.”
Conversation languished, and they stood looking at each other. After a
moment Eddie asked, “Say,” pointing to the ukulele, “do you really play
that thing?”
“Sure. I play it swell sometimes.”
“What do you mean, sometimes?”
“Well, it’s according to what I’m playing.”
“What can you play good?”
“Do you know ‘It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More’?”
Eddie nodded. Who in the year of our Lord 1923 didn’t know “It Ain’t
Gonna Rain No More”? “Go ahead, play it,” he ordered.
Dot sat down on a camp stool and began:
“It ain’t gonna rain no more, no more,
It ain’t gonna rain no more.
How in the world can the old folks tell
That it ain’t gonna rain no more?”
There was something pathetically sweet about her. She was so eager to
please. So anxious to be obliging. Even the untrained ear of Eddie
Collins cringed at the horrible chords that came forth so brazenly
from the ukulele. She was like a good child dancing for company.
No ability, but plenty of willingness. Her brows were knit with
earnestness. Her eyes never left the fingers which she placed with such
painful accuracy in the wrong places. Eddie smiled.
“It ain’t gonna rain no more, no more....”
And she was darn pretty, too. Gee, what soft-looking skin.
“That it ain’t gonna rain no more.” ...
The ukulele was quiet. The earnest eyes looked up at Eddie from their
task.
“Yeh,” he said by way of approbation. “Let’s talk.”
A thin-faced, sleek-haired youth wearing white trousers came suddenly
from around the corner of the boat.
“Miss Higgins wants her cape,” he said to Eddie.
Eddie’s hands dug deeper into his pockets. His shoulders became a shade
more rounded. He said, “Tell Miss Higgins to come for it herself.”
The thin-faced youth smiled. “One doesn’t say those things to a lady,”
he told Eddie, loftily.
“No? Well, you tell what’s-her-name to come get this coat herself.”
“Perhaps she doesn’t care to speak to you,” suggested the other.
“She didn’t mind early this evening,” said Eddie. His eyes narrowed
again. His mouth was a crooked line when he spoke.
“Just what do you mean?” The boy with the sleek hair was quick to leap
at Eddie’s insinuation.
Dot’s teeth tore nervously at her nails. She had once seen a pale-faced
fellow with greased hair reduce an automobile mechanic to a meek and
bloody pulp.
“Look here, Buddie,” Eddie’s tone was not unpleasant now, but his eyes
still squinted, and his lips were thin and jagged. “I have no pick with
you.”
“But I have with you,” replied the other.
Eddie’s hands flew out of his pockets, and Dot uttered a tiny cry as
the pale-faced youth came toward them.
The woman, Edna, left her place at the rail. She did not appear to
hurry, but suddenly she was between Eddie and the other youth.
“One moment,” she said.
Eddie glared at her. His eyes were hot and red with fury. In that mad,
whirling eternity just before the first blow is struck, every man is
wildly, gloriously primitive. In the blackness of club and nail, of
tooth and claw, woman’s business was to stand aside till the cry of the
victor split the silence. Woman and foe never appeared simultaneously
upon the horizon of the primitive warrior, and so, harking back to the
Stone Age, the brain of the fighting man is unprepared for the active
presence of a woman on the battle-ground.
Edna, tall and smiling, stood between the two young men. The black silk
cape lay over her arm now. It had fallen to the deck with Eddie’s first
decisive movement.
“You get the hell out of this.” Eddie spoke quietly between his teeth.
The woman laughed and flung the cape across the arm of the sleek-haired
boy. “Here’s Miss Higgins’ cape,” she said. “Tell her that Carbona is
great stuff.”
She laughed again, and forcing her arm through his, walked him back
toward his crowd. He was an easier subject than Eddie would have been.
The youth had not really wanted to fight. His fear of Eddie’s contempt
had made him aggressive. He welcomed the peace-making efforts of Edna
Driggs.
Eddie Collins didn’t. “Your friend is pretty God-damn interfering,” he
said to Dot.
“Don’t be sore,” she begged. “I’m glad he didn’t hit you.”
“What! That little monkey-faced fool?”
“Oh, I know you could have licked him, but I’m glad you didn’t fight.”
A couple passed them, carrying cigarettes that glowed brightly in the
night. Beneath was the lustrous, splashing river, and above, a tranquil
ceiling of stars.
“Funny,” Dot said, and her voice was low. “We see each other here
tonight and then never again.” She waved toward the place where Edna
had disappeared with the sleek-haired boy. “Why did you meet that
Higgins girl, I wonder? It wasn’t for anything. You just meet and talk
and fight and forget. I wonder why.”
“Say, what are you talking about?”
She smiled a little, and her eyes were wide and childish in the
moonlight. “I feel mopey now,” she said. “It’s ’cause they’re playing
sad music, I guess.”
She leaned against the rail and listened. Some one who could coax forth
all the native pathos and grief there is in the melody was playing
“Aloha Oe” on a steel guitar.
“Ain’t that sad?” Dot asked. “Gee, it makes me feel so soft.” She
reached for his hand, and these two children stood together, silent and
solemn, on the deck of the noisy _Burma_. “Gee, I could cry,” she said.
“Honest to God, Joe, I could cry.”
Her dark, full lips quivered, and his grasp on her thin, nail-bitten
fingers tightened ever so slightly.
“My name’s not Joe. It’s Eddie. Eddie Collins,” he said, and his tone
was harsh and angry.