Willie had arranged for supper at home. As they left the theater and
sped through the streets crowded with uncharacteristic mobs Persis
thought longingly of the tango-hunts she had indulged in during the past
season. But there was no one to dance with her now. And she realized
that she would be impossibly conspicuous as a cafe-hunting bride with a
husband who abhorred this whole chapter in the chronicle of diversion.
Alone with Willie in the Enslee palace, which Ten Eyck described as "a
sublime junk-shop," Persis was oppressed to melancholia. The air that
came in at the windows had a mournful breath. The peculiar aversion for
the city, that overtakes New-Yorkers in the late spring seized her and
shook her. The mansions neighborly to theirs were boarded up now, with
only a caretaker's window alight here and there. There was nobody even
to summon by telephone as a rescuing third party to make a crowd out of
the appallingly tiresome duet with Willie.
"This town is a cemetery," she exclaimed, as she quenched her eighth
cigarette stump. "Opening a house here now is like opening a grave in
Woodlawn at midnight. You've got to take me away or leave me in
Bloomingdale."
"What about Paris?" Willie suggested.
She remembered Ten Eyck's eyes, and said, "Let's make it London."
"I'll get what I can to-morrow. You wouldn't like to cross in the
yacht?" he asked, haughtily. "_Isolde's_ all right in the ugliest
weather."
She shook her head violently, and yawned and spoke so eloquently of her
fatigue that he slunk away to his own room.
The next day he set his secretary to work running down a berth on a
steamer. Everything seemed to be gone. People whom the panicky times had
reduced from wealth to anxiety were crossing the ocean to places where
they could economize without ostentation. The final report was that the
only suitable berth was the imperial suite on the new _Imperator_.
"Did you grab it?" said Willie. The secretary shook his head.
"Why the devil didn't you?" Willie snapped.
"They ask five thousand dollars for it."
Even Willie winced at this. "I don't want it for a year," he groaned.
"Just one voyage."
"It has a private deck, a drawing-room, two bath-rooms, two servants'
rooms--"
The "private deck" decided Willie; but when he told Persis he laid
stress on the price he paid; not from any braggart motive, but as a
pathetic sort of courtship.
Persis smiled a little. It was something. But when she found the private
deck she took pains to invite other passengers she knew to make it their
own piazza. Among the passengers were Mrs. Neff and Alice.
* * * * *
After Persis had thwarted Alice's elopement with Stowe Webb the boy had
been tempted to go to Mrs. Neff and plead with her to withdraw her ban,
seeing that he was now a man of affairs with an assured income. But he
imagined what she would say when she asked him the amount of that
income; and he imagined her smile. She did not have to ridicule his
fortune. The sum itself was so petty that it ridiculed itself.
He and Alice had met clandestinely a few times at the houses of friends,
but both were young and both were timid, and their friends were cynical
with discouragement. Alice wanted to go to watch him off at the dock,
but had not dared, and only sent him a tear-blotted steamer letter. And
while he was down in his state-room reading it she was locked in her
pink-and-white virginal chamber crying her blue eyes crimson on her bed.
She never spoke of him to her mother, and Mrs. Neff did not know what
had become of him.
So the two child-lovers pined away. New York became a deserted village
to Alice, and Stowe found the ocean a congenial waste, for he felt in
his breast an Atlantic loneliness. Nor was Paris less sad; its
allurements were only thorns; he felt that he must be true to his little
wife-to-be, and it seemed that even to indulge in the more innocent
gaieties would belie his desolation.
Then Mrs. Neff grew just a trifle too shrewd. Noting that Alice never
spoke of Stowe Webb, she made up her crafty old mind that the two young
wretches were meeting secretly. Since nothing happened at all, she all
too cleverly decided that something was about to happen, and resolved to
nip the passion-flower in the bud. She read Alice a long curtain-lecture
on the perfection with which children obeyed their parents when she was
young, then dilated on the advantages of European travel in broadening
the mind, and drew such a glowing portrait of her own benevolence in
offering Alice the opportunity of going abroad that the girl began to
foresee what was coming, and what real motive was actuating her mother.
By the time Mrs. Neff arrived at the heartbreaking news that she was
about to drag Alice off to Paris the simple child was able to dissemble
her ecstasy and give a convincing portrayal of a daughter who would
rather go anywhere on earth than to France. Like Br'er Rabbit, she
pleaded not to be thrown into the briar-patch of all places. So she was
thrown into the briar-patch. Alice was on her way to Paris.
She took Persis into her confidence, and Persis found a dreary pleasure
in the joke. She even forbore to warn Alice against the folly of
marrying into poverty. She was not so satisfied with her own triumph as
to recommend her example to others.
There was, as there will always be, a certain joy in having the best and
the most expensive things of every sort. But there was, as there will
always be, a disappointment in getting by merely wishing or commanding;
especially as the fairy gift of wishes has always carried a few
amendments: "You may have anything you wish for except--" Whereupon the
"excepts" become the only things sincerely wishable.
Persis found London at the height of its June festivity. The President
of France was visiting the King of England, and there were state
banquets and state balls and state everything, mingled with private
celebrations that rivaled them in pomp; and a horse-show, and
horse-races, regimental polo tournaments; the annual hysterical
wholesale celebration of nothing in particular.
Many of Persis' school-girl friends were duchesses, countesses,
marchionesses, mere ladies. Lady Crainleigh, whom Persis had once beaten
in a potato-race at a country horse-show in Westchester, gave a dance
where seven hundred guests were present and where titles were as common
as pebbles on a shore. Persis wore her "all-around" diamond crown, and
danced with a Russian grand-duke and a prince or two.
The tango and the turkey-trot had spread overseas, and royalties trod on
Persis' toes as they bungled the steps like yokels. It was fantastic to
hear the trashy tunes of American music-halls resounding through the
ballrooms of mansions and palatial hotels.
At the Royal Ascot the Queen sent a duke to fetch Persis to the royal
box, and spoke amiably of her sister.
But, however Persis glittered abroad, when the inevitable time came to
become mere woman and go to bed, she must always return to the nagging
presence of Willie, infatuated the more by the inaccessible distances
her soul kept from his.
With his harrowed face, his unwelcome caresses, his unanswerable prayers
for a little love, he ceased to be tragic. He became a pest.
Persis was learning wherein wealth, as well as poverty, has its
poverties, its nauseas, its petty annoyances, its daily denials, its
hair-cloth shirts.
She began to feel that if she had married Forbes and made her own
clothes she could not have grown wearier than she grew from putting on
and taking off the complicated harnesses devised by intoxicated
dressmakers.
Sometimes she declared that she would rather trim one bonnet and wear it
the rest of her life than try on any more of the works of the mad
hatters of Europe.
And what mockery her splendor was!--for the ulterior purpose of
gorgeousness is love. Humanity has stretched its mating season
throughout the whole year, but the meaning of bright plumage remains an
invitation to courtship, a more or less disguised advertisement:
"Behold, I am ready. I am desirable!"
Persis was dressing herself up for yesterday's party. Men courted her
still, slyly and disgustingly, but she felt herself insulted by the
adventure, degraded by the implications. Whatever other faults she had,
Persis was not promiscuous. There was nothing of the female rake in her
nature. She was meant to be loved by many and to love one. Her heart had
selected its one among the ones; but the hand had married elsewhere.
There was great danger for her soul if she did not meet that One. And
greater danger if she did.