CHAPTER I_Play the Game!

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PLAY THE GAME!

RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL

[Illustration: Publisher's logo]

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

NEW YORK :: LONDON :: 1924

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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TO MY BROTHERS

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Books by

RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL

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CORDUROY

NARRATIVES IN VERSE

JANE JOURNEYS ON

PLAY THE GAME

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D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

New York London

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PLAY THE GAME!

CHAPTER I

There was no denying the fact that Honor Carmody liked the boys. No one

ever attempted to deny it, least of all Honor herself.

When she finished grammar school her mother and her gay young stepfather

told her they had decided to send her to Marlborough rather than to the

Los Angeles High School.

The child looked utterly aghast. "Oh," she said, "I wouldn't like that

at all. I don't believe I _could_. I couldn't _bear_ it!"

"My dear," her mother chided, "don't be silly! It's a quite wonderful

school, known all over the country. Girls are sent there from Chicago

and New York, and even Boston. You'll be with the best girls, the very

nicest----"

"That's just it," Honor interrupted, forlornly.

"What do you mean?"

"_Girls._ Just girls. Oodles and oodles of nothing but girls. Honestly,

Muzzie, I don't think I could _stand_ it." She was a large, substantial

young creature with a broad brow and hearty coloring and candid eyes.

Her stepfather was sure she would never have her mother's beauty, but he

was almost equally sure that she would never need it. He studied her

closely and her actions and reactions intrigued him. He laughed, now,

and his wife turned mildly shocked eyes on him.

"Stephen, dear! Don't encourage her in being queer. I don't like her to

be queer." Mrs. Lorimer was not in the least queer herself, unless,

indeed, it was queer to be startlingly lovely and girlish and appealing

at forty-one, with a second husband and six children. She was not an

especially motherly person except in moments of reproof and then she

always spoke in a remote third person. "Honor, Mother wants you to be

more with girls." Then, as if to make it clear that she was not merely

advancing a personal whim,--"You need to be more with girls."

"Why?"

"Why--why because Mother says you do." Mrs. Lorimer did not like to

argue. She always got out of breath and warm-looking.

Her daughter dropped on the floor at her feet. Mrs. Lorimer had small,

happy-looking, lily-of-the-field hands and Honor took one of them

between her hard brown paws and squeezed it. "I know, but--_why_ do you

say so? I don't know anything about girls. Why should I, when I've had

eight boy cousins and five boy brothers and"--she gave Stephen Lorimer a

brief, friendly grin--"and two boy fathers!" Her stepfather was not

really younger than his wife but he was incurably boyish. The girl grew

earnest. "Please, _pretty-please_, let me go to L. A. High! I've counted

on it so! And"--she was as intent and free from self-consciousness as a

terrier at a rat hole--"all the boys I know are going to L. A. High! And

_Jimsy's_ going, and he'll _need_ me!"

Her stepfather laughed again and lighted a cigarette. "She has you

there, Mildred. He will need her."

"Of course he will." Honor turned a grateful face to him. "I'll have to

do all his English and Latin for him, so he can get signed up every week

and play football!"

Mrs. Lorimer did not see why her daughter's finishing need be curtailed

by young James King's athletic activities and she started in to say so

with vigor and emphasis, but her husband held up his long beautifully

modeled hand rather in the manner of a traffic policeman and stopped

her.

"Look here, Mildred," he said, "suppose you and I convene in special

session and consider this thing from all angles and then let her know

what it comes to,--shall we? Run along, Top Step!"

"All right, Stepper," said the child, relievedly. "_You_ explain it to

her." She went contentedly away and a moment later they heard her robust

young voice lifted on the lawn next door,--"Jim-_zee_! Oh, Jimsy!

Come-mawn-_out_!"

"You see?" Mrs. Lorimer wanted rather inaccurately to know. "That's what

we've got to stop, Stephen."

He smiled. "But--as your eldest offspring just now inquired--why?"

"_Why?_" She lifted her hands and let them fall into her lap again, palm

upward, and regarded him in gentle exasperation. "Stephen, you know,

really, sometimes I feel that you are not a bit of help to me with the

children."

"Sometimes you do, I daresay," he granted her, serenely, "but most of

the time you must be simply starry-eyed with gratitude over the

brilliant way I manage them. Come along over here and we'll talk it

over!" He patted the place beside him on the couch.

"You mean," said his wife a little sulkily, going, nevertheless, "that

you'll talk me over!"

"That is my secret hope," said Stephen Lorimer.

It was all quite true. He did manage her children and their

children--there were three of each--with astonishing ease and success.

They amused him, and adored him. He understood them utterly. Honor was

seven when her own father died and nine when her mother married again.

Stephen Lorimer would never forget her first inspection of him.

Nursemaids had done their worst on the subject of stepfathers; fairy

tales had presented the pattern. He knew exactly what was going on in

her mind, and--quite as earnestly beneath his persiflage as he had set

himself to woo the widow--he set himself to win her daughter. It was a

matter of moments only before he saw the color coming back into her

square little face and the horror seeping out of her eyes. It was a

matter of days only until she sought him out and told him, in her

mother's presence, that she believed she liked him better than her first

father.

"Honor, _dear_! You--you mustn't, really----" Mildred Lorimer insisted

with herself on being shocked.

"Don't _you_, Muzzie? Don't you like him better?" the child wanted

persistently to know. "He was very nice, of course; I did like him

awfully. But he was always 'way off Down Town ... at The Office. We

didn't have any fun with him. Stepper's always home. I'm glad we married

a newspaper one this time."

"Stephen, that dreadful name.... What will people think?"

Her new husband didn't in the least care. He and Honor had gravely

considered on that first day what they should call each other. It seemed

to Stephen Lorimer that it was hardly fair to the gentleman who had

stayed so largely at The Office to have his big little daughter and his

tiny sons calling his successor Father or Dad, and _Papa_ with all its

shades and shifts of accent left him cold. "Let's see, Honor.

'Stepfather' as a salutation sounds rather accusing, doesn't it?

'Step-pa,' now, is less austere, but----"

"Oh, Stephen, _dear_!" They were not consulting Mrs. Lorimer at all.

"I've got it! It's an inspiration! 'Stepper!' Neat, crisp, brisk. Means,

if any one should ask you, 'Step-pa' and also, literally, stepper; a

stepper; one who steps--into another's place."

"_Stephen_----"

"Well, haven't I, my dear?" He considered the three young Carmodys,

nine, seven, and five. "Steps yourselves, aren't you? Honor's the top

step and----"

"Oh, Stepper, call me Top Step! I like that."

"Right. And Billy's Bottom Step and Ted's the Tweeny! Now we're all

set!"

"Yes," said Honor, contentedly. She herded her little brothers out of

the room and came back alone. "But--what'll I tell people you _are_?"

"Why, I think," he considered, "you're young enough and trusting enough

to call me A Writer."

"I mean, are you Muzzie's step-husband, too?"

It was the first time she had seen the lightness leave his eyes. "No.

_No._ I am your moth--I am her husband. There is no step there." He got

up and walked over to where his wife was sitting and towered over her.

He was a tall man and he looked especially tall at that moment. "Her

plain--husband. Extremely plain, as it happens"--he was himself again

for an instant--"but--_her husband_." It seemed to the child that he had

forgotten which one of them had asked him the question and was

addressing himself to her mother by mistake. He seemed at once angry and

demanding and anxious, and she had never seen her mother so pink.

However, her question had been answered and she had affairs of her own.

She went away without a backward glance so she did not see her

stepfather drop to his knees beside the chair and gather the quiet woman

roughly into his arms, nor hear his insistent voice. "Her husband. The

_first--husband--she--ever had. Say it, Mildred. Say it._"

And now Honor was thirteen and a half, and tardily ready for High

School, and there were three little Lorimers, twins and a six months'

old single. Stephen Lorimer, who had been a singularly footloose world

rover, had settled down securely in the old Carmody house on South

Figueroa Street. He was intensely proud of his paternity, personal and

vicarious, and took it not seriously but joyously. He was dramatic

critic and special writer for the leading newspaper of Los Angeles, and

theoretically he worked by night and slept by day, but as a matter of

puzzling fact he did not sleep at all, unless one counted his brief

morning naps. His eyes, in consequence, seemed never to be quite open,

but nothing, nevertheless, escaped them.

An outsider, looking in on them now, the erect, hot-cheeked, imperious

woman, a little insolent always of her beauty, and the lolling, lounging

man with the drooping lids, would have placed his odds unhesitatingly

on her winning of any point she might have in mind. Even Mildred Lorimer

herself, after four years and a half of being married to him, thought

she would win out over him this time. Honor was the only daughter she

had, the only daughter she would ever have, for she had definitely

decided, at forty-one, to cease her dealings with the long-legged bird

who had flapped six times to her roof, and it seemed intolerable to her

that--with five boys--her one girl should be so robustly ungirlish.

"Now, then, let's have it. You want Honor to go to Marlborough. As she

herself asked and I myself repeated,--why?"

"And as I answered you both," said his wife, trying hard to keep the

conversation spinning lightly in the air as he did, "it's because I want

her to be more like other girls."

"And I," said her husband, "do not." This was the place for Mildred

Lorimer to fling her own _why_ but her husband was too quick for her.

"Because she is so much finer and sounder and saner and sweeter as she

is. Mildred, I have never seen any living creature so selfless. What was

the word they coined in that play about Mars?--'_Otherdom?_' That's it,

yes; otherdom. That's Honor Carmody. She could have finished grammar

school at twelve, but Jimsy needed her help."

"That's just it! Can't you see how wrong that is?"

"No. I'm too much occupied with seeing how right it is. Good Lord, my

dear, in a world given over to the first person perpendicular, can't you

see the amazing beauty and rarity of your child's soul? Every day and

all day long she gives herself,--to you, to me, to the kiddies, to her

friends. She is the eternal mother." Mildred Lorimer was not the eternal

mother. She was not in fact a mother at all. The physical fact of

motherhood had six times descended upon her and she was doing her

gentle, well-bred, conscientious best in six lively directions, but

under it all she was forever Helen, forever the best beloved. She was

getting rather beyond her depth but she was not giving up. Stephen, in

discussion, had an elusive way of soaring into hazy generalities. She

brought him down.

"I can't see why it should make her any less unselfish to attend the

best girls' school than to--to run with the boys." She brought out the

little vulgarism with a faint curl of her lovely lip.

"'Run with the boys!' That has a positively Salem flavor, hasn't it?

Almost as deadly, that 'with,' as 'after,'" He loved words, Stephen

Lorimer; he played with them and juggled them. "Yet isn't that exactly

what the girls of to-day must and should do? Isn't it what the girls of

to-morrow--naturally, unrebuked--will do? Not running after them, slyly

or brazenly; not sitting at home, crimped and primped and curled,

waiting to be run after. No," he said hotly, getting up and beginning to

swallow up the room from wall to wall with his long strides, "_no_! With

them. Running with them, chin in, chest out, sound, conditioned,

unashamed!" He believed that he meant to write a tremendous book, one

day, Honor's stepfather. He often reeled off whole chapters in his mind,

warm and glowing. It was only when he got it down on paper that it

cooled and congealed. "Running with them in the race--for the race----"

his hurtling promenade took him to the window and he paused for an

instant. "Come here, Mildred. Look at her!"

Mildred Lorimer came to join him. On the shabby, rusty lawn of the King

place, next door, all the rustier for its nearness to their own emerald

turf, sat Honor Carmody and Jimsy King, jointly and severally lacing up

a football.

"Yes, look at her!" said her mother with feeling.

"Leave her alone, Mildred. Leave her alive!"

The two children were utterly absorbed. The boy was half a head taller

than the girl, heavier, sturdier, of a startling beauty. There was a

stubborn, much reviled wave in his bronze hair and his eyes were a dark

hazel flecked with black. His skin was bronze, too, bronzed by many

Catalina summer and winter swims at Ocean Park. It made his teeth seem

very white and flashing.

The window was open to the soft Southern California air, and the voices

came across to the watchers.

"_Hold_ it!"

"I _am_ holding it!"

A handsome man of forty came up the tree-shaded street, not quite

steadily, and turned into the King's walk. His hat was pulled low over

his eyes and the collar of his coat was turned up in spite of the

mildness of the day. He nodded to the boy and girl as he went past them

and on into the house.

"_Again!_" said Mrs. Lorimer, tragically. "That's the second time this

week!"

"Rough on the kid," said her husband. "See him now."

Jimsy King had turned his head and was following his father's slow

progress up the steps and across the porch and into the house. "Be in in

a minute, Dad!" he called after him.

"Loyal little beggar. I saw him steering him up Broadway one morning,

just at school time. Pluck."

Honor had looked after James King, the elder, too, and then at his son,

and then at the football in her hands again. "Hurry up," she commanded.

"Pull it tighter! _Tighter!_ Do you call that pulling?" Inexorably she

got his attention back to the subject in hand.

"That makes it all the worse," said Mrs. Lorimer. "Of course they're

only children--babies, really--but I couldn't have anything.... It's bad

blood, Stephen. I _couldn't_ have my child interested in one of the

'Wild Kings'!"

"Well, you won't have, if you're wise. Let 'em alone. Let 'em lace

footballs on the front lawn ... and they won't hold hands on the side

porch! Why, woman dear, like the well-known Mr. Job, the thing you

greatly fear you'll bring to pass! Shut her up in a girls' school--even

the best and sanest--and you'll make boys suddenly into creatures of

romance, remote, desirable. Don't emphasize and underline for her. She's

as clean as a star and as unself-conscious as a puppy! Don't hurry her

into what one of those English play-writing chaps calls--Granville

Barker, isn't it?--Yes,--_Madras House_--'the barnyard drama of sex....

Male and female created He them ... but men and women are a long time

in the making!'"

The lacing of the football was finished. The boy lifted his head and

looked soberly at the door through which his father had entered, not

quite steadily. Then he drew a long breath, threw back his shining

bronze head, said something in a low tone to the girl, and ran into the

house.

Honor Carmody got to her feet and stood looking after him, the odd

mothering look in her square child's face. She stood so for long

moments, without moving, and her mother and her stepfather watched her.

Suddenly Stephen Lorimer flung the window up as far as it would go and

leaned out.

"It's all right, Top Step," he called, meeting the leaping gladness of

her glance. "We've decided, your mother and I. You're going to L. A.

High! You're going----" but now he dropped his voice and spoke only for

the woman beside him, slipping a penitent and conciliatory arm about

her, his eyes impish, "you're going to run with the boys!"