They danced. Mr. Dowling should have found other forms of exercise and pastime.
Nature has not designed everyone for dancing, though sometimes those she has denied are the last to discover her niggardliness. But the round young man was at least vigorous enough—too much so, when his knees collided with Alice's—and he was too sturdy to be thrown off his feet, himself, or to allow his partner to fall when he tripped her. He held her up valiantly, and continued to beat a path through the crowd of other dancers by main force.
He paid no attention to anything suggested by the efforts of the musicians, and appeared to be unaware that there should have been some connection between what they were doing and what he was doing; but he may have listened to other music of his own, for his expression was of high content; he seemed to feel no doubt whatever that he was dancing. Alice kept as far away from him as under the circumstances she could; and when they stopped she glanced down, and found the execution of unseen manoeuvres, within the protection of her skirt, helpful to one of her insteps and to the toes of both of her slippers.
Her cheery partner was paddling his rosy brows with a fine handkerchief. “That was great!” he said. “Let's go out and sit in the corridor; they've got some comfortable chairs out there.”
“Well—let's not,” she returned. “I believe I'd rather stay in here and look at the crowd.”
“No; that isn't it,” he said, chiding her with a waggish forefinger. “You think if you go out there you'll miss a chance of someone else asking you for the next dance, and so you'll have to give it to me.”
“How absurd!” Then, after a look about her that revealed nothing encouraging, she added graciously, “You can have the next if you want it.”
“Great!” he exclaimed, mechanically. “Now let's get out of here—out of THIS room, anyhow.”
“Why? What's the matter with——”
“My mother,” Mr. Dowling explained. “But don't look at her. She keeps motioning me to come and see after Ella, and I'm simply NOT going to do it, you see!”
Alice laughed. “I don't believe it's so much that,” she said, and consented to walk with him to a point in the next room from which Mrs. Dowling's continuous signalling could not be seen. “Your mother hates me.”
“Oh, no; I wouldn't say that. No, she don't,” he protested, innocently. “She don't know you more than just to speak to, you see. So how could she?”
“Well, she does. I can tell.”
A frown appeared upon his rounded brow. “No; I'll tell you the way she feels. It's like this: Ella isn't TOO popular, you know—it's hard to see why, because she's a right nice girl, in her way—and mother thinks I ought to look after her, you see. She thinks I ought to dance a whole lot with her myself, and stir up other fellows to dance with her—it's simply impossible to make mother understand you CAN'T do that, you see. And then about me, you see, if she had her way I wouldn't get to dance with anybody at all except girls like Mildred Palmer and Henrietta Lamb. Mother wants to run my whole programme for me, you understand, but the trouble of it is—about girls like that, you see well, I couldn't do what she wants, even if I wanted to myself, because you take those girls, and by the time I get Ella off my hands for a minute, why, their dances are always every last one taken, and where do I come in?”
Alice nodded, her amiability undamaged. “I see. So that's why you dance with me.”
“No, I like to,” he protested. “I rather dance with you than I do with those girls.” And he added with a retrospective determination which showed that he had been through quite an experience with Mrs. Dowling in this matter. “I TOLD mother I would, too!”
“Did it take all your courage, Frank?”
He looked at her shrewdly. “Now you're trying to tease me,” he said. “I don't care; I WOULD rather dance with you! In the first place, you're a perfectly beautiful dancer, you see, and in the second, a man feels a lot more comfortable with you than he does with them. Of course I know almost all the other fellows get along with those girls all right; but I don't waste any time on 'em I don't have to.Ilike people that are always cordial to everybody, you see—the way you are.”
“Thank you,” she said, thoughtfully.
“Oh, I MEAN it,” he insisted. “There goes the band again. Shall we?”
“Suppose we sit it out?” she suggested. “I believe I'd like to go out in the corridor, after all—it's pretty warm in here.”
Assenting cheerfully, Dowling conducted her to a pair of easy-chairs within a secluding grove of box-trees, and when they came to this retreat they found Mildred Palmer just departing, under escort of a well-favoured gentleman about thirty. As these two walked slowly away, in the direction of the dancing-floor, they left it not to be doubted that they were on excellent terms with each other; Mildred was evidently willing to make their progress even slower, for she halted momentarily, once or twice; and her upward glances to her tall companion's face were of a gentle, almost blushing deference. Never before had Alice seen anything like this in her friend's manner.
“How queer!” she murmured.
“What's queer?” Dowling inquired as they sat down.
“Who was that man?”
“Haven't you met him?”
“I never saw him before. Who is he?”
“Why, it's this Arthur Russell.”
“What Arthur Russell? I never heard of him.” Mr. Dowling was puzzled. “Why, THAT'S funny! Only the last time I saw you, you were telling me how awfully well you knew Mildred Palmer.”
“Why, certainly I do,” Alice informed him. “She's my most intimate friend.”
“That's what makes it seem so funny you haven't heard anything about this Russell, because everybody says even if she isn't engaged to him right now, she most likely will be before very long. I must say it looks a good deal that way to me, myself.”
“What nonsense!” Alice exclaimed. “She's never even mentioned him to me.”
The young man glanced at her dubiously and passed a finger over the tiny prong that dashingly composed the whole substance of his moustache.
“Well, you see, Mildred IS pretty reserved,” he remarked. “This Russell is some kind of cousin of the Palmer family, I understand.”
“He is?”
“Yes—second or third or something, the girls say. You see, my sister Ella hasn't got much to do at home, and don't read anything, or sew, or play solitaire, you see; and she hears about pretty much everything that goes on, you see. Well, Ella says a lot of the girls have been talking about Mildred and this Arthur Russell for quite a while back, you see. They were all wondering what he was going to look like, you see; because he only got here yesterday; and that proves she must have been talking to some of 'em, or else how——”
Alice laughed airily, but the pretty sound ended abruptly with an audible intake of breath. “Of course, while Mildred IS my most intimate friend,” she said, “I don't mean she tells me everything—and naturally she has other friends besides. What else did your sister say she told them about this Mr. Russell?”
“Well, it seems he's VERY well off; at least Henrietta Lamb told Ella he was. Ella says——”
Alice interrupted again, with an increased irritability. “Oh, never mind what Ella says! Let's find something better to talk about than Mr. Russell!”
“Well, I'M willing,” Mr. Dowling assented, ruefully. “What you want to talk about?”
But this liberal offer found her unresponsive; she sat leaning back, silent, her arms along the arms of her chair, and her eyes, moist and bright, fixed upon a wide doorway where the dancers fluctuated. She was disquieted by more than Mildred's reserve, though reserve so marked had certainly the significance of a warning that Alice's definition, “my most intimate friend,” lacked sanction. Indirect notice to this effect could not well have been more emphatic, but the sting of it was left for a later moment. Something else preoccupied Alice: she had just been surprised by an odd experience. At first sight of this Mr. Arthur Russell, she had said to herself instantly, in words as definite as if she spoke them aloud, though they seemed more like words spoken to her by some unknown person within her: “There! That's exactly the kind of looking man I'd like to marry!”
In the eyes of the restless and the longing, Providence often appears to be worse than inscrutable: an unreliable Omnipotence given to haphazard whimsies in dealing with its own creatures, choosing at random some among them to be rent with tragic deprivations and others to be petted with blessing upon blessing.
In Alice's eyes, Mildred had been blessed enough; something ought to be left over, by this time, for another girl. The final touch to the heaping perfection of Christmas-in-everything for Mildred was that this Mr. Arthur Russell, good-looking, kind-looking, graceful, the perfect fiance, should be also “VERY well off.” Of course! These rich always married one another. And while the Mildreds danced with their Arthur Russells the best an outsider could do for herself was to sit with Frank Dowling—the one last course left her that was better than dancing with him.
“Well, what DO you want to talk about?” he inquired.
“Nothing,” she said. “Suppose we just sit, Frank.” But a moment later she remembered something, and, with a sudden animation, began to prattle. She pointed to the musicians down the corridor. “Oh, look at them! Look at the leader! Aren't they FUNNY? Someone told me they're called 'Jazz Louie and his half-breed bunch.' Isn't that just crazy? Don't you love it? Do watch them, Frank.”
She continued to chatter, and, while thus keeping his glance away from herself, she detached the forlorn bouquet of dead violets from her dress and laid it gently beside the one she had carried.
The latter already reposed in the obscurity selected for it at the base of one of the box-trees.
Then she was abruptly silent.
“You certainly are a funny girl,” Dowling remarked. “You say you don't want to talk about anything at all, and all of a sudden you break out and talk a blue streak; and just about the time I begin to get interested in what you're saying you shut off! What's the matter with girls, anyhow, when they do things like that?”
“I don't know; we're just queer, I guess.”
“I say so! Well, what'll we do NOW? Talk, or just sit?”
“Suppose we just sit some more.”
“Anything to oblige,” he assented. “I'm willing to sit as long as you like.”
But even as he made his amiability clear in this matter, the peace was threatened—his mother came down the corridor like a rolling, ominous cloud. She was looking about her on all sides, in a fidget of annoyance, searching for him, and to his dismay she saw him. She immediately made a horrible face at his companion, beckoned to him imperiously with a dumpy arm, and shook her head reprovingly. The unfortunate young man tried to repulse her with an icy stare, but this effort having obtained little to encourage his feeble hope of driving her away, he shifted his chair so that his back was toward her discomfiting pantomime. He should have known better, the instant result was Mrs. Dowling in motion at an impetuous waddle.
She entered the box-tree seclusion with the lower rotundities of her face hastily modelled into the resemblance of an over-benevolent smile a contortion which neglected to spread its intended geniality upward to the exasperated eyes and anxious forehead.
“I think your mother wants to speak to you, Frank,” Alice said, upon this advent.
Mrs. Dowling nodded to her. “Good evening, Miss Adams,” she said. “I just thought as you and Frank weren't dancing you wouldn't mind my disturbing you——”
“Not at all,” Alice murmured.
Mr. Dowling seemed of a different mind. “Well, what DO you want?” he inquired, whereupon his mother struck him roguishly with her fan.
“Bad fellow!” She turned to Alice. “I'm sure you won't mind excusing him to let him do something for his old mother, Miss Adams.”
“What DO you want?” the son repeated.
“Two very nice things,” Mrs. Dowling informed him. “Everybody is so anxious for Henrietta Lamb to have a pleasant evening, because it's the very first time she's been anywhere since her father's death, and of course her dear grandfather's an old friend of ours, and——”
“Well, well!” her son interrupted. “Miss Adams isn't interested in all this, mother.”
“But Henrietta came to speak to Ella and me, and I told her you were so anxious to dance with her——”
“Here!” he cried. “Look here! I'd rather do my own——”
“Yes; that's just it,” Mrs. Dowling explained. “I just thought it was such a good opportunity; and Henrietta said she had most of her dances taken, but she'd give you one if you asked her before they were all gone. So I thought you'd better see her as soon as possible.”
Dowling's face had become rosy. “I refuse to do anything of the kind.”
“Bad fellow!” said his mother, gaily. “I thought this would be the best time for you to see Henrietta, because it won't be long till all her dances are gone, and you've promised on your WORD to dance the next with Ella, and you mightn't have a chance to do it then. I'm sure Miss Adams won't mind if you——”
“Not at all,” Alice said.
“Well,Imind!” he said. “I wish you COULD understand that when I want to dance with any girl I don't need my mother to ask her for me. I really AM more than six years old!”
He spoke with too much vehemence, and Mrs. Dowling at once saw how to have her way. As with husbands and wives, so with many fathers and daughters, and so with some sons and mothers: the man will himself be cross in public and think nothing of it, nor will he greatly mind a little crossness on the part of the woman; but let her show agitation before any spectator, he is instantly reduced to a coward's slavery. Women understand that ancient weakness, of course; for it is one of their most important means of defense, but can be used ignobly.
Mrs. Dowling permitted a tremulousness to become audible in her voice. “It isn't very—very pleasant—to be talked to like that by your own son—before strangers!”
“Oh, my! Look here!” the stricken Dowling protested. “Ididn't say anything, mother. I was just joking about how you never get over thinking I'm a little boy. I only——”
Mrs. Dowling continued: “I just thought I was doing you a little favour. I didn't think it would make you so angry.”
“Mother, for goodness' sake! Miss Adams'll think——”
“I suppose,” Mrs. Dowling interrupted, piteously, “I suppose it doesn't matter whatIthink!”
“Oh, gracious!”
Alice interfered; she perceived that the ruthless Mrs. Dowling meant to have her way. “I think you'd better go, Frank. Really.”
“There!” his mother cried. “Miss Adams says so, herself! What more do you want?”
“Oh, gracious!” he lamented again, and, with a sick look over his shoulder at Alice, permitted his mother to take his arm and propel him away. Mrs. Dowling's spirits had strikingly recovered even before the pair passed from the corridor: she moved almost bouncingly beside her embittered son, and her eyes and all the convolutions of her abundant face were blithe.
Alice went in search of Walter, but without much hope of finding him. What he did with himself at frozen-face dances was one of his most successful mysteries, and her present excursion gave her no clue leading to its solution. When the musicians again lowered their instruments for an interval she had returned, alone, to her former seat within the partial shelter of the box-trees.
She had now to practice an art that affords but a limited variety of methods, even to the expert: the art of seeming to have an escort or partner when there is none. The practitioner must imply, merely by expression and attitude, that the supposed companion has left her for only a few moments, that she herself has sent him upon an errand; and, if possible, the minds of observers must be directed toward a conclusion that this errand of her devising is an amusing one; at all events, she is alone temporarily and of choice, not deserted. She awaits a devoted man who may return at any instant.
Other people desired to sit in Alice's nook, but discovered her in occupancy. She had moved the vacant chair closer to her own, and she sat with her arm extended so that her hand, holding her lace kerchief, rested upon the back of this second chair, claiming it. Such a preemption, like that of a traveller's bag in the rack, was unquestionable; and, for additional evidence, sitting with her knees crossed, she kept one foot continuously moving a little, in cadence with the other, which tapped the floor. Moreover, she added a fine detail: her half-smile, with the under lip caught, seemed to struggle against repression, as if she found the service engaging her absent companion even more amusing than she would let him see when he returned: there was jovial intrigue of some sort afoot, evidently. Her eyes, beaming with secret fun, were averted from intruders, but sometimes, when couples approached, seeking possession of the nook, her thoughts about the absentee appeared to threaten her with outright laughter; and though one or two girls looked at her skeptically, as they turned away, their escorts felt no such doubts, and merely wondered what importantly funny affair Alice Adams was engaged in. She had learned to do it perfectly.
She had learned it during the last two years; she was twenty when for the first time she had the shock of finding herself without an applicant for one of her dances. When she was sixteen “all the nice boys in town,” as her mother said, crowded the Adamses' small veranda and steps, or sat near by, cross-legged on the lawn, on summer evenings; and at eighteen she had replaced the boys with “the older men.” By this time most of “the other girls,” her contemporaries, were away at school or college, and when they came home to stay, they “came out”—that feeble revival of an ancient custom offering the maiden to the ceremonial inspection of the tribe. Alice neither went away nor “came out,” and, in contrast with those who did, she may have seemed to lack freshness of lustre—jewels are richest when revealed all new in a white velvet box. And Alice may have been too eager to secure new retainers, too kind in her efforts to keep the old ones. She had been a belle too soon.
The device of the absentee partner has the defect that it cannot be employed for longer than ten or fifteen minutes at a time, and it may not be repeated more than twice in one evening: a single repetition, indeed, is weak, and may prove a betrayal. Alice knew that her present performance could be effective during only this interval between dances; and though her eyes were guarded, she anxiously counted over the partnerless young men who lounged together in the doorways within her view. Every one of them ought to have asked her for dances, she thought, and although she might have been put to it to give a reason why any of them “ought,” her heart was hot with resentment against them.
For a girl who has been a belle, it is harder to live through these bad times than it is for one who has never known anything better. Like a figure of painted and brightly varnished wood, Ella Dowling sat against the wall through dance after dance with glassy imperturbability; it was easier to be wooden, Alice thought, if you had your mother with you, as Ella had. You were left with at least the shred of a pretense that you came to sit with your mother as a spectator, and not to offer yourself to be danced with by men who looked you over and rejected you—not for the first time. “Not for the first time”: there lay a sting! Why had you thought this time might be different from the other times? Why had you broken your back picking those hundreds of violets?
Hating the fatuous young men in the doorways more bitterly for every instant that she had to maintain her tableau, the smiling Alice knew fierce impulses to spring to her feet and shout at them, “You IDIOTS!” Hands in pockets, they lounged against the pilasters, or faced one another, laughing vaguely, each one of them seeming to Alice no more than so much mean beef in clothes. She wanted to tell them they were no better than that; and it seemed a cruel thing of heaven to let them go on believing themselves young lords. They were doing nothing, killing time. Wasn't she at her lowest value at least a means of killing time? Evidently the mean beeves thought not. And when one of them finally lounged across the corridor and spoke to her, he was the very one to whom she preferred her loneliness.
“Waiting for somebody, Lady Alicia?” he asked, negligently; and his easy burlesque of her name was like the familiarity of the rest of him. He was one of those full-bodied, grossly handsome men who are powerful and active, but never submit themselves to the rigour of becoming athletes, though they shoot and fish from expensive camps. Gloss is the most shining outward mark of the type. Nowadays these men no longer use brilliantine on their moustaches, but they have gloss bought from manicure-girls, from masseurs, and from automobile-makers; and their eyes, usually large, are glossy. None of this is allowed to interfere with business; these are “good business men,” and often make large fortunes. They are men of imagination about two things—women and money, and, combining their imaginings about both, usually make a wise first marriage. Later, however, they are apt to imagine too much about some little woman without whom life seems duller than need be. They run away, leaving the first wife well enough dowered. They are never intentionally unkind to women, and in the end they usually make the mistake of thinking they have had their money's worth of life. Here was Mr. Harvey Malone, a young specimen in an earlier stage of development, trying to marry Henrietta Lamb, and now sauntering over to speak to Alice, as a time-killer before his next dance with Henrietta.
Alice made no response to his question, and he dropped lazily into the vacant chair, from which she sharply withdrew her hand. “I might as well use his chair till he comes, don't you think? You don't MIND, do you, old girl?”
“Oh, no,” Alice said. “It doesn't matter one way or the other. Please don't call me that.”
“So that's how you feel?” Mr. Malone laughed indulgently, without much interest. “I've been meaning to come to see you for a long time honestly I have—because I wanted to have a good talk with you about old times. I know you think it was funny, after the way I used to come to your house two or three times a week, and sometimes oftener—well, I don't blame you for being hurt, the way I stopped without explaining or anything. The truth is there wasn't any reason: I just happened to have a lot of important things to do and couldn't find the time. But I AM going to call on you some evening—honestly I am. I don't wonder you think——”
“You're mistaken,” Alice said. “I've never thought anything about it at all.”
“Well, well!” he said, and looked at her languidly. “What's the use of being cross with this old man? He always means well.” And, extending his arm, he would have given her a friendly pat upon the shoulder but she evaded it. “Well, well!” he said. “Seems to me you're getting awful tetchy! Don't you like your old friends any more?”
“Not all of them.”
“Who's the new one?” he asked, teasingly. “Come on and tell us, Alice. Who is it you were holding this chair for?”
“Never mind.”
“Well, all I've got to do is to sit here till he comes back; then I'll see who it is.”
“He may not come back before you have to go.”
“Guess you got me THAT time,” Malone admitted, laughing as he rose. “They're tuning up, and I've got this dance. I AM coming around to see you some evening.” He moved away, calling back over his shoulder, “Honestly, I am!”
Alice did not look at him.
She had held her tableau as long as she could; it was time for her to abandon the box-trees; and she stepped forth frowning, as if a little annoyed with the absentee for being such a time upon her errand; whereupon the two chairs were instantly seized by a coquetting pair who intended to “sit out” the dance. She walked quickly down the broad corridor, turned into the broader hall, and hurriedly entered the dressing-room where she had left her wraps.
She stayed here as long as she could, pretending to arrange her hair at a mirror, then fidgeting with one of her slipper-buckles; but the intelligent elderly woman in charge of the room made an indefinite sojourn impracticable. “Perhaps I could help you with that buckle, Miss,” she suggested, approaching. “Has it come loose?” Alice wrenched desperately; then it was loose. The competent woman, producing needle and thread, deftly made the buckle fast; and there was nothing for Alice to do but to express her gratitude and go.
She went to the door of the cloak-room opposite, where a coloured man stood watchfully in the doorway. “I wonder if you know which of the gentlemen is my brother, Mr. Walter Adams,” she said.
“Yes'm; I know him.”
“Could you tell me where he is?”
“No'm; I couldn't say.”
“Well, if you see him, would you please tell him that his sister, Miss Adams, is looking for him and very anxious to speak to him?”
“Yes'm. Sho'ly, sho'ly!”
As she went away he stared after her and seemed to swell with some bursting emotion. In fact, it was too much for him, and he suddenly retired within the room, releasing strangulated laughter.
Walter remonstrated. Behind an excellent screen of coats and hats, in a remote part of the room, he was kneeling on the floor, engaged in a game of chance with a second coloured attendant; and the laughter became so vehement that it not only interfered with the pastime in hand, but threatened to attract frozen-face attention.
“I cain' he'p it, man,” the laughter explained. “I cain' he'p it! You sut'n'y the beatin'es' white boy 'n 'is city!”
The dancers were swinging into an “encore” as Alice halted for an irresolute moment in a doorway. Across the room, a cluster of matrons sat chatting absently, their eyes on their dancing daughters; and Alice, finding a refugee's courage, dodged through the scurrying couples, seated herself in a chair on the outskirts of this colony of elders, and began to talk eagerly to the matron nearest her. The matron seemed unaccustomed to so much vivacity, and responded but dryly, whereupon Alice was more vivacious than ever; for she meant now to present the picture of a jolly girl too much interested in these wise older women to bother about every foolish young man who asked her for a dance.
Her matron was constrained to go so far as to supply a tolerant nod, now and then, in complement to the girl's animation, and Alice was grateful for the nods. In this fashion she supplemented the exhausted resources of the dressing-room and the box-tree nook; and lived through two more dances, when again Mr. Frank Dowling presented himself as a partner.
She needed no pretense to seek the dressing-room for repairs after that number; this time they were necessary and genuine. Dowling waited for her, and when she came out he explained for the fourth or fifth time how the accident had happened. “It was entirely those other people's fault,” he said. “They got me in a kind of a corner, because neither of those fellows knows the least thing about guiding; they just jam ahead and expect everybody to get out of their way. It was Charlotte Thom's diamond crescent pin that got caught on your dress in the back and made such a——”
“Never mind,” Alice said in a tired voice. “The maid fixed it so that she says it isn't very noticeable.”
“Well, it isn't,” he returned. “You could hardly tell there'd been anything the matter. Where do you want to go? Mother's been interfering in my affairs some more and I've got the next taken.”
“I was sitting with Mrs. George Dresser. You might take me back there.”
He left her with the matron, and Alice returned to her picture-making, so that once more, while two numbers passed, whoever cared to look was offered the sketch of a jolly, clever girl preoccupied with her elders. Then she found her friend Mildred standing before her, presenting Mr. Arthur Russell, who asked her to dance with him.
Alice looked uncertain, as though not sure what her engagements were; but her perplexity cleared; she nodded, and swung rhythmically away with the tall applicant. She was not grateful to her hostess for this alms. What a young hostess does with a fiance, Alice thought, is to make him dance with the unpopular girls. She supposed that Mr. Arthur Russell had already danced with Ella Dowling.
The loan of a lover, under these circumstances, may be painful to the lessee, and Alice, smiling never more brightly, found nothing to say to Mr. Russell, though she thought he might have found something to say to her. “I wonder what Mildred told him,” she thought. “Probably she said, 'Dearest, there's one more girl you've got to help me out with. You wouldn't like her much, but she dances well enough and she's having a rotten time. Nobody ever goes near her any more.'”
When the music stopped, Russell added his applause to the hand-clapping that encouraged the uproarious instruments to continue, and as they renewed the tumult, he said heartily, “That's splendid!”
Alice gave him a glance, necessarily at short range, and found his eyes kindly and pleased. Here was a friendly soul, it appeared, who probably “liked everybody.” No doubt he had applauded for an “encore” when he danced with Ella Dowling, gave Ella the same genial look, and said, “That's splendid!”
When the “encore” was over, Alice spoke to him for the first time.
“Mildred will be looking for you,” she said. “I think you'd better take me back to where you found me.”
He looked surprised. “Oh, if you——”
“I'm sure Mildred will be needing you,” Alice said, and as she took his arm and they walked toward Mrs. Dresser, she thought it might be just possible to make a further use of the loan. “Oh, I wonder if you——” she began.
“Yes?” he said, quickly.
“You don't know my brother, Walter Adams,” she said. “But he's somewhere I think possibly he's in a smoking-room or some place where girls aren't expected, and if you wouldn't think it too much trouble to inquire——”
“I'll find him,” Russell said, promptly. “Thank you so much for that dance. I'll bring your brother in a moment.”
It was to be a long moment, Alice decided, presently. Mrs. Dresser had grown restive; and her nods and vague responses to her young dependent's gaieties were as meager as they could well be. Evidently the matron had no intention of appearing to her world in the light of a chaperone for Alice Adams; and she finally made this clear. With a word or two of excuse, breaking into something Alice was saying, she rose and went to sit next to Mildred's mother, who had become the nucleus of the cluster. So Alice was left very much against the wall, with short stretches of vacant chairs on each side of her. She had come to the end of her picture-making, and could only pretend that there was something amusing the matter with the arm of her chair.
She supposed that Mildred's Mr. Russell had forgotten Walter by this time. “I'm not even an intimate enough friend of Mildred's for him to have thought he ought to bother to tell me he couldn't find him,” she thought. And then she saw Russell coming across the room toward her, with Walter beside him. She jumped up gaily.
“Oh, thank you!” she cried. “I know this naughty boy must have been terribly hard to find. Mildred'll NEVER forgive me! I've put you to so much——”
“Not at all,” he said, amiably, and went away, leaving the brother and sister together.
“Walter, let's dance just once more,” Alice said, touching his arm placatively. “I thought—well, perhaps we might go home then.”
But Walter's expression was that of a person upon whom an outrage has just been perpetrated. “No,” he said. “We've stayed THIS long, I'm goin' to wait and see what they got to eat. And you look here!” He turned upon her angrily. “Don't you ever do that again!”
“Do what?”
“Send somebody after me that pokes his nose into every corner of the house till he finds me! 'Are you Mr. Walter Adams?' he says. I guess he must asked everybody in the place if they were Mr. Walter Adams! Well, I'll bet a few iron men you wouldn't send anybody to hunt for me again if you knew where he found me!”
“Where was it?”
Walter decided that her fit punishment was to know. “I was shootin' dice with those coons in the cloak-room.”
“And he saw you?”
“Unless he was blind!” said Walter. “Come on, I'll dance this one more dance with you. Supper comes after that, and THEN we'll go home.”
Mrs. Adams heard Alice's key turning in the front door and hurried down the stairs to meet her.
“Did you get wet coming in, darling?” she asked. “Did you have a good time?”
“Just lovely!” Alice said, cheerily, and after she had arranged the latch for Walter, who had gone to return the little car, she followed her mother upstairs and hummed a dance-tune on the way.
“Oh, I'm so glad you had a nice time,” Mrs. Adams said, as they reached the door of her daughter's room together. “You DESERVED to, and it's lovely to think——”
But at this, without warning, Alice threw herself into her mother's arms, sobbing so loudly that in his room, close by, her father, half drowsing through the night, started to full wakefulness.
On a morning, a week after this collapse of festal hopes, Mrs. Adams and her daughter were concluding a three-days' disturbance, the “Spring house-cleaning”—postponed until now by Adams's long illness—and Alice, on her knees before a chest of drawers, in her mother's room, paused thoughtfully after dusting a packet of letters wrapped in worn muslin. She called to her mother, who was scrubbing the floor of the hallway just beyond the open door,
“These old letters you had in the bottom drawer, weren't they some papa wrote you before you were married?”
Mrs. Adams laughed and said, “Yes. Just put 'em back where they were—or else up in the attic—anywhere you want to.”
“Do you mind if I read one, mama?”
Mrs. Adams laughed again. “Oh, I guess you can if you want to. I expect they're pretty funny!”
Alice laughed in response, and chose the topmost letter of the packet. “My dear, beautiful girl,” it began; and she stared at these singular words. They gave her a shock like that caused by overhearing some bewildering impropriety; and, having read them over to herself several times, she went on to experience other shocks.
MY DEAR, BEAUTIFUL GIRL:
This time yesterday I had a mighty bad case of blues because I had not had a word from you in two whole long days and when I do not hear from you every day things look mighty down in the mouth to me. Now it is all so different because your letter has arrived and besides I have got a piece of news I believe you will think as fine as I do. Darling, you will be surprised, so get ready to hear about a big effect on our future. It is this way. I had sort of a suspicion the head of the firm kind of took a fancy to me from the first when I went in there, and liked the way I attended to my work and so when he took me on this business trip with him I felt pretty sure of it and now it turns out I was about right. In return I guess I have got about the best boss in this world and I believe you will think so too. Yes, sweetheart, after the talk I have just had with him if J. A. Lamb asked me to cut my hand off for him I guess I would come pretty near doing it because what he says means the end of our waiting to be together. From New Years on he is going to put me in entire charge of the sundries dept. and what do you think is going to be my salary? Eleven hundred cool dollars a year ($1,100.00). That's all! Just only a cool eleven hundred per annum! Well, I guess that will show your mother whether I can take care of you or not. And oh how I would like to see your dear, beautiful, loving face when you get this news.
I would like to go out on the public streets and just dance and shout and it is all I can do to help doing it, especially when I know we will be talking it all over together this time next week, and oh my darling, now that your folks have no excuse for putting it off any longer we might be in our own little home before Xmas.
Would you be glad?
Well, darling, this settles everything and makes our future just about as smooth for us as anybody could ask. I can hardly realize after all this waiting life's troubles are over for you and me and we have nothing to do but to enjoy the happiness granted us by this wonderful, beautiful thing we call life. I know I am not any poet and the one I tried to write about you the day of the picnic was fearful but the way I THINK about you is a poem.
Write me what you think of the news. I know but write me anyhow.
I'll get it before we start home and I can be reading it over all the time on the tram.
Your always loving
VIRGIL.
The sound of her mother's diligent scrubbing in the hall came back slowly to Alice's hearing, as she restored the letter to the packet, wrapped the packet in its muslin covering, and returned it to the drawer. She had remained upon her knees while she read the letter; now she sank backward, sitting upon the floor with her hands behind her, an unconscious relaxing for better ease to think. Upon her face there had fallen a look of wonder.
For the first time she was vaguely perceiving that life is everlasting movement. Youth really believes what is running water to be a permanent crystallization and sees time fixed to a point: some people have dark hair, some people have blond hair, some people have gray hair. Until this moment, Alice had no conviction that there was a universe before she came into it. She had always thought of it as the background of herself: the moon was something to make her prettier on a summer night.
But this old letter, through which she saw still flickering an ancient starlight of young love, astounded her. Faintly before her it revealed the whole lives of her father and mother, who had been young, after all—they REALLY had—and their youth was now so utterly passed from them that the picture of it, in the letter, was like a burlesque of them. And so she, herself, must pass to such changes, too, and all that now seemed vital to her would be nothing.
When her work was finished, that afternoon, she went into her father's room. His recovery had progressed well enough to permit the departure of Miss Perry; and Adams, wearing one of Mrs. Adams's wrappers over his night-gown, sat in a high-backed chair by a closed window. The weather was warm, but the closed window and the flannel wrapper had not sufficed him: round his shoulders he had an old crocheted scarf of Alice's; his legs were wrapped in a heavy comfort; and, with these swathings about him, and his eyes closed, his thin and grizzled head making but a slight indentation in the pillow supporting it, he looked old and little and queer.
Alice would have gone out softly, but without opening his eyes, he spoke to her: “Don't go, dearie. Come sit with the old man a little while.”
She brought a chair near his. “I thought you were napping.”
“No. I don't hardly ever do that. I just drift a little sometimes.”
“How do you mean you drift, papa?”
He looked at her vaguely. “Oh, I don't know. Kind of pictures. They get a little mixed up—old times with times still ahead, like planning what to do, you know. That's as near a nap as I get—when the pictures mix up some. I suppose it's sort of drowsing.”
She took one of his hands and stroked it. “What do you mean when you say you have pictures like 'planning what to do'?” she asked.
“I mean planning what to do when I get out and able to go to work again.”
“But that doesn't need any planning,” Alice said, quickly. “You're going back to your old place at Lamb's, of course.”
Adams closed his eyes again, sighing heavily, but made no other response.
“Why, of COURSE you are!” she cried. “What are you talking about?”
His head turned slowly toward her, revealing the eyes, open in a haggard stare. “I heard you the other night when you came from the party,” he said. “I know what was the matter.”
“Indeed, you don't,” she assured him. “You don't know anything about it, because there wasn't anything the matter at all.”
“Don't you suppose I heard you crying? What'd you cry for if there wasn't anything the matter?”
“Just nerves, papa. It wasn't anything else in the world.”
“Never mind,” he said. “Your mother told me.”
“She promised me not to!”
At that Adams laughed mournfully. “It wouldn't be very likely I'd hear you so upset and not ask about it, even if she didn't come and tell me on her own hook. You needn't try to fool me; I tell you I know what was the matter.”
“The only matter was I had a silly fit,” Alice protested. “It did me good, too.”
“How's that?”
“Because I've decided to do something about it, papa.”
“That isn't the way your mother looks at it,” Adams said, ruefully. “She thinks it's our place to do something about it. Well, I don't know—I don't know; everything seems so changed these days. You've always been a good daughter, Alice, and you ought to have as much as any of these girls you go with; she's convinced me she's right about THAT. The trouble is——” He faltered, apologetically, then went on, “I mean the question is—how to get it for you.”
“No!” she cried. “I had no business to make such a fuss just because a lot of idiots didn't break their necks to get dances with me and because I got mortified about Walter—Walter WAS pretty terrible——”
“Oh, me, my!” Adams lamented. “I guess that's something we just have to leave work out itself. What you going to do with a boy nineteen or twenty years old that makes his own living? Can't whip him. Can't keep him locked up in the house. Just got to hope he'll learn better, I suppose.”
“Of course he didn't want to go to the Palmers',” Alice explained, tolerantly—“and as mama and I made him take me, and he thought that was pretty selfish in me, why, he felt he had a right to amuse himself any way he could. Of course it was awful that this—that this Mr. Russell should——” In spite of her, the recollection choked her.
“Yes, it was awful,” Adams agreed. “Just awful. Oh, me, my!”
But Alice recovered herself at once, and showed him a cheerful face. “Well, just a few years from now I probably won't even remember it! I believe hardly anything amounts to as much as we think it does at the time.”
“Well—sometimes it don't.”
“What I've been thinking, papa: it seems to me I ought to DO something.”
“What like?”
She looked dreamy, but was obviously serious as she told him: “Well, I mean I ought to be something besides just a kind of nobody. I ought to——” She paused.
“What, dearie?”
“Well—there's one thing I'd like to do. I'm sure I COULD do it, too.”
“What?”
“I want to go on the stage: I know I could act.” At this, her father abruptly gave utterance to a feeble cackling of laughter; and when Alice, surprised and a little offended, pressed him for his reason, he tried to evade, saying, “Nothing, dearie. I just thought of something.” But she persisted until he had to explain.
“It made me think of your mother's sister, your Aunt Flora, that died when you were little,” he said. “She was always telling how she was going on the stage, and talking about how she was certain she'd make a great actress, and all so on; and one day your mother broke out and said she ought 'a' gone on the stage, herself, because she always knew she had the talent for it—and, well, they got into kind of a spat about which one'd make the best actress. I had to go out in the hall to laugh!”
“Maybe you were wrong,” Alice said, gravely. “If they both felt it, why wouldn't that look as if there was talent in the family? I've ALWAYS thought——”
“No, dearie,” he said, with a final chuckle. “Your mother and Flora weren't different from a good many others. I expect ninety per cent. of all the women I ever knew were just sure they'd be mighty fine actresses if they ever got the chance. Well, I guess it's a good thing; they enjoy thinking about it and it don't do anybody any harm.”
Alice was piqued. For several days she had thought almost continuously of a career to be won by her own genius. Not that she planned details, or concerned herself with first steps; her picturings overleaped all that. Principally, she saw her name great on all the bill-boards of that unkind city, and herself, unchanged in age but glamorous with fame and Paris clothes, returning in a private car. No doubt the pleasantest development of her vision was a dialogue with Mildred; and this became so real that, as she projected it, Alice assumed the proper expressions for both parties to it, formed words with her lips, and even spoke some of them aloud. “No, I haven't forgotten you, Mrs. Russell. I remember you quite pleasantly, in fact. You were a Miss Palmer, I recall, in those funny old days. Very kind of you, I'm shaw. I appreciate your eagerness to do something for me in your own little home. As you say, a reception WOULD renew my acquaintanceship with many old friends—but I'm shaw you won't mind my mentioning that I don't find much inspiration in these provincials. I really must ask you not to press me. An artist's time is not her own, though of course I could hardly expect you to understand——”
Thus Alice illuminated the dull time; but she retired from the interview with her father still manfully displaying an outward cheerfulness, while depression grew heavier within, as if she had eaten soggy cake. Her father knew nothing whatever of the stage, and she was aware of his ignorance, yet for some reason his innocently skeptical amusement reduced her bright project almost to nothing. Something like this always happened, it seemed; she was continually making these illuminations, all gay with gildings and colourings; and then as soon as anybody else so much as glanced at them—even her father, who loved her—the pretty designs were stricken with a desolating pallor. “Is this LIFE?” Alice wondered, not doubting that the question was original and all her own. “Is it life to spend your time imagining things that aren't so, and never will be? Beautiful things happen to other people; why should I be the only one they never CAN happen to?”
The mood lasted overnight; and was still upon her the next afternoon when an errand for her father took her down-town. Adams had decided to begin smoking again, and Alice felt rather degraded, as well as embarrassed, when she went into the large shop her father had named, and asked for the cheap tobacco he used in his pipe. She fell back upon an air of amused indulgence, hoping thus to suggest that her purchase was made for some faithful old retainer, now infirm; and although the calmness of the clerk who served her called for no such elaboration of her sketch, she ornamented it with a little laugh and with the remark, as she dropped the package into her coat-pocket, “I'm sure it'll please him; they tell me it's the kind he likes.”
Still playing Lady Bountiful, smiling to herself in anticipation of the joy she was bringing to the simple old negro or Irish follower of the family, she left the shop; but as she came out upon the crowded pavement her smile vanished quickly.
Next to the door of the tobacco-shop, there was the open entrance to a stairway, and, above this rather bleak and dark aperture, a sign-board displayed in begrimed gilt letters the information that Frincke's Business College occupied the upper floors of the building. Furthermore, Frincke here publicly offered “personal instruction and training in practical mathematics, bookkeeping, and all branches of the business life, including stenography, typewriting, etc.”
Alice halted for a moment, frowning at this signboard as though it were something surprising and distasteful which she had never seen before. Yet it was conspicuous in a busy quarter; she almost always passed it when she came down-town, and never without noticing it. Nor was this the first time she had paused to lift toward it that same glance of vague misgiving.
The building was not what the changeful city defined as a modern one, and the dusty wooden stairway, as seen from the pavement, disappeared upward into a smoky darkness. So would the footsteps of a girl ascending there lead to a hideous obscurity, Alice thought; an obscurity as dreary and as permanent as death. And like dry leaves falling about her she saw her wintry imaginings in the May air: pretty girls turning into withered creatures as they worked at typing-machines; old maids “taking dictation” from men with double chins; Alice saw old maids of a dozen different kinds “taking dictation.” Her mind's eye was crowded with them, as it always was when she passed that stairway entrance; and though they were all different from one another, all of them looked a little like herself.
She hated the place, and yet she seldom hurried by it or averted her eyes. It had an unpleasant fascination for her, and a mysterious reproach, which she did not seek to fathom. She walked on thoughtfully to-day; and when, at the next corner, she turned into the street that led toward home, she was given a surprise. Arthur Russell came rapidly from behind her, lifting his hat as she saw him.
“Are you walking north, Miss Adams?” he asked. “Do you mind if I walk with you?”
She was not delighted, but seemed so. “How charming!” she cried, giving him a little flourish of the shapely hands; and then, because she wondered if he had seen her coming out of the tobacco-shop, she laughed and added, “I've just been on the most ridiculous errand!”
“What was that?”
“To order some cigars for my father. He's been quite ill, poor man, and he's so particular—but what in the world doIknow about cigars?”
Russell laughed. “Well, what DO you know about 'em? Did you select by the price?”
“Mercy, no!” she exclaimed, and added, with an afterthought, “Of course he wrote down the name of the kind he wanted and I gave it to the shopman. I could never have pronounced it.”