CHAPTER VII
IN the last week of September Ginger went with a flag of truce to her Aunt Fan and asked her to go east with her.
“Boston?” asked Aunt Fan, shrewdly.
“No,” said Ginger, coloring hotly but steady-eyed, “New York.” She considered for a moment and then said, gravely. “But it is—connected with Boston, in a way, Aunt Fan.”
She put it, rather stumblingly, into words. Dr. Mayfield had made her realize how unjust she had been to Dean Wolcott with regard to his riding, and that had made her understand the possibility of being unjust in other ways. She was very brief and very dry about it; Mrs. Featherstone was not the sort of person to whom one opened the shy depths of one’s heart—she pounced too much, and chattered. It was enough for her to know that her niece was open-mindedly going to give eastern culture a chance at polishing the surface of her rugged westernism.
Aunt Fan was delighted. “Of course I’ll go, child! We’ll have a wonderful time—you’ll see! You’ll be crazy about it! Just wait till you see Fifth Avenue—and Peacock Alley! You know, Jim’ll just be pleased to the bone to beau us around—you can’t see anything of New York at night without a man, of course—and if we see it with him, we’ll see itright!” She beamed affectionately upon the girl for the first time since Dean Wolcott’s exodus from Dos Pozos. “Honey, I’m tickledpinkto go with you. We’ll see all the new shows, and you know what I’m thinking of?— You know, Imayhave my face lifted!”
Ginger thought grimly that she, personally, might have her heart lifted, but she didn’t say so. She went downtown and saw about reservations and bought a wardrobe trunk and put her two evening gowns in it (Aunt Fan had banned all the rest) and in a fortnight they were on their way across the continent.
It surprised Ginger a great deal and at first annoyed her considerably to find how much country there seemed to be outside of California. She had known, of course, that New York wouldbe larger and more impressive than San Francisco or Los Angeles, but she had felt that most of the desirable out-of-doors was contained in her own state. The great city itself startled and saddened her; she had not realized that there were as many people as that in the world, and most of them tired-looking and pale and in a hectic hurry to get somewhere else. They stopped at an opulent and ornate hotel and Aunt Fan was very gay and amiable, and on their first day—they had arrived in the morning—they shopped on the Avenue, lunched at the Ritz, did a matinée and had tea, and then Jim Featherstone called for them and took them down to dinner at the Brevoort and to a play, and afterwards to one of the roofs, where they ate again and danced.
Jim Featherstone was a tall, thin, middle-aged man with a rather melancholy expression and much skill in assembling a meal. He and Aunt Fan were unfeignedly glad to see each other, and Ginger was content to have them talk together and leave her to herself. They left her to herself a great deal in the days and evenings which followed—not that they ever forgot her or neglected her, but she had a sense of being withthem but not of them, and she felt that it always would be so. Her aunt, languid as a wilted lily at Dos Pozos, developed an amazing energy in New York; from their nine o’clock tray breakfast in their sitting-room until one the next morning, she was in perpetual and enthusiastic motion—always panting a little, taking her short, chugging steps in her short-vamped, high-heeled pumps, her blue eyes prominent, like a gold fish’s.
“This is the life, dearie,” she said, breathlessly, one day. “And you know, I haven’t gained an ounce, for all I’ve eaten like a human being; it’s being so active that saves me. Jim doesn’t want me to have my face lifted; not for two or three years anyway, he says. He says you get a sort ofhardlook; he says he wouldn’t like to have my expression changed.” She sighed. “Isn’t it a crime— A man that can be a friend like that, a total loss as a husband?” She patted Ginger’s arm (she was very fond of her, in these days) affectionately. “Dearie, I don’t know that I regret—youknow! He was a sweet boy, andclass, class if ever I saw it in my life, but I’m not so sure he would have made you happy. IfJim Featherstone couldn’t make a woman happy, I don’t know who——”
“I think,” said Ginger, almost to herself, “a woman has to make herself happy, Aunt Fan. I guess no one can do it for you.” Ginger was saying “I think” a good deal at that time, and she was actually thinking. She was growing very tired of long parades of food, and the pavements made her feet ache for the sun-baked earth, for her stirrups. She had seen so many plays—“shows,” Jim Featherstone and her Aunt Fan invariably called them—“a good show,” “a bad show,” “a peach of a little show,” that they were blurred and jumbled in her memory, and her eyes wanted distance and sky line instead of bright lights indoors and quivering electric signs on the streets.
She had been more than a month, now, in the east, and she had docilely done everything and bought everything she was asked to do and to buy, and she had gone everywhere they wanted to take her, but she was puzzled. Was this the sort of thing which had made Dean Wolcott different from ’Rome Ojeda?
Her aunt sensed her restlessness and grew uneasy;she had no wish to terminate her own holiday. “Jim,” she said urgently, “I wish to goodness you could rustle up a man for Ginger—not just anybody, of course, but some really nice chap. One that looks like a collar ad—youknow! The child’s getting homesick and blue, and if we don’t give her something to think about she’ll rush home and marry that wild-man—that immorally good-looking Ojeda boy.”
Jim Featherstone was interested, but he really didn’t know what to do about it. All the men he knew were his own sort and age; hard-boiled old birds, he called them; wouldn’t do for Ginger. He had a very soft spot in his leathery heart for Ginger, Jim Featherstone. They decided that they must try to give her a better time, and they set earnestly about it, but the girl did not respond.
“Dearie,” her aunt would say in the morning, “don’t you want to come along with me while I get my henna rinse? You could have a manicure while you’re waiting, or a facial. Or just sit and look out at the Avenue—that’sas good as a show, I always say.”
But Ginger had had a manicure two days earlier (she had come to like the look of her brownfingers after careful grooming) and she never had facials, and looking out at the Avenue made her long unendurably for the range; and it seemed to her that Aunt Fan had had her mind as well as her hair henna rinsed; as if she’d had a permanent wave in her personality. Then, suddenly, she remembered Mary Wiley.
Mary Wiley was a girl she had known at boarding school in Los Angeles, a slim, frail girl who had been sent west for the mildness of the winters. She was three or four years older than Ginger, but they had roomed together for several months and the younger child had liked her warmly, without ever understanding why. She had very smooth, cool hands and she was always delicately and pleasantly pale, and never in a hurry. She always had her lessons learned and her themes written and had generous margins of time for other people.
They had corresponded for a while; it was Ginger who had stopped writing. Mary Wiley had sent her a brief, bracing little note when she had heard, through other channels of the old school, of Aleck’s death, but Ginger had never acknowledged it. Now she wanted to find her.The telephone book was rich in Wileys but she knew she would recognize the address when she saw it and she did—up in the Eighties, and just off Riverside Drive, the hotel door man told her. She could take the bus. Ginger liked taking the bus when she could ride on the top; it gave her a comforting little sense of leashed freedom for a while, and she loved the river. It was the first river she had ever known, personally, and she had the merest bowing acquaintance with it now, but she knew that she would like knowing it if she could.
It was a narrow, quiet-looking house; it made her think of Mary Wiley herself. A neat, middle-aged maid answered her ring and took her name and said that she would see if Miss Wiley was at home. She had hardly finished her leisurely mounting of the stairs when Ginger heard a low exclamation of pleasure and her friend came skimming down to her. (She recalled, now, the way Mary Wiley had of moving, of coming downstairs.)
She did not kiss her but she took both her hands and glowed her deep and quiet gladness. “Virginia McVeagh! My dear! It’s so nice tosee you! And howlovelyyou are—much lovelier, even, than when you were little!”
Mary Wiley was a plain young woman herself but she drank up Ginger’s beauty thirstily. She was still slim and frail, with rather colorless hair and skin, but she had good gray eyes and a singularly intelligent sweetness of expression.
They sat down to talk in the small drawing-room which was rather scantily furnished, Ginger thought, and presently she telephoned to her aunt that she was staying for luncheon and would not be back until late in the afternoon. It just happened, Mary Wiley said, to be her lazy day, so they could have a fine visit.
Her mother and father were at luncheon, elderly, mellow people with low voices and much gentle warmth of manner and they were extraordinarily kind to their daughter’s school friend without in the least making what Aunt Fan would have called “a fuss over her.” Luncheon was a very simple meal—clear soup in dull blue bowls with thin slices of lemon floating on it, something creamed on toast, tiny graham muffins and a fruit salad, and there were the plainest possible doilies of unbleached linen on the dark, lusterless table.The middle-aged maid served silently and slowly, and—in contrast with the hotel and the restaurants where Jim Featherstone had taken her—it was like leaving the pounding surf and coming into a little still bay.
The Wiley family, it appeared, had not seen a fourth of the plays which Ginger had seen; they were astonished at her energy. They had seen three of the better ones and there were one or two more which they meant to see during the winter; they did not—the parents—go out very much at night. On the other hand, they seemed to have heard a great deal of music; they had season tickets for the Symphony and the Philharmonic, and they were going that afternoon to hear a young Russian pianist whom their daughter had heard the evening before, and they spoke of art exhibits in the smaller galleries. When they first asked Ginger if she had seen any interesting pictures she thought they meant on the screen and she answered accordingly that she had been too busy seeing plays; she was relieved, an instant later, to see that they had not realized her mistake. Mary Wiley said she would take her tothe Ehrich Galleries next day; there were some delectable old Dutch things there now.
Mrs. Wiley wanted to know if Ginger had seen any other parts of the east, and her husband and her daughter began to smile at her.
“What she really wants to know, Virginia,” said Mary Wiley, “is whether you’ve seen Boston?”
Ginger could feel herself coloring. “No,” she said, “I haven’t seen anything but New York—yet.”
“My wife is a Bostonian, you see, Miss Virginia,” said Mr. Wiley, “and she still has, after thirty years, a little the feeling of the Children of Israel in Egypt.” He chuckled enjoyingly and his wife defended herself gently.
“My dear Walter, you know I have become—I am—aloyalNew Yorker!” She gave a very small sigh. “New York is a wonderful city; it is stupid to compare the two. Boston——”
“‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion,’” her husband quoted, teasingly. “Though it is to be admitted, Deborah, my dear, you have wept unobtrusively.”
“‘For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song,’” she flashed back at him.
Her daughter leaned over and patted her hand. “She’s sung the Lord’s song in a strange land, hasn’t she, father?”
“She has—loyally and lustily,” he laughed.
“Well,” said Mrs. Wiley, smiling pacifically upon them both, “I like to think I’ve brought a little of Boston with me and transplanted it. My people”—she turned to Ginger—“have never yet, after all these years, become entirely reconciled to having me a New Yorker, but I say to them—‘My dears, cannot one have a lamp, and a fire, and a book, even in New York?’”
Ginger liked their voices and the way they looked at each other. She wondered if Dean Wolcott’s mother was something like Mrs. Wiley. Presently the parents went away to their concert and the girls talked for an hour, and then Mary Wiley, who said she had been indoors all day, offered to walk with Ginger back to her hotel. They went beside the river as far as Seventy-second Street, and Mary Wiley walked with her remembered smoothness of gait, swiftly and easily on her low heeled and gray-spatted feet. Ginger,in footgear of her Aunt Fan’s choosing, seemed to be on stilts in comparison. She learned, during the walk, what her friend had meant by calling that her lazy day. Every other week day she had classes at an Italian Settlement House far uptown; she thought Ginger might enjoy visiting it with her, one day.
This was the beginning—when Mary Wiley walked back into Ginger’s life on her low heels—of Ginger’s entrance into the inner city, where her Aunt Fan, ardent pilgrim that she was, and Jim Featherstone, born on West Fortieth Street, could never penetrate. She still went once or twice a week with them to dinners and “shows,” but for the rest of the time she was quietly busy with her friend: afternoons at the Settlement, early morning walks in the Park, trips on the river—over the river to the Palisades; the Russian quarter, the Syrian quarter; a service at the Greek cathedral, performances at little theaters which Jim Featherstone had shied away from as dangerously high-brow; exhibitions of strange new pictures at the smaller galleries—or mellow old pictures. Mary Wiley seemed always occupied but never hurried; her life was a brimming cup which never ran over.
She took Ginger to an upstairs shop in a cross street where low-voiced saleswomen conferred together over her and sent for certain special models—“Miss Hadley, don’t you think that old-blue frock for Miss McVeagh—the one with the silver fringe?”—or “I believe that Russian peasant thing would suit Miss McVeagh——”
Mary Wiley urged her to take the Russian peasant thing; it was richly red, of a soft wool stuff, boldly embellished in cobalt and dull silver. “It’s the sort of thing I’ve longed all my life to wear,” she said, and her satisfaction seemed all the deeper for being vicarious. “You can’t think what a joy it is to see it on you, Virginia! My dear, are you half thankful enough for being so beautiful? You ought to set aside a Thanksgiving Day for every month in the year!”
Ginger liked her cool compliments. She liked everything she did with Mary Wiley. Perhaps, best of all, she liked the luncheons at the Woman’s City Club and the Query Club and others to which her friend belonged or went as a guest, where she—Ginger—might sit in mouselike silence and hear brisk and vigorous talk. Mary Wiley sometimes spoke, quietly and effectively. Once,in the midst of a discussion on the iniquities of the retailer, she said suddenly—“I think Miss McVeagh could tell us something of interest on that subject; you know, she owns and operates one of the largest cattle ranches in her part of California.”
“Thatbaby?” A lean, elderly woman bent forward in her seat and smiled at Ginger, and—her cheeks crisping hotly—she heard herself speaking. It was incredible that they should all stop, those keen and purposeful women—and listen to Ginger McVeagh, but they did.
“Did you get that, Helen?” she heard them saying to each other when she had finished her three or four sentences. “That’s all she gets a pound—and consider what we pay our local butchers!”
Several came and spoke to her afterward; California was always a name to conjure with, they said, but a California cattle ranch— They made her feel definite and worth while; once Mary Wiley asked half a dozen of them in to meet her at tea, and made her wear the red peasant dress.
But most of all she found herself at the Symphony. When she was homesick, which was often,in spite of her new contentment, she found that music—not solo things nor chamber music, but the crash and volume of an orchestra—most nearly approximated the breadth and freedom of her life at home. Sitting beside her friend or quite alone, serenely ignorant of composition and composer and interdependence of instrument, she was as wholly content as when she was riding Felipe or Diablo into the heart of a sunset. When she tried, gropingly, to tell Mary Wiley what she felt, she quoted to her a line of Huneker’s; it ought, she thought, to be graven over the door of every concert hall: “Other arts give us defined pleasures, but music is the only art that restores us to ourselves.”
It restored Ginger not only to herself but to her lover. Whether they ever came together again, whether she ever saw him again, sitting perched in her high balcony seat in Carnegie Hall, all the pride and criticism and bitterness were cleansed away; she went to him once more as she had gone to him on Aleck’s bridge; she found harmony in harmony.
“You are radiant,” said Mary Wiley to her as they came away from Carnegie on an afternoonof dazzling snow. “I knew you would love Tschaikowsky. You look—my dear, did you love it so much?”
Ginger fell into step beside her. “Let’s walk, shall we? Yes; I loved it. But I was thinking just then about—Mary, I would like to go to Boston.”
“Would you, really? How warmly mother will approve of you for that chaste desire!”
“Mary, there is some one in Boston I must see. I was unjust, and ignorant, and—mean. Mean and stupid. Now I’m going to Boston and tell him so.”
Mary Wiley smiled at her. “I think that’s big and fine, Virginia. Shall I go with you—to Boston, I mean? I’ve been wanting to run down for a day or two, to see my cousin Sarah; she is ill again. There’s a mousy little hotel just across the street from her house where you could stay. Let me see ... my young aliens would adore not being Americanized for a few days; suppose we go Monday and come back on Friday? That will give you time for a little sedate sight-seeing to please mother—and for—for your own affairs.”She smiled sunnily at her. “My dear, I’m very glad. I’ve been sure that there was some one.”
Ginger shook her head, her color mounting. “I don’t know, Mary; I’m not sure of anything, except that I must go—and tell him.”
“I’ve known there was some one,” said Mary Wiley. There had been some one, with her, once, but he had not come home from France. Mrs. Wiley had wept when she told Ginger about it, but if Mary Wiley ever wept she made her tears turn the wheels of her serene and selfless activities.
Aunt Fan lifted her plucked eyebrows when she learned that her niece was going to Boston. “Ishould say it would be much better form just to drop him a line—one of those postcards with a picture of the hotel on it—and say—oh, ‘West is East,’ or something kind of cute like that, and wait forhimto make the first move!” Aunt Fan was feeling a trifle acid; she and Jim Featherstone were getting on each other’s nerves again, and in spite of being so triumphantly active she had gained six pounds.
On the way to Boston Ginger tried to formulate what she would say to Dean Wolcott; she wantedto make it proudly clear to him that this was no overture for a return to their former relation; it was simply and solely an acknowledgment of her wrongness of attitude at Dos Pozos, of her new respect and liking for the world he had always lived in, but always when she rehearsed it her phrases were swallowed up in great waves of gladness which rolled over her—like the music she had heard from her high perch in Carnegie. After all, she was Virginia Valdés McVeagh, feudal lady of her own land; under her novel humility there was the conviction that she had only to extend her forgiveness and her understanding. She summoned up the memory of his look, his tall slimness, his walk, the tones of his voice; his arms, his lips.
Directly Mary Wiley left her at the hushed little hotel she wrote a note to him—four lines—and sent it by messenger, and sat down to wait in the lobby. A grave bell boy tried twice to show her to her room, but she told him she wished to wait there for the answer to the letter she had just sent. She was joyfully sure what form the answer would take; Dean Wolcott would come himself. She could picture him, crossing to herfrom the front door to the chair where she sat; he would look as he had looked that golden day, when they came together on Aleck’s bridge.
The door opened and closed nineteen times by count. She would know her messenger the instant she saw him; he was a rather small boy, copiously freckled, and he wore thick spectacles.
He returned in exactly twenty-seven minutes by the office clock and handed Ginger’s note back to her, unopened. There was only a caretaker at the Wolcott residence, he reported: she had told him that the entire Wolcott family had gone to Florida.