” What kind of girls you were living with and what kind of a life you lead—from man to man instead of hand to mouth——”
Joy had turned the words over in her whirling brain all night. One thing alone was certain; she must see Packy, find out what he meant—what Packy had insinuated about herself in particular—what he knew, about Sarah and Jerry——
Jerry came in about ten o’clock in her favourite purple satin and pink mules, first poking a freckled nose around the door to see if she was awake. “Didn’t disturb you last night because I thought if there was any sleep to be had, you ought to have it,” she announced.
She regarded Jerry from beneath tired eyelids, with a sick feeling of disloyalty. Jerry was the best friend she had; she knew that;—and yet, she knew just as surely that she could not picture Grant meeting her. What could Packy have meant——Watching Jerry’s unconscious face, she could not bring herself to repeat Packy’s quoted words—to tell Jerry anything of what had passed.
“Why don’t you try and sleep some more?” Jerry was saying, after a keen scrutiny of her. “You look dead, and you’ve got nothing on hand thisA.M.—it’s just as well to hang off when you can.”
Joy fell back into bed, and Jerry pulled down the black and white-striped shades before tiptoeing out. From the first moment that she had known Jerry, she had liked her. Jerry had never been anything to Joy but an unselfish, true friend. If it had not been for Jerry, the glory of music that Pa was unfolding to her would never have been hers. If it had not been for Jerry, she would never have met Grant—never have known. . . . But now—now, what did she owe Jerry? Grant had said, he had to—think. How long—how long would he—think?
She had had only a few hours of fitful slumber—something that Jerry had divined with one solicitous glance. Jerry had gone out and left her without trying to talk, which might fully have awakened her. What had Packy meant? She sank into a comatose state from which, contrary to the will of her weary brain, she fell into a heavy sleep.
About four o’clock, she woke with a raging headache. Jerry had closed the windows, as the room faced on a court and was noisy in the daytime, and the air was envelopingly turgid. She dressed slowly, realizing as she became more awake that she had not really eaten for more than twenty-four hours. To ransack the kitchen at this time of the day was hopeless, she knew. There was no solution but to walk down to the nearest dairy lunch, which was quite a distance.
Hatted for the street, she passed through the hall, giving a fleeting look to the living-room before leaving the apartment. Sarah and Jerry were “rolling the bones” on the floor, with Wigs and Davy and several other youths in full cry.
“Honey, what am them?”
“Oh, babe—what will the harvest be?”
“Shine out, little seven!”
“Root, hog, or die!”
Wigs caught sight of Joy as she was about to leave, and sang out: “Oh, Jo-oy! What d’you mean, going to dinner at the Copley with Boston’s Best? We saw you getting gay in there with Whosis—sitting up just like you were at a funeral and all that!”
“Come on in!” invited Davy. “Chance to make your everlasting fortune—never saw good coin change hands so fast——”
She made her escape hastily.What had Packy meant!The kind of life she led—from man to man instead of from hand to mouth——At the Dairy lunch, over some poached eggs, she reflected that it was rather hand to mouth to-day.
It was nearing evening as she paid her check and started to walk back. There could be no explanation of Packy’s words except that he had deliberately lied. Yet that did not sound like Packy. Fast and flippant he undoubtedly was, but she could not picture him lying about a girl.
Suddenly, as she approached the apartment house, her heart came up in her mouth. Surely that was Packy’s car in front—and Packy himself in the act of stepping into it. She waved her veil at him wildly. If he should drive away now just as the solution to her questionings presented itself——But he saw her, and jumped out again as she came up to him.
“Joy! What doggone good luck. Jerry said she didn’t know where you’d gone or when you’d come back——”
“I think it’s good luck, too,” she said quietly. “I have a lot of questions to ask you.”
A window banged six stories up, and Jerry shrieked above them: “That you, Joy? Come on up—there’s somebody to see you!”
“That blond ninny who bumped into Grant and me at the dance that night,” Packy elucidated.
Jim Dalton! Life was too full of complications. She had as much as told him so—“I told him I was too busy to see him,” said Joy.
“Come on—we’ll go riding,” said Packy, and called up to Jerry—“Joy’s coming riding with me—better tell her company not to wait.”
“Where are you going?” Jerry cried, hanging her head farther out of the window.
“Where are we going?” Joy repeated, as he hesitated.
“Down the Shore Road a ways!” he answered finally, and Jerry’s face disappeared.
“Hang Jerry—she acts like a regular old chaperone,” he grumbled as he helped her in the car.
“According to what you think of me, I need one,” she retorted. They were well under way before he replied, in a cool, even tone:
“Pretty crude, Joy—that’s not like you. I suppose Holy Boy Grant has been spilling a lot of chatter in your shell-pink ear.”
“Then youdidsay something to him! Packy—how could you do such a thing!”
The small, pitiful voice evoked a quick glance from him. “How couldn’t I, you’d better say. May I remark in passing that he certainly didn’t leave the ground long untrampled. Came up late last night, did he? I had to nurse myself along a bit before I staggered about and got under way.”
A mile flashed by them while Joy thought desperately: His profile bent over the wheel looked hard and even cruel. He had admitted talking to Grant as calmly as he would have admitted sending her a box of candy. He seemed to be in a repressed state below the level of which anything might be lurking.
“I—I want to know—just what you told him,” she said at last, after coining and discarding many different methods of putting the question.
“What did he tell you?” Packy countered, eyes on the road ahead.
“He told me—he told me that you told him—that I led a man-to-man existence——”
“Yes, and for once you overdid the thing,” he said smoothly. “I told you, I could wait any reasonable length of time; but I wasn’t corked up to the extent of standing by and smirking while you paraded Old Maid Grant around under my nose. You ought to have had more sense of proportion, Joy, than to go outside your line like that. And jealousy, my dear girl, is a little item you absolutely glanced over.”
“What do you mean?” cried Joy, the wind tearing the words out of her mouth almost before they came. “What right have I given you to be jealous?”
“That’s absolutely ruled out as beside the point.” Still that level voice, although the speed of the car had increased to a breathless, horrible race that left no room for analysis. “You’ve got me so I don’t know whether I’m drinking booze or water—and I don’t propose to have you meanwhile carrying on a nice, pink-and-white little time with our mutual friend Grant. It gets me—see?”
“But—I don’t see yet why you were cad enough to go and tell him such lies about me——”
“Lies!” His lips twisted back from his teeth in silent mirth. “That’s what he said. The funny part of the whole thing is that I told the truth.”
“You can’t mean what you’re saying. You must have been drinking before you came to-day——”
“Now listen, Joy—you had me buzzing for awhile there—I didn’t know exactly where to place you. Of course, living with Jerry and Sal gave me a fairly good idea——”
“Ideaof what?” she screamed. “That’s whatI want to know—that’s what I’ve been asking you. What did you say, when you told Grant what kind of girls I was living with?”
“I was about to say,” his even tones went on, “that you pulled the innocent gag fairly well, but a little too frequent. I can stand just about as much, Joy—after which, off come the brakes and away we skid!” He turned and looked at her swiftly. His eyes were bloodshot, and they glittered. She shuddered and shrank away from him to the farthest corner of the car. The last time she had seen eyes with that look in them—it had been at Prom—Jack Barnett, standing unsteadily against the wall. Miles whirled past—while she cowered against the door of the car and thought with such intensity that her hands and feet felt as if they were turned to ice. He was drunk. She should have known before they started. What could she say, to persuade him to turn back—and failing that, what was there she could do?
A veering turn into a crossroad brought a protest. “What are we leaving the Shore Road for? Is this the way back?”
“This is not the way back. I’m not going to take you back until I’m good and ready—and the devil only knows when that’ll be!”
Her agonised scream vibrated above the roar of the motor. “Packy! Take me back! You must! You——”
“Save—your—breath!” was jolted back to her, and then he laughed—a long laugh that began and ended in his throat.
No more time to think, now—she knew what she must do. Her hands crept out to the knob of the door. Mechanically she looked back and saw a car in the distance—a car that she was dimly conscious had been following them for some time. She could open the door in one second, jump out in another—and before Packy could get back to her, the other car would be upon them——
She turned the knob; Packy saw her at the same minute. With a growl he lurched towards her and seized her by one arm. She struggled violently, and he took his hand from the steering wheel and pulled her back into the seat again.
It all happened in one of those seconds of eternity. While they struggled, the car, still going at white-hot speed without a hand at the wheel, careened from the road and was stopped by a tree.
A jarring crash which made one aware of every little bone and ligament shivering one’s body; the eerie sensation of flying through space; then—nothingness.
Pain—nothing but pain—and floating in a dizzy white world full of needles that pricked and hummed—a strange white world in which there was no time to open one’s eyes and look, because of the pain. Agony so fearful that it seemed as if the very universe must be cracking—everything above and beyond must be coming to an end—and yet the white world hummed on, and the needles sang.
Always pain—agony so deep that when it became less, the memory of it threw her into agony again.
Joy opened her arms and looked around. The white world was gone—she could see familiar pieces of black walnut furniture. And with the white world and humming needles had gone her pain, leaving her so weak she felt as if she scarcely could open her eyes.
Jerry was sitting at the foot of the bed—a pale Jerry, with eyes large and black as inkwells, her freckles standing out in bold relief. Joy was childishly pleased to have sound travel forth from her mouth: “Jerry?”
Jerry jumped up and came to the side of the bed. “Joy! Hullo, old girl!”
Before her wide, relieved grin Joy essayed a colorless smile which merely dragged her face into little white wrinkles. “Some—smash, wasn’t it?” she quavered, anxious to show that she was in possession of her senses. “How long have I been this way?”
“Too darn long,” said Jerry sternly. “Rotten company when you’re unconscious, I’ll say that for you, Joy. Well, got to call up the doctor—I said I’d let him know when you were ready to sit up and eat.”
“Eat!” Joy murmured in objection; but Jerry was gone. It was too much trouble to lie and think. She fell asleep.
When she awoke, Jerry was standing by her bedside rattling a spoon in a glass of milk. “Do you think it’s any bouquet to a doctor to fall asleep, and stay that way all the time he’s here?” she demanded merrily. “Anyway, he says to all outward appearances you aren’t dying yet. He’ll be around again to-morrowA.M.”
Joy paused in drinking. “What—happened, Jerry? You haven’t told me yet.”
Jerry’s teeth shut down on each other. “I’ll tell you the whole darn tale to-morrow. To-day you’d go to sleep in the middle of it.” She pulled down the blinds and in the darkness of the room, Joy fell into a thick, dreamless space from which she brought herself up with a start. It was morning; chinks of glory were pouring in through the blinds; and all at once she felt hungry and almost vigorous. Jerry was asleep on the chair by the foot of the bed, but as Joy stirred, her eyes popped open and she bounced up.
“What ho!” she exclaimed, dashing for the door. “You have the look of a real breakfast in your eye!”
Joy did not talk much until the “real breakfast” was downed. Then she leaned back on her pillows expectantly. “Now, Jerry—please tell me—everything that happened. I gather from investigation that none of my bones are broken—but what did happen to me? How did I get back here? And what happened to Packy?”
Jerry pulled out her cigarette case. “Mind if I have at it? The doc would kill me for doing this here, but I’m so fuzzy since this happened——Packy, allow me to snort, got off nobly with a bump on the eye. The nasty little garter snake! You see, Joy, Jim Dalton and I were pursuing you in a taxi at ten dollars per sneeze, all the way.”
“Jim Dalton!”
“Right. He horned in on the craps, and by the way, after a round or two he began taking away everybody’s cash, so the taxi bill might not have made him as sad as it would have made me—and pretty soon Sal and Wigs and the gang faded off down town to get a club sandwich, but I stuck around and so did this Dalton bird. He had never played about with me at all, so I took a somersault when he began to mention you in an offhand way. Said he had seen you a couple of onces, and wanted to again sometime.”
“I told him I was too busy to see him,” Joy interpolated, trying to struggle to a sitting posture. Jerry raised a restraining hand.
“Take it from one who has flown about on the four winds, Joy—he’s all right. He played a hunch to come up that night, and he might have saved your life for all you know.”
Joy fell back on the pillows. “Oh, all right—but go on.”
Jerry smiled. “Don’t interrupt and I’ll spill it fast——Just at that moment dear little Packy blew in on one of the stiffest breaths I’ve come near since the first of July. Wanted to know where you were, why you weren’t there, etcetera, and I told him to go to and stay put. He paced out banging the door in good old ten-twenty-thirty style, and Dalton passed the remark that he’d seen the angel messing around you before and didn’t like the way he parted his hair. I took a glim out of the window with some small idea of drowning Packy’s pretty car with a bucket of varnish there happened to be handy, when you breezed up and stood talking to him with all the life in the world. I knew there was a nice speedy wind out which would muffle Packy’s breath, so I hove up the window and bade you come in out of the wet. But no—you would go a-riding, and I was all for letting you go, but Dalton got a taxi while I was still bandying words with you, and told me to put on my old grey bonnet and trot along with him. I trotted!” She took a long breath. “God, Joy, that was a ride! I had netted the info that you were going out on the Shore Road, but there was always the chance you’d change your minds, and we had one whirl getting you into view! Some joy-ride—cheery for me no end—with Dalton bickering along with himself to the effect that he wouldn’t let that fellow take you out alone with as enthusiastic a breath as he was exhibiting—my only recreation was making up five different stories which I told the taxi-boy, about the car we were streaking after—which made him put on all speed and sizzle along, anyhow.”
“I saw your car,” said Joy, “or else I wouldn’t have tried to jump.”
“Oh—so that’s what brought about the smash!”
Jerry whistled. “Joy, when I saw the car hit the tree——No matter; and we certainly paid Packy off. We picked you up—or rather Jim did—and put you in the taxi—and Packy was rolling about with only an eye gone wrong—so Jim put him to sleep beside his car, which was all in, too, from the looks of it; and came back home—leaving Packy to his own devices, as the saying is. Not a peep has been heard from him; he must have come to and slapped the car into shape, or there’d at least have been a squib in the papers.”
“Now you’ve gotten to me,” said Joy.
Jerry suddenly sobered, dropping the light tone she had been using to gild the narrative. “You’ve had a little—concussion of the brain. I don’t know whether the doctor wanted me to tell you or not—but he says you’ll be all right in a couple of weeks, so I don’t see why you shouldn’t have the straight facts.”
“Concussion.” Joy considered her state. “Oh, yes—that’s what football athletes are always getting, aren’t they?”
“That’s right—the idea’s the same,” said Jerry. “You tackled a tree, instead of a person.” There was a slight pause, and Jerry said briskly: “Mr. Grant Grey has called up once or twice. I told him you were ill, but I guess he thinks it’s only a stall.”
“Oh—Grant——” She dismissed the subject as a triviality that could be attended to at any time. “My father, Jerry—you haven’t let him know about me, have you?”
“No, I didn’t. I would have, if the doctor had given me any reason to; but he said that you would be all right and if you by any chance should start sliding, it wouldn’t be sudden—your father could be reached in time. I sort of thought you wouldn’t want him to know.”
“I wonder—what would have happened.” Joy tried to imagine her father’s arrival in the apartment; his meeting with Sarah and Jerry; his hearing the no doubt picturesque recital of her accident that Jerry would render. The arrival of the doctor put a stop to this conjecture, which was not a sufficiently pleasant line of thought to be reopened at any other time.
The days of convalescence that followed were long, with somber colouring. She missed her music; Grant did not call up again; the days had dreadful emptinesses that called out for Grant . . . or for her music. Sarah was almost unbearable to live with. Before, the incompatibility of the two had not been so noticeable, when Joy had been out or busy with her music most of the day; in the evenings, if they were together, there were always men around to distract their attention. But now Joy’s enforced stay in the house, threw them together a little more often; just that little more that is too much. Sarah made no bones of the fact that she nourished deep rancour against Joy for her accident, which she considered “all Joy’s fault, anyway.” As a result of the accident, Packy presumably would not put in an appearance at the apartment again; thus ran Sarah’s grievance, which she poured upon Joy instead of sympathy. It did not seem as if Sarah cherished a genuine affection for any human being, man or woman; and the more one knew of her, the more horrified one became at the hard, glassy surface which appeared to be impenetrable.
But there was Jerry who, an untiring nurse and a companion who never failed in interest, stayed constantly with Joy, turning down all invitations with an iron hand. The uneasiness that had always been there, moulded into form by Packy and Grant, was glazed over for a time. All Joy’s knowledge of and regard for Jerry spoke more coherently than unsubstantiated inference.
The two weeks set by the doctor had not quite passed when, one afternoon, Joy tired of lying in bed. She felt perfectly well; there was no reason why she shouldn’t get up and walk as far as the living-room. She did not admit to herself that the cellarette was her real objective; but it had been a long time since she had taken a prescription. Sarah was out on one of her eternal tea dates; Jerry had vanished somewhere. She slipped into her little blue crepe kimono and pattered down the hallway, exultant in the power to walk so much and so healthily.
She swung around the door of the living-room and in before she saw that someone was already there—Jerry, talking to Jim Dalton. They were both standing at the door, so that she almost rushed into them, then stood still in surprise.
Girls in fiction or plays who are surprised in negligée are always “distractingly lovely” in silks or satins, with hair becomingly flowing. But real girls in negligée, unless they know they are going to be inspected, are quite a different matter. Joy’s hair was strained back in tight braids from a face which, without rouge, was as thinly white as skim-milk. The ribbons of her night gown had had their colour laundered out of them; her kimono was—well, it was a kimono, not a negligée, nor lingerie, nor a tea gown. All this, and more, her thoughts touched upon in the first still moment.
Jim was the first to find his voice. “I’m glad to see you’re able to be around, Miss Nelson,” he said calmly. “You won’t have to go back; I was just leaving.”
Jerry went down the hall to the door with him, while Joy went into the living-room and sank down on the lounge. It was uncanny, the way that man had understood her, had spoken in a matter-of-fact voice and relaxed her, and left without making a point of leaving. She realized, as she lay among the pillows, that she could not have reached her room again with any degree of certainty; he had tactfully forestalled her; very thoughtful, for a man.
Jerry came back into the room, smoking in a desultory manner. “I didn’t think I’d tell you, Joy, because I know you don’t like him—but that boy has been here every blooming day since you’ve been sick, to find out how you were at first-hand—while your Grant has stalled at phone distance. I hate to say anything about a man I’ve never met, Joy, but Grant listens to me like a flat tire.”
Joy giggled nervously.
“It isn’t easy for Jim to come, either,” Jerry added. “He takes the trip way out here after he gets through working every day.”
“It’s none of Jim Dalton’s business,” said Joy. “He doesn’t have to come; I wish he wouldn’t. I barely know him, and he keeps turning up and acting as if he were my father or something.”
“Or something!” Jerry repeated derisively. “No—you’ve got a wrong slant on him. Of course, if you look at it that way, heisbeing a bit outside the works—but when you think it over, the knights of old they talk about who beat it to the rescue of dames in distress, didn’t always stop to decide whether it was any of their business.”
A bitter resentment swept over Joy—resentment that it had been Jim Dalton and not Grant who had followed them on that ride; that it had been Jim and not Grant who had come to see how she was. “Jerry!” she cried suddenly. “Did you know that Grant had left me?”
Jerry had been watching her smoke rings space themselves to the ceiling, but turned swiftly. At her look of blank interrogation, Joy repeated: “Grant has left me! I—I don’t think he’s ever coming back!” Then she stopped, with a tearing intake of breath.
There was an interval while Jerry’s smoke rings turned to curlicues and gargoyles, and Jerry remained seemingly lost in admiration of her skill. Finally, Jerry spoke.
“Of course, Joy, I don’t know the facts of the case—but he’ll come back. I’d stake ten to one on it. He’ll come back—I tell you he will!”
“I’m waiting——!” said Joy.
And she waited—through a week that turned hope to hopelessness. She dared not leave the apartment for fear the telephone would ring. She told herself that he was not coming; yet she sat in the living-room, a book on her lap, or sat at the piano touching keys into strange harmonies . . . waiting.
Gradually life began to resume its accustomed gait at the apartment. Jerry had curtailed all parties during Joy’s convalescence, but now was off again. It was nearing fall; people were coming back into town; the telephone jangled constantly. Joy lacked the energy to join any of these parties, and the evenings were very lonely; as she had not gone back to Pa Graham’s as yet, her days also were long and purposeless.
And so a week had passed on leaden wheels. And one evening about ten-thirty when she heard a babble of voices in the living-room, she made up her mind to dress and annex herself to the crowd.
The music of popping corks and carefree laughter assailed her ears as she came into the room. There were three men, not counting one that Sarah had taken to a comfortable, cosy corner and to whom she was archly whispering. Jerry was standing by the piano, looking over some popular songs with a short, chunky youth who could make the keys jingle in strange, barbaric dissonances that made up an irresistible syncopation which seemed to intoxicate more than the contents of the cellarette. The ever-present Wigs and Davy hailed Joy, pressed a “tall one” upon her, and sat her on the sofa.
“I knew you couldn’t stand Boston’s Best for a steady diet,” said Wigs. “You struck the right time, too, Joy; Jerry’s gotten herself quite tightly edged to-night, a thing that never happens as you know, and since we’ve got the wine and women, she’s going to favour us with song.”
The chunky boy at the piano was shaking out some bars of eerie ragtime. Jerry turned, swaying, hands on hips. Her eyes were shining with almost polished rays; they wandered over the room in an impersonal, professional smile. It was doubtful if she saw Joy at all. Her lips parted in an avid, gamin grin, and hardly opening her teeth, she jutted forth the words of the song:
“I wanted some men and I sought themI made myself up like a dollThe other girls, oh, how I fought them!They handed it to me for gall—I wanted some men and I’ve got themTurned down five bids for dinner last nightBut somehow they’re not what I thought themAnd somehow I know it’s not right.”
“I wanted some men and I sought themI made myself up like a dollThe other girls, oh, how I fought them!They handed it to me for gall—I wanted some men and I’ve got themTurned down five bids for dinner last nightBut somehow they’re not what I thought themAnd somehow I know it’s not right.”
“I wanted some men and I sought them
I made myself up like a doll
The other girls, oh, how I fought them!
They handed it to me for gall—
I wanted some men and I’ve got them
Turned down five bids for dinner last night
But somehow they’re not what I thought them
And somehow I know it’s not right.”
The fiery, vivid personality that was Jerry’s leaped out through scarcely a motion as she sang, insolently, through her teeth, her red lips always curved into that goblin grin. She was swinging into the chorus now, a chorus of dizzying syncopation the notes of which she followed not at all, speaking the words with a little drag at inconsequential moments—
“Ten men down—and more to go—Other girls get them—if you are slow—This life is shortSo don’t get caughtYou’ve got to have strings to your bow!”
“Ten men down—and more to go—Other girls get them—if you are slow—This life is shortSo don’t get caughtYou’ve got to have strings to your bow!”
“Ten men down—and more to go—
Other girls get them—if you are slow—
This life is short
So don’t get caught
You’ve got to have strings to your bow!”
“No sense to words of any popular songs nowadays,” complained Davy. “But Jerry puts ’em over—she’s the Queen of the Cabaret Artists.”
Joy had never heard Jerry sing before, except from a distance at the Prom. It was a rich voice, thick and uneven and even harsh in places; but she had “put it over.” She did not need any voice at all, with that audacity and insolence. There was loud applause, mingled with the popping of more corks. The chunky youth deserted the piano, complaining that it was “devilish dry work.” Jerry came over to the lounge.
“Hello, Joy,” she said lightly. “Come to join the happy family? Everyone was bored as blazes to-night until we started opening them up, and now everyone thinks they’re bright as the morning sun, which is still a long ways off from to-night, I’ll tell anyone.” She teetered slightly standing before them. Jerry “tightly edged,” was fascinating as ever, but not a pleasant sight.
“I can make up words as good as that old song,” said Sarah from her corner. Her head had slid to her companion’s shoulder, but she bobbed it up as she sang:
“Mazie had a man an’ he left her flatIf she’d had more than one he’d not had nerve to do that.”
“Mazie had a man an’ he left her flatIf she’d had more than one he’d not had nerve to do that.”
“Mazie had a man an’ he left her flat
If she’d had more than one he’d not had nerve to do that.”
“Fine! Let’s all make up pop’lar songs,” cried Davy, thumping out a staccato time with his feet and humming some blue lines of uncertain origin.
“Pop-u-lar songs,” corrected Wigs, with academic zeal. “’Shamed of you, Davy, ignoring your shyllables that way.”
“None of your business whether I cut silbles when I see ’em or not,” Davy retorted. “Always was ’ristocratic. Can’t help way was made——”
“Should help cruelty to inan-imate objexsh. Poor little shyllables can’t hit back.” Wigs became tearful over his chivalry in defending helpless objects. Davy remained gay, taking a glass Jerry had just filled, from her hands while chanting—
“O my name’s July an’ I gotta thirstO babe, share de whiskey or you shore will burst.”
“O my name’s July an’ I gotta thirstO babe, share de whiskey or you shore will burst.”
“O my name’s July an’ I gotta thirst
O babe, share de whiskey or you shore will burst.”
“Some poet!” said Jerry, and tipped the contents of the glass on to his collar, as he started to lift it to his lips. She poured herself another glass, while he rose and tore off the dripping mass that had been his collar, shrieking another stanza:
“De whiskey am frisky in its lawful placeBabe, leave some for me or I’ll slap your face.”
“De whiskey am frisky in its lawful placeBabe, leave some for me or I’ll slap your face.”
“De whiskey am frisky in its lawful place
Babe, leave some for me or I’ll slap your face.”
“Shay—whaddyouthinkthisish—blooming musical comedy?” And Wigs wept again.
Sarah’s little comrade in the corner was announcing that Sarah had “passed out”; the chunky pianist stopped drinking long enough to say that Sal was a rumhound and never knew when to stop; there seemed to be no end to Wigs’ flow of tears; Davy was chanting a new verse in which he could only get as far as “O Babe——” and then he would have to begin over. Jerry was laughing stridently at Davy between gulps of port wine. It was the worst to see Jerry so——But Sarah was the farthest along—she lay back on her cushions now without motion, her hair that was usually so exquisitely arranged, loose in loops about her face, her mouth sagging open ever so slightly.
Watching the sight before her, Joy felt a nauseation that she had ever touched liquor herself. Wigs’ tears reminded her sickeningly of her own. She had been living in a daze; but the daze had worn off. To-night was the finishing touch. Packy may have been despicable, but his words about Jerry and Sarah at this moment seemed to be justified.
She rose and left, ignoring Davy’s pleas for her to stay, and the fact that her departure threw Wigs into a fresh fit of tears. Jerry was still remarking that the evening was young and tender—and Joy had no doubt but that they would all drink until they were unable to move.
In the morning she got up early and packed her things—a decision born of the night hours, which did not change its colour in the rays of the sun. She was going home. Her visit had stretched itself far beyond its first designated limits. Her father could not understand why she had not come long since. She would go back to the Mid-Victorian house and face the family portraits—feel the protection of the four walls of the ancestral mansion around her—enjoy the peace and security of the little town.
A thought held her up, as she was folding a sweater. What of her singing? To leave Boston would be to leave Pa Graham. She had been subconsciously assuming that her music would always go on, but—how?
In a very few minutes she had dressed for the street and was hurrying out of the apartment. No one was stirring, but it was nine o clock, and she knew Pa would be in his studio. If she could only get there before his first lesson——
There is something about the personal quality of singing, and the reverence the teacher inspires as the embodiment of that great art, that draws the confidence. If singing teachers could tell half the stories of the lives of their pupils!
Pa was alone playing in the great studio, and came forward with delighted welcome: “Back again, my prima donna! Are you ready and eager for work once more?” Before her white wistfulness he paused. She stood looking around the room, at the busts of Mendelssohn and Beethoven; at the shrine to “Patti—the thing that happened once” in the far corner; at the photograph of Sembrich of the golden voice supreme, with loving greetings to Pa written across the face; the piles of music on the pianos——A sob arose to her lips. “Oh, Pa!” she said. “If you could only understand! Everything—has left me!” Days of waiting, of patient tears, brought a swift little rush of words: “I haven’t even a heart—any more.”
Pa took her hand gently and led her to a chair. Then he stood before her, stroking his short little beard, his old eyes very soft under his bent brows.
“Child—your heart may break—it’s the way of young hearts every once in a while—but there is one great soul that will remain true as long as you are true, and that is the soul of music. An older and wiser spirit than mine has said: ‘All passes; Art alone endures.’ With you, all else may pass, but the soul of music will unite itself with your own, always weaving its tendrils more closely into your being. Just now it may seem a cold comfort in your desolation—but it is a thing that ripens as the years go on—always faithful—always providing you are faithful.”
A quick little silence in the room. Joy lifted her head. “I want to, Pa—I want to turn to my music, so much—but how can I—do anything more with it—when I feel as if everything in my heart was burned and dead!”
He smiled. “Youth is tragic—every once in a while. Look you, Joy—you came this morning half determined to tell me you weren’t coming to me again—but you are. What would you do, else? Your impulse to love, let us say, has been awakened, then—diverted. Note, I do not say snuffed out, for that is an impossible thing. The impulse is still there—and if you turn it to music, spending it royally in terms of energy and power in work at your art, instead of in terms of love, you will be content, and you will become one of the greatest artists the world has known. You will interpret life to hundreds of thousands, through the transmutation of your life into work. ‘All passes; Art alone endures.’” He took a few quick turns about the room, then brought himself up with a jerk. “I do not want you to sing to-day; you have been with tears too recently; besides, I have a lesson. Go away, and think over what I have said. You will have some decisions to make. For if you come back to me, there will be no more half-toned effort such as the desultory summer work we have done.”
“Desultory summer work,” Joy gasped. “Why, I practised regularly——”
“Practice! An hour and a half a day. That is the most you can do with your voice. But there must be hours of silent study. No matter what one may say of Geraldine Farrar now, she was, is and will remain a very great artist. It does not drop on one like the gentle rain from Heaven, after a few years of hour-and-a-half practice. That girl worked ten hours a day in her years of study. Lilli Lehmann said she never had such a worker. You have the voice—yes. Now you require solfège, through harmony and counterpoint, French, Italian and German complete, other languages to pronounce—you are but at the threshold of your toil. Oh, when I see you before me, with practically everything to learn, the days don’t seem long enough—the years don’t seem long enough!” He quieted down and looked at her. A great deal had descended upon her at once, but she felt no sense of oppression at the program outlined; rather, she felt as if energy were pouring in upon her, energy to accomplish anything he said. She rose, inhaling a long breath as she did to sing on, feeling her ribs swell out, with the sense of power that it never failed to give her.
“It’s true, Pa—I did come in here half with the idea of leaving you. I didn’t know what I would do. But you have decided me. There’s no need of my thinking over what you said. I’ve decided now. You never told me all this before, about how I would have to work, because I wasn’t ready for it—isn’t that so? I am now—and thank you.”
His eyes glinted beneath his brows. “I’ll not let you decide here. Go away as I told you, and then come back. At Jerry’s, your atmosphere will not be so—musical, and you can make an unbiased decision.”
“No—I want to decide now—before I go back to Jerry’s——”
“You speak as if Jerry might influence you the other way. Jerry loves to mind her business with strict impartiality, but if she ever overstepped her limits she would only urge you to strive as she might have. That girl has the makings of a diseuse of the first water.”
She left the studio in the gilded bubble of youth’s ambition. All the voices and urges within her seemed this morning to have crystallized themselves into one refrain: “No work is too hard if it reaches towards perfection!” How could she have thought she could leave Pa?
She had forgotten—Jerry, Jerry, the mystery—about whom Pa seemed to know more than she, Joy, who lived with her.
What could she do? What was she to think? Where could she turn, in this perplexity?
Jerry was sitting in her room—a pale, seedy-looking Jerry in the familiar purple kimono, staring dully at the half-packed trunk. She did not turn as Joy came in.
“So you’ve—decided to go,” she said in a funny, hard little voice that wavered at the end.
All the resentment and doubt that had been torturing Joy, was dispelled by the sight of that desolate figure and those few wry little words. “Jerry!” she cried. “I—I thought about it this morning—but I—I couldn’t!”
Jerry’s lashes flickered, but she remained sitting in the same position, knees drawn against her chin, pink mules flapping in front of her. “It never wandered into my bean until just now, when I came in and saw——But I’ve been boiling the idea down—and I think you’d better.”
“Jerry!”
“You aren’t happy here; I—I guess you never have been. I’ve never done anything but harm to you from the first moment I knew you. God knows I didn’t mean to, but it seems my good intentions always make the smoothest kind of boulevards for the joy-riders in hell.”
Jerry broke the silence that followed her last speech. “Joy—I’ve never told you about myself. Get comfortable now, because I’m going to ladle out the whole story.”
Joy was at the threshold of the Blue Room, of what she had always wanted to know. And now that she was so near, she drew back. “Oh, no, Jerry—please don’t tell me anything you’d rather not talk about—and you’ve often said you’d rather not talk about that——”
“I also said I’d tell you sometime when I felt like it. Now gets the vote. I should have told you right at the start—but I didn’t, because I didn’t want to go into it. Now I’ve got to.”
“Well, if you must tell me—I’m comfortable,” said Joy in a small voice, sitting down on one of the black walnut chairs which had been remodeled with black-and-white-striped cushions.
” To begin at the pop of the pistol—I was born in New York—over on the East Side, where people live like flies. You’ve never been there, have you?” Joy shook her head. “Then you probably won’t believe some of the things I’m going to tell you. I was one of ten—and we all lived in two rooms.” Jerry’s voice seemed to have grown dull, and she stared away from Joy as she talked. “When you toss it over in your mind—it’s pretty brutalizing, living that way—it tends to turn humans into worse than animals—for humans can make themselves as much lower than animals as they can higher—that’s one of the things I’ve learned so far in life.”
“You don’t meanten people—in two rooms?” Joy gasped.
Jerry shrugged her shoulders. “That’s exactly what I do mean. Not only that, but we took two boarders in our rooms because my father was always out of work.”
Joy’s eyes were huge disks of horror; already she had shrunk into her chair looking at Jerry as if she had suddenly dropped in from Mars. Jerry was continuing rapidly:
“I sold newspapers as soon as I was able to take in the pennies. I wore a grey sweater and a pair of bloomers, and talked to everybody who bought a paper of me, whether they slung a line back or not.” She gave a long, quivering sigh. “I don’t intend to go into details about my life from the ground floor up——But get this clear, Joy:I never knew what it was to be innocent, not since I can remember. And I’m not throwing out any cross lines when I say that it wasn’t my fault or my own choosing. I—never had any other slant on it offered to me. My life, as I have said, was like that of an alley cat, and it couldn’t be translated to you any other way.”
“I don’t understand,” said Joy faintly.
“You wouldn’t. You were having milk fed to you when I was picking up beer-leavings. That’s the best way I can put it to you.”
There was a pause while Jerry studied her pink mules and searched for words in which to clothe what she wanted to say. Finally, with a swift frown, she plunged into narrative again, obviously leaving a hiatus.
“When I was thirteen, I got a job as messenger girl for Charlette et Cie. Happened to have drifted up the Avenue to see if I could get some man to buy my whole load of papers—saw the sign, Girl Wanted, and tacked inside. There were a bunch of others waiting that dressed the part a little better—I had on the grey sweater and bloomers—but I told the dame that was doing the interviewing that I’d carry their old bundles for less than any other applicant. This underbidding tickled the old girl somehow, and before I knew it, I was one of Charlette’s regular messenger-girls at five dollars per.
“My getting rich quick was the cause of a split between me and the family. I shut my mitt on my income—and the result was the throwing of a few flat-irons and other little parties, which ended in the fact that one night I didn’t come back and I’ve never been back since. I hadn’t ever bet much on the family—and there was a new boarder I didn’t like.”
“What do you mean, Jerry,” Joy interposed; “you couldn’t live—notliveon five dollars a week?”
“I could and did. I took a room at a dollar a week. It was a hall bedroom, the kind you don’t even read about. No light, and squirming all over. I used to——Never mind—I got along all right—and the family never came after me; I guess one more or less didn’t make such a hell of a difference.
“Excuse me, Joy! You look paralyzed or something. I was inhaling the dollar-a-week air again——Cheer up—I’m whirling off the slum stuff as swift as it can go—but you’ve really got to hear some of this, so you can understand every little thing.”
“Go—on,” Joy articulated with difficulty.
“My next two years I spent carrying bundles for Charlette’s and incidentally hanging around the place before and after hours, talking to the models every chance I could get, absorbing the main truths about what clothes can do to you and what you can do to clothes. My errands took me into the workrooms and fitting-rooms, and I began to make my own clothes and what I admitted was improving on Charlette designs in doing so. Watching the models and hearing them talk had given me an idea of what colour and line could do.
“I think I was at my worst at fifteen. I tossed a mean make-up and looked probably older than I do now. I had no morals and a bunch of bad ideas. Some of the models were all right, but those weren’t the ones who shot their mouths off. About the only rule I went by was to look out for myself.
“Along about then, I struck for recognition—I was working twelve hours a day and only pulling down seven a week—and they graduated me into the work-rooms.
“That’s the way my rise in the world began—that and changing to a sub-let room in an apartment uptown. I was five years more at Charlette’s; and at the end of that time I was one of their designers—what I had been working for, all that time.” She closed her eyes as if they hurt. “I’d been working on the same old twelve-hour average, but it was a change and higher pay, and I lapped up the work, I was so crazy about it. There seemed a sort of poetry to it—even when I started as a cutter, baster, fitter and spent days over the sewing machine—a poetry that grew as I pushed myself into the designing end and put the right thing on the right person.”
“Like Mrs. Messy,” Joy said, with a little hysterical giggle. She had lost her look of breathless horror, and was listening with minute interest.
“Well—there were a lot of people like her around, of course—there always are, in a big designing shop—and I learned how to put things on them, too—as you’ve seen.” The two girls smiled at each other. The air had become less tense. It was almost in relief that Jerry continued:
“I always worked overtime, at first because I knew that was the way to get ahead, then later from habit as well as my burning to get to the top. I saved my money, too, and was the original glued-to-a-nickel fiend. Men dropped out of my life pretty much in those five years. I was too busy getting ahead.
“Before I go on and get to the heart-throb—I’ll give you a general snapshot of me at the age of twenty. I made myself up everyA.M.as peppily as if I were going to tread the boards. I wore my hair in the last gasp from Paris. I cut my clothes as snappy as I could get away with, which was some, you can gather. And I looked like a misprint. As for the rest—I was hard as a city pavement, tough as gum, and looked on men as a necessary evil.”
“That wasn’t your fault!” Joy interpolated swiftly. Jerry shrugged her shoulders by way of answer, but gave a faint nod, before going on.
“Then one day a man walked into Charlette’s who—I’ve never lined this out to a soul, Joy; but I’ll try to hold my words in when I talk about him. You know, or of course you don’t, the type of man likely to float around Charlette’s. Husbands, or sapheads. Mostly both. But this day—a man came in with his sister, who was having us do her wedding dress.
“She was Mabel Lancaster. Of course you know who she is.”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” Joy admitted. “The name sounds vaguely familiar, but most nice names sound that way to me——”
“Well, New Yorkers would know; it’s an old family, not much ready cash; and she tied up to Eustace Drew, also old family, and a lot of ready cash. The papers were full of blurbs about it at the time. I had thrown a lot of thought over her dress, and it was good, by the way—but Fanchon spread a noise about having done it herself. Fanchon was the old girl who had first interviewed me when I came in for messenger girl. Her real name was Mrs. O’Brien, but never mind.
“I was out front shadowing Fanchon O’Brien with a telephone message when he came, not trailing after his sister with a dragged-in-look or tripping along with all the zest in the world—just the in-between effect that I had often remarked no man ever got in Charlette’s Louis Somebody salon. Joy, he—well, he’s tall, and big, and he’s got brown hair, sort of choppy, with a pinch of red in it. And his eyes are blue as yours, only they’re breezy and full of zip—and then they can look at you with a little half-smile——”
She caught herself up. “Tell me when, I blow, Joy! I knew I would.”
Joy laughed. “I love it when you ‘blow,’ Jerry! I’ve often wondered if you ever—could! Go on—quick!”
“Well—he didn’t look at me at all. Fanchon took them into the theatre salon, and I sneaked after them, pretending I was busy at something or other. Mabel Lancaster was saying that she wanted to look at some evening gowns for her trousseau, and Fanchon nailed me to rustle the dear models along. I did so, and then stood at the end of the salon and kept my eyes pasted on the back of his head. I was hard in love with him then—with the back of his head and the way he turned and smiled and said things to his sister. The back of a man’s head is an awful test—it can register, or not register, so many things. Try it and see some time!
“Finally I came down the theatre to a seat almost behind them. Fanchon had gone back in the workroom to see about the wedding dress, and thanks to Charlette having the theatre salon in semitones, they didn’t notice me, although they never wasted an eye on surrounding human scenery anyhow.
“‘Those models fascinate me, Phil,’ she was saying. ‘What an empty show their life must be! Or is it? What do you think?’ ‘I’ve known some of their kind,’ he answered, ‘and I can assure you that their chief concern is what they put on or leave off their backs. Poor little rats! Not much “honour and truth and a sure intent” among them!’
She laughed. ‘You’re always talking about “honour and truth and a sure intent,”’ she said. ‘You’re so romantic, Phil—anyone would think you were getting married instead of me!’
“Then he wasn’t married! That was my first thought, as I faded away back to Fanchon. But later on, the things he said began to sink in. ‘Poor little rats!’ He had said that in the same tone that he had looked through me. Every time I thought of it I wanted to go and burn myself up and then crawl out and fly away a new bird, like a Pegasus or a Phœnix, or whatever the old thing is. I knew I was a poor little rat—that he’d call me the same thing if he ever had a good look at me. And the worst thing was that I didn’t have a clue on how not to be a poor little rat—not a clue, except for those three things he had named—‘honour and truth and a sure intent.’ The first two and me weren’t speaking. That last—well, I thought I did have a sure intent. To get to the top on designing for Charlette—to get so that I would be the acknowledged head, second only to the old girl Charlette herself, who spent most of her time hanging in on the Paris exhibits—that was my aim; and then I was going to spread and have a good time. Not a bad aim, as aims go. The trouble with everyone nowadays is, everyone wants to get to the top and have a good time every step of the way too.”
She paused to take breath.
“Do you mean,” said Joy, “that you—you really fell in love with him—then?”
“Yes.”
They were silent for a moment, and then Joy whispered an old, old question—and one that of late had been pricking her with uncertainty.
“Jerry—how did you—know? How could you be so—sure?”
“How does one know?” Jerry repeated. “That’s something that crashes in to different make-ups in different ways, Joy. With me—it came like a pistol shot. Just as sudden, and as unwelcome.
“I thought about him on an average of every day, after that. You see, no one had ever spilled it to me before that there might be something lacking in my get-up. I always believed that you can get to anything you want if you want it hard enough to work for nothing but that. Look where I had landed by tearing my eyes out with work while other girls watched the clock and beat it early for movie dates—from the East Side newsie in grey sweater and bloomers to a Fifth Avenue designer in a Charlette model—at twenty. And so I began to believe that if I wanted Phil Lancaster hard enough, I could get him. There was this hitch to it, though; I knew how to work for what I wanted, before. Now I was in the dark. The only right thing I knew was that I was wrong—and that I didn’t want to see him again until I was right.
“Then the war came along. When I read his name in the Plattsburg lists, I decided that I’d better go over to France and see what I could do about it, too. I had a stock-taking of myself, and decided—Y. M. C. A. entertainment was my line. When I was a newsie, I used to sing in the bars for a nickel, and I was always quick at catching on to popular songs. I got one of the fitters at Charlette’s who could rustle the ebonies, and we went over a bunch of stuff. My voice was big and I had pep—but they told me I had no training—no repertoire—that I’d better study singing, and also get some practical professional experience.
“That’s how I connected up with Pa Graham. One of the designers had a friend who sang at Rector’s, and was studying for musical comedy. Singing teachers are the worst lottery there is, but the alley cat fell on her feet again. That girl took me to Pa—she was the only musical-comedy special he had. He didn’t have much time, but when I told him I wanted to get to France, and sang for him, he fixed it.”
“Wait a minute,” said Joy. “Where did you practice, and when? Just tell me that.”
“Oh, about that time I changed my living quarters to a two-room-and-bath arrangement up on West 111th. They were furnished, and a bum piano thrown in. I didn’t care how bum it was, as it took all I could do to pick out notes with one finger. This was a blurb or so more than I’d been paying, which with my lessons meant that I was putting by a half of one percent, of my regular speed, even with a raise I got along in there.
“Then Fanchon came to me confidentially one day and offered to sell some of her stock in the firm—war times were getting stiff. I can tell you I stood still and shivered in my silk socks. Charlette’s stock was closed-corporation stuff and it had been one of my largest ideas to get some of it salted down. Only the old guard had their mitts on it, and I didn’t know when I was going to be trusted with a block. I made her out a cheque in quick order. A stockholder! They couldn’t kick me out now, I doped it.”
She was silent for a moment of reflection, seeming to choose between the thoughts that were crowding about her, while Joy held her breath in hope that she would plunge ahead without choosing.
“I wanted to get some percentage on my lessons, and some of the professional experience they talked about, so pretty soon I looked around for a cabaret job and got one—through the girl at Rector’s, who knew the manager at Hanley’s. It wasn’t bad. I wouldn’t have done anything else with my evenings but sleep—and six hours’ sleep always did me, from habit I guess. I came on at seven-thirty and eleven-five, two songs each time.
“That was some life—practice early in theA.M., get to Charlette’s at nine, work all day, Hanley’s in the evening, Pa Graham Sundays. That man has got a soul in him for every art in music, and he showed me how to succeed in my line while he was trying to make me into a diseuse. He made me go and hear Yvette Guilbert, and told me that’s what I should aim for—to be the American Yvette. But I had my own little idea of what I wanted to do, and to try diseusing in war times wasn’t it.
“And all this time I steered clear of men. It wasn’t so easy now that I was at Hanley’s, but being at work most of the time helped me, that and the thought of Phil Lancaster—it was funny the way he and the things he said stuck in my mind. ‘Honour and truth and a sure intent’—I had all of that now, the way I looked at it. You remember war times, Joy—everybody wanting to do something for somebody—air just reeking with idealism—all I wanted was to get over there and be some good. And after the war, Phil Lancaster, if he was still alive. Things would be different after the war, I thought. And I figured it that the experience of being over there would purify me as you read of its purifying people’s souls. For by that time I saw what the first years of my life had done to me. I don’t blame myself yet for being born an alley cat and living with and in scum for the first fifteen years of my life. I wasn’t taught any differently, and in spite of everything I taught myself and pulled myself out of the scum. No, I didn’t blame myself—I only wanted to better myself—and I thought that this Y stuff, overseas, would do a lot towards wiping away the scum that seeps in under the skin, when you’re buried in it, and sticks afterwards when you wash off the outside part.
“It was in October of 1917 that the top of everything was knocked off for me. I was at Hanley’s singing some fool song about ‘My Little Service Flag Having Seven Stars,’ and it was about eleven-fifteen—when suddenly I saw him—Phil Lancaster. Sitting alone at a table by the wall. He was looking at me,he was looking at me! He was in the uniform of a Captain of Infantry, and if I hadn’t been remembering him every day ever since he had come into Charlette’s, I wouldn’t have known him, he was so changed and tired. But he was looking at me! I faded up and closed out—all my wind gone. Shut down on encores. Couldn’t pipe another note. He had looked at me—well, as if he was noticing me hot.
“While I was still standing in the reception hallway, one of the waiters blew in with a note for me. I never saved it—just like me to lose it—but he asked if I couldn’t come out and have something to eat with him, describing his location. Now, we’re not allowed to go out and sit at the tables at Hanley’s. People could come back in the reception hall, and talk to us there, but that was all. My first idea was to reel a note back to him telling him that, and trust he would take the hint. But no! I didn’t dare let that go. Supposing he didn’t come across—after all those months—no, I couldn’t trust to it that he would tumble, or even want to. I gave the waiter a note saying I would join him presently, and scrubbed off most of my make-up, just leaving what I thought was a good veneer for close-range work. I had worn a big hat that flopped all around my face, and with my coat on and the lid flopping and the make-up toned down, I didn’t look much like myself. I took a sneak out the side and then breezed in front, told a waiter who didn’t know me I was joining a friend, and fox-trotted up to his table with all the starch in the world.
“And all the way I had been saying to myself: Jerry, you’ve had to fight for everything you’ve got so far—and you’ve got to fight for this, but you’ve been given the chance to fight!
“I sat down opposite him and grinned. He came out of a trance and looked at me. ‘Oh, hello!’ he said. ‘Are you sure you’re the same one who has seven stars on her service flag?’ ‘Seven is my limit,’ I said. ‘Is that a fixed resolve? Because I was seriously considering asking you if you would break over and add an eighth.’
“I took a minute off to look at him. Yes, he had the appearance of having downed a few drinks. There was a lot more, too—he certainly had been riding the sad sea waves! ‘Where do you get it, you officer guys?’ I asked him. He didn’t answer—he was lamping me. ‘On the stage up there, you seemed quite wicked. Now, you are a disappointment. I can never be taken up for conduct unbecoming an officer, with you at my table.’
“I opened my mouth and nearly fell in it. Then I managed to get out that I’d better leave, so he could try someone else. He said ‘No—I wantyou. You look as though you had enough joy of living to cheer up even a dead one—and that’s what I am, or the next thing to it.’
“I suggested that if he wanted me to trot out any joy of living stuff, we had better leave that place and come on up to my apartment. I had some there—a small but good assortment. I had outgrown my taste for beer, but still wolfed down the Demon Rum—and I couldn’t sit in Hanley’s much longer without being recognized. He paid the check and we were off without even waiting for the change. Now I knew he’d been drinking. It’s a long way from Hanley’s to West 111th, in case you don’t know—in a taxi—although only about twenty minutes in the Subway. We got in a meter-wagon and started off through the white lights. My heart was travelling quicker than the meter.
“‘It’s sort of unusual for an officer to be alone in New York, isn’t it?’ I said, and he pulled a laugh that would have been funny if it hadn’t been so pitiful. ‘Alone? I’m the loneliest man in New York.’ Then he set himself off and told me what was rotting in the State of Denmark. His girl had knocked him one by quietly side-stepping around the corner and getting sewed up to a French artillery officer. This had just burst in upon him when he had heaved in from Upton thatP.M.—after leaving her last week with all the encouragement in the world. It had made him simply silly—he’d been sampling everything he could get hold of, and was quite poppo by now, as I could see.
“That girl was probably a good girl, but she hadn’t played fair, to do a thing like that. And when you don’t play fair, you let yourself in for a lot of responsibility. Here was her responsibility—shifted to me—and I was her opposite. I hadn’t been good, according to her standards, but I had always played fair.
“I gathered, as we bumped along through Columbus Circle, that she had been about the only thing that had been keeping him treading water, just now. He’d been made a Captain at Plattsburg, and he hadn’t felt he was up to such a position; and at Upton he was feeling it more and more. He told me about two young officers who’d shot themselves because they were going crazy with their cares and responsibilities. It was a tough thing for some of those young kids, to feel that they had whole companies of men under them to answer for, when up to now they had never answered for anything but the dog. He said if he hadn’t been older than those kids he now would be tempted to do the same thing; that he never felt nearer to it.
“It all seemed like a dream, Joy—bumping along in a taxi beside the man I’d been in love with for so long—and he spreading his tale of woe. It couldn’t have happened any other time but war times. If he thought about telling me this stuff at all, he thought I was the grade of intelligence that would peacefully let it slide by. I got that fact, and began to think in quick flashes. Ever since I had watched the back of his head, back in Charlette’s, I had fixed it in my mind so that he could have walked over me in golf shoes and I would have sat up and begged for more. I wanted to get hold of that girl and feel my fingernails meet in her throat. As for Phil—the more he talked about it, the gloomier an atmosphere he cast.
“We got to my apartment and as I opened up some joy getter, he passed the remark that I did myself pretty well for a cabaret singer. Then he slumped right down again, and got so low he couldn’t even drink. ‘It’s no use,’ he said; ‘in my frame of mind, Uncle Sam’s army is better off without me, and God knows there’s no one else in this universe who would care!’ When men say that, you always know they mean a girl. They never seem to think of their families in that connection.
“I went over to where he was looking at my wine, and said: ‘You’re drunk. To snuff yourself out would brand you a coward in the eyes of the world and God, too. Besides which, I won’t let you.’ He ripped off a nasty laugh at that. ‘This is really almost amusing—to be sitting listening to a cabaret girl tell meshewon’t let me “snuff myself out!”’ He took my hand, and hung onto it. ‘Then you do want me for the eighth star!’ A man never plain holds your hand, it seems—it’s just a starter. ‘Listen here,’ I said. ‘I may be a cabaret girl, but I’m not several other little things you seem to think I am. I’ve got “honour and truth and a sure intent,” which is more than you’ll have if you follow up your intent with me!’
“He dropped my hand like a hot potato and squared off to take a look at me. ‘Did you say honour and truth and——?’ ‘I did,’ said I. ‘So come to and stay there.’ ‘I never made a mistake like this before,’ he said. ‘I think I had better go.’
“I can tell you it made me feel pretty sick. If I could have stopped caring for him the way I’d started—but I couldn’t—I’d sort of fixed everything on him and there it hung. And here he was going to the sausages, and wanted me to help him fry himself. I was knocked cold. I hadn’t really got what he had doped me out to be—until he said he’d better go.
“I lost my head then. ‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘Sit down and let me tell you something. You’ve never seen me before. Well, I have you—in at Charlette’s last February—I heard you talking to your sister about “honour and truth and a sure intent.” That was the first look-in I’d ever had on the subject. You were the first real man that I had ever come within shouting distance of, who sprung such stuff, and those words sunk in till they got sewed in me. All the more so because I was—and am—in love with a man who’d never look straight at me till I made myself over, and I figured it that somehow those words might be the combination that would fix me up for him. I always remembered you and what you said, and I’ve been trying to get all those three things. And then when you turned up to-night I was as happy as a fool, thinking I’d be with a real man and he’d give some more dope on how to be a real girl—then you talk about ending it all, like any thirty-center up against a dark pocket, and take me for Mazie-off-the-streets thrown in!’
“He didn’t say anything for a few minutes—turned away from me and did a walk over to the piano. There was a bunch of French stuff on it that Pa was trying to get soaked into me, and a book of Yvette Guilbert’s. Then he turned around and I saw he’d lost most of his edge. ‘I want to beg your pardon,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been so ashamed of myself in all my life. But I shan’t curse myself for writing that note to you—no matter what prompted me to do so. Of all girls in New York—to stumble on one who remembered something I said—something that she thought was doing her good!
“I saw he’d gone sober, and I put away the cup that cheers too loud. He came up to me and looked me over—not hot this time, but impersonal. ‘So you’re in love with someone—who—won’t look straight at you?’ He squinted his eyes up and took in the general effect, the way I do when I stand off and look at a model draped in a half-built creation. ‘War times are not so busy but what I’d like to play Pygmalion for you.’ ‘What kind of a game is that?’ I said.
“He laughed, and gave me a close-up of the Pygmalion-Galatea affair. I didn’t mind if I had pulled a bone—there he was, as keen and peepy as if he hadn’t been talking about putting a bullet through his brains a while ago and glimming me as cool and impersonal as if he hadn’t hauled my hand around a minute back. The main thing was that I’d given him a jolt—and he’d lost his edge.