The next day was Saturday, and Félicie returned around noon just as Jerry left Joy in a whirlwind of breathless anticipation. Félicie was pale and sulky from dancing all night and having to come back to New York the next morning.
“I missed a dance this afternoon and a wonderful one this evening,” she crabbed, taking off her outer raiment and donning a kimono, before lying on the bed to recuperate. At Joy’s question of why she hadn’t stayed the house-party through, she batted an injured brown velvet orb. “How could I, with Greg here and acting so awfully just because I wanted to go to Princeton for one day. He needn’t think I’d give up every evening to him—especially after the way he talked Thursday. I tell you, Joy, it’s awful to be in love. I never did such an inconvenient thing as I did when I fell in love with Greg.”
Joy stifled her laughter. “Did you have a good time?”
“Marvelous—simply marvelous. Princeton is the house-party girl’s Mecca. It’s mean of Greg to act so—it isn’t as if I could be asked to Princeton for many more years.”
Joy ran a scale, poising it neatly through the air and listening to the smoothness of tone. In the morning sun, music was more alive and satisfactory, even with no piano near. It was part of her—and little fluctuations of feeling were to be ignored, when she knew that all her being was absorbed in one great purpose. It had been silly of her to grow sentimental just because she had been doused in the atmosphere of sentiment. Inconsistently, she felt angry at Félicie.
“I can’t imagine being in love with a man and going off skating with a dozen others.”
“Oh, Joy, if you’re going to take Jerry’s side I shall just pass out!” wailed the lovely thing on the bed. “Being in love doesn’t stop you from wanting something new once in awhile.”
“Nothing seems to prevent anyone nowadays from going after a new sensation! Excitement-chasing! That’s what everyone’s doing!”
“It’s all very well for those who aren’t in love to theorize about what those who are in love should do. For all Jerry’s talk, I can’t see her giving upher‘excitement-chasing’ for any man. Can you?”
The thought was a new one. What would happen if Jerry was given the opportunity to know this man so that the novelty would wear off? How would the Excitement-Eater stand a sustained love? She was silent in conjecture, and Félicie, too lazy to voice the triumph she felt, closed her eyes and worked her face down into the pillow.
Joy and Jerry had tickets for an Æolian Hall concert that afternoon, and now Joy went alone. The throngs always pressing ahead on the streets, exhilarated her, and she watched the faces of the people that urged themselves along; faces with success or failure written more or less plainly upon them. Most women, she supposed, succeeded or failed by proxy, as their husbands rose or fell in the foaming rapids of struggle. But there would be no such vicarious state for her! She was plunging directly into the rapids for herself, and some day she would walk in her own success.
She returned to the hotel in a fine enthusiasm, humming under her breath; the concert had been perfect. Her spirits were dashed, however, by the empty room. Félicie had gone out with Greg; Jerry had not returned. She would probably be alone until they assembled to take the midnight; they had decided when they came over, to go back Saturday night. To eat dinner all alone in New York! She was doing her hair without enthusiasm when the telephone bell rang. It was Jerry’s voice, eager and exultant: “That you, Joy? I’m downstairs—— Thought I was going to desert you for dinner, did you? Just wanted to see if you were back yet. Be right up.”
She finished setting in her hairpins with a lightening of spirits, as the door rattled open and Jerry came dancing in.
“Was the concert good?” she cried. Spots of colour flaunted joy from either cheek; her lips were tremulous, crinkled into softness; her eyes were a battlefield of colour.
“Very good,” said Joy, and waited.
Jerry pulled off her hat and suit, and in her customary whirlwind was making preparations for an evening toilette. “Put on your best calico, Joy; we’re dining in state. Phil’s gone to get into his cocktail-and-demitasse, too.”
“Phil!”
“Yes, of course, Phil. Do you want to hear what happened, or don’t you? Are you keeping still because I’m shooting off my mouth, or——”
“I want to hear,” Joy said; “and when people want to hear, they generally keep still.”
And then it came, with the generosity that was Jerry’s.
“Well, it seems I always tell you everything from the pop of the pistol on through. When we went down in the lobby, he asked me where I wanted to go; and I said, ‘Hanley’s.’ He looked at me queerly on that. ‘What made you pick that out?’ he wanted to know.”
She was caressing her hair with the military brushes, not raking it as was her custom.
“‘Let’s walk over,’ I said. ‘I want to stop at a place on the Avenue.’ As we went down Forty-Second Street, I rained a loose line of chatter along. I told you to-day would be my turn to talk. We got to Charlette’s before I had stuck in any background. When I saw the good old grey-silk-curtained windows, I began to get a bit shaky. But I turned to him and said: ‘We got to the end—rather sudden, last night. Men don’t like to work back, but you know—and intimated as much—that women are different that way.’ He opened the door for me, looking sort of at sea, and we came in. ‘All I ask of you,’ I said, ‘is to stand here and watch me.’ ‘The last part is something I can never omit,’ he said.
“You know Charlette’s—never many customers floating around, but oh, how they do bleed ’em when they come! I breezed forward, and the first person I ran into was Fanchon O’Brien. She tucked me into her flesh Georgette waist with a few motherly kisses, and the next minute somebody had passed the glad word and cutters, basters, fitters and designers came out and fell around me. I won’t go into details of Old Home Week at Charlette’s. When I broke away, Phil followed me to the door and on the other side I didn’t give him a chance to speak.
“‘Did you see all the poor little rats hailing me as a kindred soul?’ I said. ‘I worked in that place from twelve years old up, from messenger-girl to designer. I was a poor little rat when I started—but when I finished, I was pretty proud of myself.’ I looked up at him, and he was looking at me, sort of scowling, as if to make everything add up right,—but not one bitchanged. ‘I should think you would be proud,’ he said. ‘I am proud of you—I shall be prouder when I can realise it more fully.’ He didn’t say anything till we got over to Hanley’s. Then he took in the name again as we went in. ‘Hanley’s!’ he said. ‘Funny——’ He didn’t say anything more and I let him look at me till we got put in our places by a waiter. Then I said: ‘You’ve forgotten what was to me one of the most important points in the Brushwood Boy. The little kid he met in the theatre who supplied the foundation of his dreams—was the same person as the woman he found. The girl had grown up; but she was the same one; she had been the kid.’
“Joy, he said nothing for two or three minutes steady, till the waiter came and he told him to bring anything, but get out. Then he said—‘I—see now! The valiance and potential beauty I saw in the spirit of the little girl who brought me back to myself—the shining hardness of the cabaret singer, whom I pitied as drawn in and around by her past and inevitable future environment—I discarded that hardness, and all that went with it, and built on the valiance and beauty. And you were discarding and building in reality—as I, with all the idiotic finality of a man, never thought you could!’
“Joy—I didn’t think I’d built. Before—he thought I was worse than I was. Last night, seeing me ooze around his sister’s drawing room, he thought I was better than I am. I began to tell him this, and he stopped me.
“When I first knew you—I knew you were better than I,’ he said. ‘As I see you now, you have all but put yourself beyond me. I have led a life of which I am ashamed; the dusty corners of which no one shall ever know, or try to sweep out. You have led a life of which you can say you are not ashamed; a life of striving against odds, from which you came out on top; a life of which to be proud.
“Joy—I was ashamed at that. For since the war—you know how I’ve been—Building, he thought! When I’d just been growing into the ways of his world. Excitement-Eating! That was the main thing I’d been growing on. I began to tell him—and he wouldn’t let me. ‘What has happened is not mine now. It is for what is to be that I plead. With your future mine, and mine yours, you can help me to forget the years we might not have esteemed so lightly.’”
Jerry had finished, at the same time that she had snapped the last catch together in her green evening gown—the same green sequin affair that she had worn that terrible night they had looked for Sarah. . . .
“Well—and then what happened the rest of the afternoon?” Joy drew out from lungs that had been deserted of breath.
“I’ve told you more than I shall ever tell anybody. The rest is mine—that and—this!”
Jerry flaunted her left hand before her. On the third finger was a tiny platinum circlet, so small that it had melted into the white of her hand at a distance, as gold could not have done. “I’ve tried to thrust it down your throat a thousand ways, but you would keep looking at my face and a thousand other unimportant things!”
Joy sank back upon the bed, her whole being a rag of dumfounderment. “Jerry!”
“Mrs. Philip Lancaster—and hurry up and put on some rouge! I don’t want to keep my husband waiting!”
“But—but why—how—where——”
“We tossed the subject back and forth at luncheon. We figured we’d been without each other long enough. After lunch we walked up to the nearest jewelry store and got this ring. I wouldn’t let him get a big one, or anything but this one. He’s poor, you know, Joy—the Lancasters are all poor. That is, he calls it poor, but now that he’s got me he’s going to work—you know he’s supposed to be a lawyer—and that combined with his income and my little Charlette block ought to keep us passing the buck along. We got married with a special license, at the Little Church Around the Corner——” Jerry spoke with the calmness of excitement at white heat—“and before going off on our honeymoon—we thought we’d take you to our wedding dinner. You see, if it hadn’t been for you I’d have still been excitement-eating—and he’d still be cynicing it around.”
The telephone rang, and Jerry darted to it. “Yes! Yes, this is Mrs. Lancaster! Yes, we’re coming, Phil!” The name was all endearments shaped in one. Jerry turned to hurry Joy with her last touches, and Joy, in a state of coma almost bordering on collapse, followed Jerry’s eager footsteps to the elevator and down into the lobby. Jerry’s husband was waiting for them, fierily handsome in evening dress, and at least ten years younger than he had seemed last night. Last night!—It seemed so far away. Joy could not even stammer much, but Jerry and Phil did not notice lack of anything, and swept her into the dining room.
“Let me see,” said Phil; “it’s the first time I’ve seen my wife in evening dress.”
“Second!” said Jerry swiftly. “I wore one at Hanley’s, two years ago!”
“Oh, but that was acostume!”
Their words were stupid, inconsequential, in the face of Joy sitting there. Their eyes were speaking to each other, saying so much that Joy dared not look. And just last night——
“I wonder what Mabel will say,” she ventured. They paid to her remark the tribute of polite inattention.
“I owe Jerry to you,” said Jerry’s husband; “but I don’t intend to pay you.”
Of course—Jerry was leaving her now! Leaving her and the apartment—alone! She considered this bleak fact, all through the course. At last, breaking in upon the conversation of eyes, she said: “What will you do with the apartment, Jerry?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jerry. “The lease will be up in July. Why don’t you stay in it till then? Phil and I are going to live in his apartment here, until we get a house in the suburbs, so I shan’t be moving out my stuff for some time.”
To stay in the apartment—with the ghost of Sarah in curl-papers and wrapper whining through the kitchenette—and the purple kimono and pink mules gone from everywhere. . . . She did not bring the thought to the surface of the table. “You two in the suburbs!” she exclaimed instead, in faint derision.
Jerry hardly smiled. People in love always lost their sense of humour, but you wouldn’t think Jerry——
“Apartment life would merely be existing for us,” said Phil. “We are going to live.”
Their eyes trembled together in close embrace. . . . Joy hurried through her dessert; the others had made no pretense of eating. Their appetite was as if they had just come in from luncheon. All three were regarding the meal as a more or less disagreeable formality to be gotten through with as quickly as possible. But when they had finished, they grew embarrassed at their haste, and everyone tried to be jovial, lingering over the coffee.
“Last night at this time,” said Phil, “I was telling our cousin just why I didn’t like younger or older women.”
“And looking at Jerry,” added Joy.
“And looking at Jerry,” he said gravely, repeating the performance.
“If you don’t like younger or older women, where do I come in?” Jerry demanded.
“You don’t,” he told her; “you are neither young nor old; you are immortal.”
At length they rose, and Joy went with Jerry while Jerry threw everything into her suitcase and crushed it shut.
“It won’t be anything but so-long,” said Jerry; “I’ll be coming over to Boston soon to get the rest of my wardrobe.”
“I’ll send it to you.”
“No—I’ll want to come. . . . Joy—you’ve been the only real girl friend I ever had—and now you’ve given me everything that there is to hang onto in this world.”
She said good-bye to them by the elevator downstairs, and watched them vanish through the same revolving doors that Jerry had helped speed around so merrily—was it only two days ago? They walked together as if they were still in an expectant dream . . . in a sort of awed breathlessness.
Joy suddenly knew that, of all lots in life, the lot of the looker-on, the passive spectator, was the hardest. To see worlds of glory pass, which she had to tell herself were not for her. She packed her bag, checked out and climbed on the midnight as soon as it was open. Félicie came at the last minute, with Greg carrying her suitcase into the train and then stopping for a prolonged farewell while the train was moving. The three girls had engaged a section, one to sleep in the upper and two on the lower, and she was astonished to find Joy alone in the lower with the upper pushed back out of the way.
“Hello,” said Joy sourly. Félicie’s but-lately-kissed beauty was annoying. . . . “Where’s Jerry?” Félicie demanded, crawling inside and emptying her suitcase over Joy in the process.
“Married!” Joy snapped, and turned over to look out of the window at the lights of New York they were leaving behind.
“Married!” Félicie sank down in the midst of the out-heaval of hairpins and lingerie, cold cream jars and silk stockings. Then weakly she articulated Jerry’s epitaph: “I always said that girl would doanything!”
Winter hung heavily on that year; February dragged itself to a close, choked with December snowfall, and Spring looked bleak and far away. Travelling even from New York to Boston was horrible, and Jerry did not come for a long time.
Joy was alone in the apartment.
As she had foreseen, Sarah’s querulous voice wavered in the halls. And in the kitchenette her kimono and curl papers tinted the atmosphere. And everywhere the tap of the pink mules or the sound of the rough plush of Jerry’s voice seemed to be trembling in echo’s echo. . . . She asked Félicie to spend the night with her as often as she cared to; but Félicie didn’t care to very often. It was not that she was not fond of Joy, as she explained; but it was so much trouble to move herself and all her things. Félicie liked everything drawn up around her in waxworks precision of detail, just as she had arranged it at her home.
And so Joy lived in an enforced solitude while considering what she was going to do. The heavy snowfalls were deadening to enterprise; the easiest thing to do was to stay in the apartment, which was hers for the present, instead of looking around for something else. Sitting alone at the piano in the room which had so often sung with mirth, she found it hard to realize that she was the only one left in Sarah’s and Jerry’s flat. One little, two little, three little Indians! One had gone; and then there were two. And now one more had gone; and there was only one. . . .
She had not seen Jim Dalton for a long time. When he had called her up, she had put him off with the excuse of work. She could not see him, because she felt that she wanted to see him too much. But she told herself with an easy surety that she was not in love with him; once back with Pa Graham she had fallen into the magic of music once more, magic that left no room for sentimentality, and that, she told herself, was all that her lapse had been; sheer sentimentality. But since the idea had occurred to her that she might suspect herself of being in love with him, she was uneasy about seeing him. And surely preventative methods were best!
Yet she longed to see him, to tell him every little detail of the epoch-making trip to New York. Looking back she clung to her part in it, and wanted Jim—wanted him to exult with her over the great one’s approval. Who was it who said he travelled faster who travels alone? There had to be someone to spur on the traveller—sometimes! And Jerry had gone, and there was no one. Félicie was frankly bored with music. And Jim of her own exclusion stayed away, although his telephone calls did not diminish in number. . . .
One afternoon in March as she was walking down Boylston Street, she saw Grant. He passed driving a car, the Grey’s runabout, and by his side was a girl whose peachbloom face, even at a distance, was vaguely familiar. As she stared, the girl waved, smiling, and said something to Grant, whose eyes were on the traffic. He swerved and brought the car into the curb, and Joy came to them as Miss Dalrymple, the Bryn Mawr girl, leaned out expectantly.
“Miss Nelson!” she hailed her. “I didn’t know you were in Boston!” Joy interrupted as she started to present Grant. “We’ve already met. I didn’t knowyouwere in Boston, Miss Dalrymple.”
The college girl explained that she was visiting a friend in her vacation, that it was her first visit in Boston, and that she liked itvery much. Her eyes dwelt on Grant in naïve compliment at this last, and Grant smiled appreciatively in return.
Joy nearly smiled, herself. Six months ago, and one would have thought she had ruined a life. Now Grant was looking better, and happier, than she had ever seen him; and he was regarding her with offhand friendliness. The girl at his side was really an exquisite thing, with clear, eager eyes like his own. Joy knew that her own radiant eyes had been dulled, first by the experience of disillusionment, and then by monotonous routine. She knew that she was thin and pale from a life of irregular restaurant eating; she knew that the exquisite young thing at Grant’s side gained colour by comparison; and she was glad. This could be a last picture that would wipe out all regret, in dreams of what might have been.
Miss Dalrymple was all exclamations over Jerry’s marriage. “To think that it happened the very next day, and there we sat never suspecting what was going on! It’s the most romantic thing I ever knew!”
Mabel had written Joy twice; at first when she had been so upset over the unconventionality that marked this Lancaster marriage, then later when she had seen them together and lost her shock, in joy at finding her brother in the heights she was beginning to fear would never be his.
“Mabel always said he was awfully romantic,” the college girl was saying; “that explained his cynicism, for they say cynics are always really romantic—that’s the way they hide it. But did you ever hear of anything so sudden?”
Joy’s eyes caught Grant’s on that. “Not—that turned out so well,” she said demurely.
Miss Dalrymple turned to Grant. “You know, Miss Nelson’s cousin had her brother all picked out for me—when Miss Nelson walked in with the most fascinating girl you ever saw, who walked right off with him.”
“Then I owe Miss Nelson—a very great debt!” said Grant, with a smile that broke in the middle as he looked at Joy and saw her amusement shrieking from beneath the sheltered surface of polite friendliness. The air was tingling with omissions, as Joy said her good-byes and left them. Their status was plain—an affair well along in interest and momentum.
The girl with the skin of peachdown and the wide, untroubled eyes was the logical mate for Grant Grey. Each could give the other as nearly all that the other desired as was possible in an earthly union. It would be one of those unions that seemed eminentlyright—and it would even seem so to Mrs. Grey! Joy laughed aloud at that last thought. The heart-caught-on-the-rebound sneer, on which so many girls inwardly feed while apparently they are smilingly urbane to their former suitors’ flames, never even occurred to her. It was a perfect union, while the union of her nature and Grant’s would always have been imperfect at best.
Inexplicably it made her feel the more lonely.
It was soon after that that a bulky letter arrived from her father, the contents of which threw her into the laughter of misgiving. It seemed that the Lamkins had returned from an extensive trip South and West, and had spread throughout the length and breadth of Foxhollow Corners the glorified account of Joy Nelson’s gallivanting around Noo York with perfectly impossible people, to one of which she seemed to be engaged “in a light way.” The rumour had swollen until it was reported that Joy had been secretly married over in New York and had taken up her abode there permanently. Of course her father had heard the last rumour first, and with businesslike precision had sifted it through to the Lamkins and heard their representations of the “facts.”
“I am disturbed,” he wrote, “and ask you for verification before I take any steps in this matter. The town seems to be rolling tales of your New York escapades as a sweet morsel under its tongue. You told me nothing of any side of your New York visit that could be interpreted this way. It is not possible for the child of your mother to have done anything really wrong, but in New York you may have forgotten the obligations that the name of Nelson puts upon you. After all, home people are the ones that will mean your life, when you finish your studying and come back to normal existence once more; and it does not do to antagonize them as you so evidently have the Lamkins. It is a difficult thing for a father to be sole guardian of a daughter; there are so many questions a father alone cannot decide. I wish you would come home, and take up your music here, perhaps in the church choir.”
He ended the letter with the thought that he might come to Boston soon, as he had never yet seen her environment there.
Joy read the letter with mixed emotions which had culminated in the rather shaky laughter. How could she explain to her father that what the Lamkins had heard had been a mere prank played for the benefit of the waiters and surrounding interested ones even as the Lamkins? It was the sort of thing that he could never understand. And he spoke as though all her fiercely eager study were to end in nothing—“a normal life once more.” The church choir! She jumped up and poured forth a long cadenza, which enveloped the room in an exultation of sound. At the close she balanced two notes evenly, one against the other, tracing them up and down—when all at once her throat began to flutter, effort ceased, and she stood in rapt wonder, listening. Her first real trill was born.
The church choir!
It was that afternoon, while she was hesitating over a reply to her father, that Jim called her on the phone.
“Do you realize how long it’s been since I’ve seen you, Joy?” he asked.
She did. “I’ve been so busy——” she faltered. “And now that Jerry is gone, I can’t very well entertain in the apartment alone——”
“Then we can meet somewhere and go to dinner. Meet me at the Touraine, at half-past six. I must see you, Joy.”
She went back to her letter in a more peaceful frame of mind. By now her sentimental lapse was well over, and she would be glad to see Jim again. After all, he was the only real friend she had. She finally pushed the letter paper away from her. Jim would advise her as to how she would reply. Somehow he always knew what to do.
When she drifted into the Touraine exactly five minutes late—Jerry and Sarah had taught her that system—men hate to wait and yet one must never be on time—Jim came forward to meet her, and she found herself clinging to his hand for a longer space of time than is allotted to the usual formal clasp. All her past loneliness rose about her and seemed to choke her utterance, with something else that left her without speech.
“Let’s not eat here,” said Jim; “there’s something so public about this place. Everyone just seems to come here to look everyone else over.”
Out in the evening air, speech returned to her, and they bridged the time they had not seen each other by a few sentences while walking through those strange cross-alleys that only Boston can boast until they came to a cobble-stoned street that comprises part of the city’s modest Chinatown, and “counted out” on the different restaurants facing them. A façade of ornate gilt with curtained windows won the count, and they were soon in a little stall away from the bright lights of the central room.
The order given, Joy told the complete story of the New York trip, with the loneliness Jerry’s leaving her had brought. “What shall I do?” she concluded. “If father comes down here, he’ll find me living alone in the apartment—which he certainly would not like.”
“Joy, you know that you can’t stay in that place alone,” said Jim. “That’s one reason why I insisted on seeing you to-night—I wanted to find out your plans.”
“Jerry wants me to stay in it till July—and it’s so much easier for me in every way—especially practicing—than if I boarded anywhere——”
Jim shook his head. “This Félicie Durant you speak of, who lives in Brighton with her great-aunt—perhaps she could persuade her aunt to rent Jerry’s apartment, and then keep you as a boarder. If you suggest that scheme to her, she might think of offering to take you in with them even if they didn’t care to move.”
“That is—a good suggestion,” she said uncertainly. She was in that state of mind where she hated to take any steps, make any plans.
“If that fails, you’ll have to apply to the Students’ Union for lists of recommendable places,” he added with quiet finality.
“Oh, is that what one does?” She felt foolishly incompetent. “How did you know?”
“I’ve been making inquiries myself. I knew you were alone there, and that you couldn’t stay that way.”
Joy felt an embracing peace, the peace of decision in which Jim always enveloped her. “Jim,” she said suddenly, “what have I ever done—or been, except a foolish girl—that you should be so good to me? At the very first, you did—more than I can ever repay—and then you went on—always helping me, in ways that really were help—and understanding so well—sometimes better than I understand myself!”
Jim looked at her across the table, and the keen friendliness dropped from his eyes, all at once; leaving them naked. Involuntarily Joy turned away her face. When his voice came, it was quiet, with a new current bearing it along.
“It is because I have understood so well—that I’ve never told you what I must tell you now. The brakes won’t hold—I think I have loved you, Joy, from the time your lip quivered when you told me to take you back to Tom.”
A pause while the Chinese waiter took away their dishes. Of all moments to bring in his tardy self!
Joy started to speak, to falter her way with lips suddenly tender, but he was looking away from her now and beyond.
“I think you ought to know, Joy—that I love you more than anyone else in this world. You—you mean life to me.”
There was no wild heart-beat trembling in her being as she heard his words, nothing but peace and a great content. “Oh, Jim!” she said in a little voice, then waited for his eyes to meet hers. . . . It had not come within the halo of dreams nor in the area of the disturbing thrills of youth—it came in a golden calm. Jim was the Perfect Knight, of whom she had dreamed in the days when she supposed one had but to wait and the knight would come a-riding; the Perfect Knight, with spotless shield and shining armour. The shield was his spotless life, making him more than worthy of her; the armour was the white strength of his soul and his body with which he had defended her at all times, since the very first.
Then weirdly, unaccountably, across the even rhapsody of her meditation came a voice from the chapels of memory; a voice full, perfectly poised, with each word as flawless as if it had been engraved on a cameo.
“Love comes down to a hearth-fire, after marriage; and we who sing are not content with hearth-fires. Remember that always, little one;we who sing are not content with hearth-fires.”
Only that second of recollection before Jim’s eyes met hers, and Joy chose her fate. She urged her eyes away from him, with a sick little shiver; and keeping them fixed on some distant point, she said in a voice so slight it almost slipped away before it struck the hearing: “Jim—please—don’t!”
“I—won’t,” he said, in a voice that did not alter. “I—I knew it was—hopeless, Joy, before I spoke; and I shall not bother you about it again; but I wanted you to know, while I was able to see you—you have not let me see you for so long.”
“Jim—I’m so sorry——” she cried, against the destruction that was descending upon her soul so lately filled with peace.
“Sorry! Sorry is—an awful little word. I didn’t want to make you—sorry. I just wanted you to know—I would have been a conceited ass indeed if I had thought you could—care for me.”
“It’s not that.”
The words were clipped out in an even, glassy tone, as hard as a window-pane and as easy to break or see through. But the shutters were down behind, for the one who most wanted to see. . . .
Jim did not bring the subject up again until they were at the door of the apartment.
“Please don’t let anything I’ve said worry you, Joy. And—we still are friends—aren’t we?”
“Oh, yes, Jim!” she cried, and then fell silent, ashamed.
“This world would indeed be an empty place for me—if anything should happen to that friendship.”
He took her hand, and she knew in a bitter little rush how much she wanted to have his arms around her—to feel again encompassing her the peace that she had destroyed. Pale as the novice who goes to her vows, she took her hand away and left him.
She sat at the piano, striving to drown the turbulence within her by a glory of sound. With shaking, silver lips, she tried to form the words of the Jewel Song—she should be able really to sing it now—for to-day had come her first trill! “All passes; Art alone endures.” She was so wise not to have allowed the sentiment of the moment to overpower her. It was just such moments that were responsible for the “mute, inglorious Pattis” of the world.
The trill came, neat and exquisite. Then haltingly—
“Je ris—de me voir—Si belle—”
“Je ris—de me voir—Si belle—”
“Je ris—de me voir—
Si belle—”
Her voice limped into silence. . . .
She left the piano. This loneliness was getting on her nerves. She would see Félicie to-morrow. Yes, to-morrow was coming—and she could not wait to have Pa hear that trill!
On hearing Joy’s proposition, Félicie consulted her great-aunt, but neither of them wished to leave their eminently satisfactory lodgings in Brighton.
“It’s awful for you to be alone, though, Joy,” she said. “Auntie suggested that you come and stay with us—she’s deaf, you know, so she won’t mind your practicing, if you don’t mind living in the little room off the kitchen——I’d take you in with me, but there’s really no room, the way everything’s fixed.”
Having decided to accept this enthusiastic invitation before it had been issued, Joy surprised Félicie by being pleased with the offer of the little room near the kitchen. “Of course, I’d pay board,” she said, “and take my meals out.”
“Well, all right,” said Félicie, “only auntie will be annoyed if you don’t eat with her. She’s lonely, now that I go out so much of the time.”
They left the situation to be fought out with “auntie,” and Joy wrote Jerry of her decision to leave the apartment as soon as she could get her things together.
Jerry replied by bursting in upon Joy one morning in the first chill days of April, while Joy was poaching a dejected egg in the kitchenette. A new radiant Jerry, all softness and winsome, assured charm that is the gain of those who are exorbitantly loved in return for their own great love. She danced over the apartment in pretended high spirits at being back, and then packed her clothes in a rush of concentration that betrayed her haste.
“This is the first time I’ve been away from him—and I didn’t know I was going to feel like this!” she confessed.
“There’s just one thing, though. You have no use for the wine-closet, I take it?”
Joy had not taken a drink since the night she watched the effect of it from the sofa, with Wigs and Davy babbling in her ear.
“Then,” said Jerry briskly, “we might just as well do a little government-agent work.” At Joy’s look of astonishment: “Oh, I never drink now. There’s—too much else to think about. Phil and I smoke together—but that’s as far as we go. Seems funny when I think in idle moments how I’ve taken it down all my life and now have just dropped it off without—much—effort. But somehow, you don’t feel like the good old stuff when you’re in love. There’s something about it——”
They took the liquor case by case to the bathroom where they became carried away by an orgy of opening bottles and watching their contents gurgle into the tub.
“We could bathe in champagne now, if we felt like it,” said Jerry reflectively. “I’ve often thought I would, but I guess I was pretty well doused on the inside when I had the little idea.”
Joy watched it gurgle down the pipe and thought of the inferno that innocent-looking liquid could cause. . . . What it had caused in her own experience. . . . In the lights and shades of the mixture tumbling to the sewers where it belonged, she saw Jack Barnett’s face for a fleeting horror, that shifted to Packy’s, quite as terrible. And she saw Sarah. . . . And then they all blended together in a whirling mass, and flickered away. The bathtub was empty. . . .
“I’ve got to admit,” Jerry was saying, in rather an artificial voice, “that in spite of everything it makes me feel sort of ill to see all that joy-getter spilling itself away in such a casual fashion.”
Joy looked at her, and saw that her mouth was slightly twisted, her eyes bearing a strained expression. It had evidently been more of an effort for her than Joy had realized.
That Jerry could have stopped drinking altogether! Even to her inexperienced knowledge it seemed an impossibility. Jerry was staring into the bathtub again, with the hungry look of the street-gamin. . . . Joy turned away, and with her old-time quick sensitiveness, Jerry laughed and joined her.
“I don’t deny it isn’t hard at times and harder at others, old girl,” she said; “but there are things in everyone’s life that are hard not to do, and all the same one simply can’t do ’em!”
The day was unlike their old times together. On the surface, both girls were affectionate, and delighted to be with one another again; but below the surface everywhere intruded the man who had come between their friendship, changing everything irrevocably. Jerry was changed. For the better, one could not doubt; but nevertheless she was not the Jerry that Joy had known and loved. She was softer, with that new glow within her lighting everything she did or said. Her speech already showed meditation, her manner was more reposeful. Content and love were fast enfolding her into serenity—and, Joy thought, who wanted a serene Jerry?
Their conversation was strained, although voluble. Jerry’s bristled with mention of Phil, directly or indirectly. This stimulated Joy’s desire to talk of Jim; and the realization that she could not, that she had not Jerry’s excuse or right, brought effort into her responses.
They telephoned Félicie, and Jerry took them both to the Copley for dinner, over which they lingered. Félicie was wearing her usual look of unbroken loveliness, and arrayed for a Sixty Club dance in Brookline. Her attitude towards Jerry was frankly pitying, which abated none the less when she saw that Jerry’s attitude duplicated hers.
“It’s all right to act as if you’d pulled the moon down to earth, for a while,” she said tolerantly. “I know how these things come out. Pretty soon this one-man stuff will get monotonous. Monotony! Sooner or later you see it in all married life! And you’ll get monotonous to him, too! Husbands always get sohusband-likewhen their wives begin getting always the same!”
Jerry laughed. “Better take the plunge like a shot the way I did, Félicie. Then you’ll have no time to think up objections. Monotony! The way I used to live—the way you’re living now—is the real monotony. Continually seeing one side only of large numbers of young men—one party after another—oh well, there’s no use wasting my flow of English on the subject.”
There was no use. A youth with an attitude of cultivated boredom and repressed correctness, came in for her, and she left them “wishing she could stay, but you see how it is.”
“She never looks eager,” said Joy; “you wouldn’t think she valued a good time so highly.”
“No, not eager; just smug,” said Jerry tersely, and they talked of other things.
Jerry the excitement-eater was dead, that was plain. Joy had always wished to see that side of her dispensed with. Then why did this change, this miraculous, softening change, stir irritation within her, throw a breach between them?
She could not fathom the reason until she took Jerry to the eleven o’clock and told her good-bye. There, with a farewell look at Jerry’s brilliant face, enhanced by the beloved freckles, it came to her in a rush. She was jealous—jealous both ways! Before, she had been jealous of Phil Lancaster only for taking Jerry from her; now, she was jealous of Jerry herself, for the world in which she lived, the world upon which Joy had turned her back. . . .
She did not sleep well that night. Disturbing thoughts pressed urgently about her, and would not postpone their hearing.
It was a powerful force that had led Jerry to stop drinking, to drop her Excitement-Eating ways without regret. To pit oneself against such a force—to eliminate it from one’s life—was an undertaking at the mysterious door of which Joy paused and shivered. . . .
” Oh, dear! What if it should rain? Can you imagine anything worse than organdy in the rain? And yet if it doesn’t rain, can you imagine anything worse than to have on dark silk, at Harvard Class Day, with everyone else in organdy?”
Thus Félicie, flattening her imperial nose against the window pane, a scowl menacing her untrodden brow, as the few clouds in the skies were menacing the calm of the June day.
Joy had been with Félicie and her aunt throughout the spring, a troubled spring of work and restlessness. The old wild longings that had once shaken her did not return. There was instead a dull, sick emptiness, which engulfed her work rather than allowing itself to be engulfed.
Few events had marked Joy’s calendar. Her father had made his long-anticipated visit, and found himself pleased with her environment as well as charmed by Pa Graham. Under Pa’s guidance Joy had worked herself into a position from which she could map out her progress for the next few years. “Nothing but death can stop me,” she told herself; and the words grew into a sort of refrain that twinkled into her mind at regular intervals, generally putting to rout some unwarranted flight of fancy.
Félicie had taken the spring at a pace that left faint smudges beneath her eyes, and an ever-so-little receding of the tide of colour on the cheeks that she boasted had never known a rouge-puff. It seemed as though she had been wound up and could not stop. Evenings when there was no excuse for going out, no especial festivity to attend, she would go to the movies, eat down a few thrills, leave early and dance late. Sometimes in the mornings, when her yawns were irrepressible, Joy would ask her why she never let down.
“My dear, you can’t stop going—you lose your grip!” she said, wide-eyed that the answer was not obvious.
“Losing your grip” was the one thing the Excitement-Eaters seemed to dread.
Now, Félicie was chafing between a watermelon-coloured organdy and a dark blue taffeta, both laid challengingly upon the bed.
“Why did I say I’d go, anyway?” she complained. “Of course, I want to go. It’s interesting, even if there are millions of relations and absolutely no cut-ins—but it isn’t worth it to have all this trouble about deciding!”
“If everyone usually wears organdy, why not chance it? They’ll all be in the same boat if it rains.”
This from Joy, as she combed her hair preparatory to donning organdy herself. Hal Jennings, the Harvardite who was taking Félicie to Class Day, had given her two tickets for the Stadium exercises and his club spread, and Joy had accepted Félicie’s invitation to share the tickets. She had never seen Harvard Class Day, and her anticipation was not dimmed by Félicie’s grumping. Félicie was always like that if she had to decide anything.
“Oh, I suppose so,” said Félicie, and retired to the closet to change; “but youknowhow itlooksin the rain!”
When they were duly arrayed in filmy pink and blue, they presented themselves to Madame Durant for approval. She always liked to see Félicie before she went out anywhere, to criticize or approve her costume—usually to command changes, which was a sore trial to Félicie, as refutation into an ear-trumpet is as futile as it is disagreeable.
Madame Durant approved their “simple dresses” at first, then when they were ordered to “turn around,” remarked accusingly that she could see right through them, and they must each put on another good, thick petticoat.
Joy and Félicie exchanged glances of despair. If there is anything a girl hates, it is a good, thick petticoat. But the ear-trumpet ruled, and they retired to bolster themselves out. Since Joy had been associated with Madame Durant, she had made allowances for many of Félicie’s characteristics. When they were starting out of the door, the penetrating voice that deaf people often acquire recalled them. Those little light coats weren’t enough. They must take long, dark coats and umbrellas. Félicie started to crumple, then remembered her starched dress and compressed her emotion into a waver.
“It’s bad enough to go not knowing how the weather’s going to act, but to go dressedpiebald!”
But they muffled themselves up properly, and with a final interlude of feeding the dog so that Madame Durant would not have it to do later, they were off. Félicie had refused to enter a street car in light things. “They’ll think we’re shop-girls just back from the Park, youknowthey will!” And so they had indulged in the formal luxury of a taxi.
“I suppose auntie was wise about those coats,” Félicie said; “but I do hate to encourage her in anything.”
“It seems so strange to have an older woman supervise one’s clothes,” said Joy. “I suppose that’s because my mother died when I was so little, and father never wanted anyone to take her place—he wouldn’t even have a housekeeper.”
“Most girls would have been pretty queer, living that way. You were lucky to have come through it all right.”
“But did I?” Joy wondered, as Félicie turned to peer out of the window at the smug blue sky. She had dismissed the subject.
“I’ve never been able to figure out why Harvard always gives such pepless parties compared to other colleges. I’d never mention it to a Harvard man, because you know it’s just as bad as discussing religion, you never getanywhere—but why do you suppose it is?”
“Never having been to a Harvard affair——”
“I shall die to-night, simply pass out, that’s all. I’m sunk when I think of it. I just will make Hal take me somewhere else, that’s all. In the first place everyone brings a girl and you know that’s wrong. It leaves absolutely no stags. That ruins everything right there.”
“Poor Harvard! Getting knocked for single-mindedness,” Joy murmured.
“That’s just what it is! At the Harvard-Yale game last fall, some Yale men, friends of Greg’s, came over and cut in on me at the tea dance afterwards—they really made the dance almost good—and the Harvard men were simply furious! They’ve just got their minds set on straight dances!”
“Oh, well, you can’t generalize. All Harvard men can’t be so resourceful that they enjoy having a whole dance with a girl.”
Before Félicie had this sifted down, the taxi-man drew up and informed them that they would have to walk from there.
The little clouds that had threatened like a baby’s playful fist in the sapphire laughter of the sky, were now striking blows of grey menace into the blue.
“Didn’t Iknowit would rain!” Félicie wailed. “Justlookat that sky.Whydo they have the Stadium exercises out-doors?”
Scattered lines of people hurrying to the Stadium; hundreds and hundreds of girls in all colours of organdy, with organdy hats—and spotless white slippers. Complacent mothers; excited fathers, trying not to look too proud; nondescript and sometimes awful people who would be lumped under the gross head, Relations; all urging their way to the Stadium. It seemed as if the world was at Harvard Class Day—the world, and its Relations. As they were led to their cold stone seats by a brick-cheeked youth who hid his admiration beneath a mask of “Harvard indifference,” a treble voice lifted itself out of the crowd.
“Why, Joy Nelson! Yes, it is! Hullo, Joy! It’s me—see?”
It was Betty Grey, in black and white organdy combined in sophisticated lines that made her look all of eighteen—Betty Grey, who threw herself over to where Joy and Félicie were installing themselves, and hung a charming wedge between two surging lines of people anxious to get to their places.
“I haven’t seen you for suchages, I thought you were dead or something! You know, how you always think people are dead or something, when you don’t see them!”
A struggle ensued behind, which failed to dislodge her while she met Félicie. “People seem to be pushing me, but they don’t mean it—I always say, judge a crowd kindly—this is my first Class Day, and I’m terribly excited! Have you been singing just lots this year?”
“Just lots,” Joy repeated gravely. “What have you been doing? And how is—everybody?”
“Oh, Grant’s all right. I haven’t done anything but flunk English History—there’s a girl visiting us who knows you and your cousin—oh dear, it feels as if everyone in the world was pushing me! I’ll see you later, what spread are you going to?”
And Betty Grey was swirled along out of sight.
“They’re starting,” said Félicie. “Look, all the classes march in.”
It was at that moment when Félicie forgot to look at the sky, that the rain came down—and in no pathetic Boston drizzle; it gave itself out in the quantities it had been holding back all day, generously making up for lost time.
All over the Stadium people stood up and umbrellas snapped open, spreading their inky mushroom caps over slim stems of organdy. “It’ll only last a minute,” said someone, and the word was passed along until the mushrooms bobbed to the repetition: “Only a minute—only a minute!”
“It’s going to be more than a minute,” said Joy, whose feet were getting wet. “I’m going out until it stops.”
“Through all that crowd! I’d rather sit here, as long as we have umbrellas.”
“Well, a cold doesn’t mean to you what it would to me. I’ll come back when it holds up”; and Joy plunged forward into the flock that was making its way to the nearest exit. Beneath the stone shelter of the Stadium she found herself but little better off. The ground trampled by hundreds of wet feet was soggy; dripping people shook themselves all around her. She turned to seek a dryer place, and knocked into a young man who was hastening by. They both drew back with apologies which faded into silence on their lips. It was Packy.
“Joy!”
“Why, hello, Packy.” She tried to speak naturally; he made no attempt, and stood staring down at her until they became aware of the enraptured gaze of two pink-organdied flappers, who were obviously regretting the fact that they had so much hair mattressed over their ears.
“Joy—I’ve wanted to see you for a long time—where can we go, so I can talk to you?”
They fell back to the lee of one of the entrances, where there was comparative calm.
“I never had the nerve—to call up again, after that night—but I wanted to see you—I’ve wanted to see you for a long time—to tell you what I thought of myself for acting the way I did.”
Packy had grown in the months that had passed since she had seen him. The gangly stripling with the restless, roving eye and the feet that were always beating out a syllable of jazz, was gone, leaving only reminiscences of himself. He had gathered composure, and his eyes had lost their look of seeking excitement.
“What have you been doing this year, Packy?” she asked involuntarily.
“Oh, that’s neither here nor there. As a matter of fact, I’ve been working.”
Working! Packy, the gilded one, with an income to keep him and his among the polo-labourers and golf-toilers!
“But—well, I’ve written I don’t know how many letters to you, Joy—and torn them up. Letters are rotten when you really want to say anything.”
They are distracted by a little girl, her organdy clinging to her in sodden folds, her improbable complexion fast fading to incoherency, as she came limping out of the rain to her mother who, firmly dry, had been standing against a pillar.
“Oh, mother, the rain has shrunk my shoes all up—I can’t hardly walk——”
“No-ra! You were out there, all this time? You’ve alwaysheardabout people who didn’t know enough to come in when it rained!”
“That good lady,” said Packy, “has described me complete. Last fall, I didn’t know enough to come in when it rained. I did know a few things, though, Joy. Can you believe that I could never have been such a cad—if I hadn’t been drunk?”
“I—can,” said Joy.
“I’ve thought it all over—I don’t know how many times—and I’ve thought it out. To go in back of the fact that I misjudged you—I misjudged Jerry and Sarah. Because we could act as freely at the apartment as though we were at our club—because they were on their own—and because you were with them, and on your own,—I thought—well, I didn’t quite think so at that—until I was drunk—and then I didn’t think at all.”
Insensibly they had retreated still farther from the crowd, and now stood in a muddy corner quite alone.
“I was in love with you, Joy, as much as I could ever be. I—I still am, I guess. It—seems to feel that way. I was always trying to puzzle out your status—just where you stood in the Jerry-Sarah household. But I didn’t understand, and so I lost you.”
“You—you needn’t blame yourself so, for not understanding,” said Joy; “almost anyone might have—I can see that now.”
“No—not any one who recognizes that we’re doing transitional stuff these days. I was coasting around on last century’s roller skates. They just hit the surface. Now they’re using ice skates, that go in a little. Oh, I’ve thought this all out—and gotmyice skates!”
“What?” she faltered.
“Why, you know. We all know. Last century—no matter what men were—theywere all that women had—so they took them and made the best of it. Now—no matter what the women of to-day are making of themselves—and a lot of women don’t exactly knowwhatthey’re making of themselves—they’re all men have—andwe’re certainly not going to make the worst of it.”
Joy thought. This was a mean between the extremes of the discussion held at Fennelly’s between Greg and the two Princeton men. “Then you think it’s working around——”
“Yes—not in this generation, but eventually—things have got to work round to a better basis. Bye and bye the world’ll get straightened out—and it won’t go back to last century’s roller skates to do it, either. It takes time, and costs a lot on the way—it cost me you—anyway, it cost me an even chance for you.” He looked down at her serious face and quoted lightly—