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“I wouldn’t ask Gaylord if I had to do it myself,” Constantine said, brushing by the maid who opened the door. “There is a young man we could easily spare. If he ever gets as good a job as painting spots on rocking-horses I’ll eat my hat.”
Mary was surveying the room. “Where––where do we go to from here?” she faltered.
Constantine sank into a large chair, shaking his head. “Damned if I know,” he panted. “Look at that truck!”––pointing to piles of wedding gifts.
Mary walked the length of the drawing room. It had black velvet panels and a tan carpet with angora rugs spread at perilous intervals; there was a flowered-silk chaise-longue, bright yellow damask furniture, and an Italian-Renaissance screen before the marble fireplace.
Opening out of this was a salon––this was where the Chinese panels were to find a haven––and already cream-and-gold furniture had been placed at artistic angles with blue velvet hangings for an abrupt contrast. There was a multitude of books bound in dove-coloured ooze; cut glass, crystal, silver candelabra sprinkled throughout. Men were working on fluted white satin window drapes, and Mary glanced toward the dining room to view the antique mahogany and sparkle of plate. Someone was fitting more hangings in the den, and a woman was disputing with her co-worker as to the best place for the goldfish globe and the co-worker was telling her that Monster’s house was to occupy the room––yes, Monster, the O’Valley dog––a pound and a half, he weighed, and was subject to pneumonia. Here they began to laugh, and someone else, knowing of Constantine’s presence, discreetly closed the door.
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Flushing, Mary returned to the drawing room and standing before Constantine’s chair she said swiftly: “I’m afraid I cannot help you, sir. I’m not this sort. I shouldn’t be able to please. Besides, it is robbing your daughter of a great joy––and a wonderful duty, if you don’t mind my saying it––this arranging of her own home. We have no right to do it for her.”
“She’s asked us to do it,” spluttered the big man.
“Then you will have to ask her to excuse me.”
Mary was almost stern. It seemed quite enough to have to stay at her post all summer, run the business and houseclean the office for his return, without being expected to come into the Gorgeous Girl’s realm and do likewise. In this new atmosphere she began to feel old and plain, quite impossible! The yellow damask furniture, the rugs, the silver and gold and lovely extravagances seemed laughing at her and suggesting: “Go back to your filing cabinet and your old-maid silk dusting cloths, to your rest-rooms for girls, and to your arguments with city salesmen. You have no more right here than she will ever have in your office.”
When Constantine would have argued further she threw back her head defiantly, saying: “Someone explains the difference between men and women by the fact that men swear and women scream, which is true as far as it goes. But in these days you often find a screaming gentleman and a profane lady––and there’s a howdy-do! You can’t ask the profane lady––no matter if she is a right-hand business man––to come fix pretties. You better write your daughter what I’ve said, and if you don’t mind I’d like to get back to the office.”
Constantine rose, frowning down at her with an67expression that would have frightened a good many women stauncher than Mary Faithful. For she had mentioned to him what no one, not even his sluggish conscience, had ever hinted at––his daughter’s duty.
But all he said was: “Profane ladies and screaming gentlemen. Well, I’ve put a screaming-gentleman tag on Gaylord Vondeplosshe––but what about yourself? Where are you attempting to classify?”
“Me? I’ll be damned if I help you out,” she laughed up at him as she moved toward the door.
Chuckling, yet defeated, Constantine admitted her triumph and sent her back to the office in the limousine.
At that identical moment Gaylord, alias the screaming gentleman, had been summoned to Aunt Belle’s bedside. For Beatrice believed in having two strings to her bow and she had written her aunt a second deluge of complaints and requests. Bemoaning the sprained ankle––and the probable regaining of three pounds which had been laboriously massaged away––Aunt Belle had called for Gaylord’s sympathy and support.
While Mary, rather perturbed yet unshaken in her convictions, returned to the office and Constantine had decided his blood pressure could not stand any traipsing round after folderols, Gaylord was eagerly taking notes and saying pretty nothings to the doleful Mrs. Todd, who relied utterly on his artistic judgment and promptness of action.
Whereupon Gaylord proudly rolled out of the Constantine gates in a motor car bearing Constantine’s monogram, and by late afternoon he had come to a most satisfactory understanding with decorators and antique dealers––an understanding which led68to an increase in the prices Beatrice was to pay and the splitting of the profits between one Gaylord Vondeplosshe and the tradesmen.
“A supper!” Mark Constantine demanded crisply that same evening, merely groaning when his sister told him that Gaylord had undertaken all the errands and was such a dear boy. “And send it up to my room––ham, biscuits, pie, and iced coffee, and I’m not at home if the lord mayor calls.”
He departed to the plainest room in the mansion and turned on an electric fan to keep him company. He sat watching the lawn men at their work, wondering what he was to do with this barn of a place. Beatrice had told him forcibly that she was not going to live in it. Wherein was the object of keeping it open for Belle Todd and himself when more and more he wished for semi-solitude? Noise and crowds and luxuries irritated him. He liked meals such as the one he had ordered, the plebeian joy of taking off tight shoes and putting on disreputable slippers, sitting in an easy-chair with his feet on another, while he read detective stories or adventurous romances with neither sense nor moral. He liked to relive in dream fashion the years of early endeavour––of his married life with Hannah. After he finished the reverie he would tell himself with a flash of honesty, “Gad, it might as well have happened to some other fellow––for all the good it does you.” Nothing seemed real to Constantine except his check book and his wife’s monument.
It was still to dawn upon him that his daughter partly despised him. He had always said that no one loved him but his child, and that no one but his child mattered so far as he was concerned. Since69Beatrice’s marriage he had become restless, wretched, desperately lonesome; he found himself missing Steve quite as much as he missed Beatrice. Their letters were unsatisfactory since they were chiefly concerned with things––endless things that they coveted or had bought or wanted in readiness for their return. As he sat watching the lawn men gossip he knitted his black brows and wondered if he ought to sell the mansion and be done with it. Then it occurred to him that grandchildren playing on the velvety lawn would make it quite worth while. With a thrill of anticipation he began to plan for his grandchildren and to wonder if they, too, would be eternally concerned with things.
As he recalled Mary’s defiance he chuckled. “A ten-dollar-a-week raise was cheap for such a woman,” he thought.
Meantime, Trudy informed the Faithful family at supper: “Gay has telephoned that he is coming to-night. Were you going to use the parlour, Mary?” A mere formality always observed for no reason at all.
“No, I’m going to water the garden. It’s as dry as Sahara.”
Luke groaned.
“Don’t make Luke help you. He’s stoop-shouldered enough from study without making him carry sprinkling cans,” Mrs. Faithful objected.
“Nonsense! It’s good for him, and he will be through in an hour.”
“Too late for the first movie show,” expostulated Luke.
“A world tragedy,” his sister answered.
“I wanted to go to-night,” her mother insisted.70“It’s a lovely story. Mrs. Bowen was in to tell me about it––all about a Russian war bride. They built a whole town and burnt it up at the end of the story. I guess it cost half a million––and there’s fighting in it, too.”
“All right, go and take Luke. But I don’t think the movies are as good for him as working in a garden.”
“You never want me to have pleasure. Home all day with only memories of the dead for company, and then you come in as cross as a witch, ready to stick your nose in a book or go dig in the mud! Excuse me, Trudy, but a body has to speak out sometimes. Your father to the life––reading and grubbing with plants. Oh, mother’s proud of you, Mary, but if you would only get yourself up a little smarter and go out with young people you’d soon enough want Luke to go out, too! I don’t pretend to know what your judgment toward your poor old mother would be!”
Mary’s day had included a dispute with a firm’s London representative, the Constantine incident, a session at the dentist’s as a noon-recess attraction, housecleaning the office, and two mutually contradictory wires from Steve. She laid her knife and fork down with a defiant little clatter.
“I can’t burn the candle at both ends. I work all day and I have to relax when I leave the office. If my form of a good time is to read or set out primroses it is nothing to cry thief for, is it? I want you to go out, mother, as you very well know. And you are welcome to fill the house with company. Only if I’m to do a man’s work and earn his wage I must claim my spare time for myself.”
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“Now listen here, dear,” interposed Trudy, who took Mary’s part when it came to a real argument, “don’t get peeved. Let me buy your next dress and show you how to dance. You’ll be surprised what a difference it will make. You’ll get so you just hate ever to think of work.”
“Splendid! Who will pay the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker?” Mary thought of the wedding presents carelessly stacked about Beatrice’s apartment. One pile of them, as she measured expenses, would have paid the aforementioned gentlemen for a year or more.
“Now you’ve got her going,” Luke objected. “Say, Trudy, you don’t kill yourself tearing off any work at the shop!”
“Luke,” began his mother, “be a gentleman. Dear me, I wish I hadn’t said a word. To think of my children in business! Why, Luke ought to be attending a private school and going to little cotillion parties like my brothers did; and Mary in her own home.” She pressed her napkin to her eyes.
“I admit Mary carries me along on the pay roll––I’m Mary’s foolishness,” Trudy said, easily. “Mary’s a good scout even if she does keep us stepping. She has to fall down once in a while, and she fell hard when she hired me and took me in as a boarder.”
Mary flushed. “I try to make you do your share,” she began, “and–––”
“I ought to pay more board,” Trudy giggled at her own audacity. “But I won’t. You’re too decent to make me. You know I’m such a funny fool I’d go jump in the river if I got blue or things went wrong, and you like me well enough to not want that. Don’t worry about our Mary, Mrs. Faithful. Just72let her manage Luke and he won’t wander from her apron strings like he will if you and I keep him in tow.”
Luke made a low bow, scraping his chair back from the table. “I’ll go ahead and get reserved seats and mother can come when she’s ready,” he proposed.
Mrs. Faithful beamed with triumph. “That’s my son! Get them far enough back, the pictures blur if I’m too close.”
“I’ll do the dishes,” Mary said, briefly. “Go and get ready.”
“I’d wipe them only Gay is coming so early,” Trudy explained, glibly.
“I’d rather be alone.” Mary was piling up the pots and pans.
“Now, deary, if you don’t feel right about mother’s going,” her mother resumed a little later as she poked her head into the kitchen, “just say so. But I certainly want to see that town burnt up; and besides, it’s teaching Luke history. Dear me, your hair is dull. Why don’t you try that stuff Trudy uses?”
“Because I’m not Trudy. Good-bye.”
“You’re all nerves again. I’d certainly let someone else do the work.”
“I need a vacation.”
“That means you want to get away from us. Well, I try to keep the home together. Leave that coffeepot just as it is, I’ll want a drop when I get back.” Waddling out the door Mrs. Faithful left Mary to assault the dishes and long for Steve’s return.
“I wonder why the great plan did not make it possible for all folks to like their relatives?” she asked herself as she finally hung the tea towels on the line; “or their star boarder?”
73
Then she became engrossed in the way the newly set out plants had taken root. Bending over the flower beds she was hardly conscious that darkness had fallen over the earth––a heavenly, summer-cool darkness with veiled stars prophetic of a blessed shower. She repaired to the porch swing to dream her dreams of fluffs and frills, arrange a dream house and live therein. It should be quite unlike the Gorgeous Girl’s apartment––but a roomy, sprawling affair with old furniture that was used and loved and shabby, well-read books, carefully chosen pictures, dull rugs, and oddly shaped lamps, a shaggy old dog to lie before the open fireplace and be patted occasionally, fat blue jugs of Ragged Robin roses at frequent intervals. Perhaps there would be a baby’s toy left somewhere along the stairway leading to the nursery. When one has the cool of a summer’s night, a porch screened with roses and a comfortable swing, what does it matter if there are unlikable persons and china-shop apartment houses?
Had Mary known what was taking place in the front parlour it would not have jarred her from her dreams. For Gaylord, resplendent in ice-cream flannels, and Trudy, wearing an unpaid-for black-satin dress with red collar and cuffs, were both busier than the proverbial beaver planning their wedding. It was to be an informal and unexpected little affair, being the direct result of the Gorgeous Girl’s demands as to settling her household.
“You’ve no idea how jolly easy it was, Babseley. There was a dressing case I know Bea will keep––it brought me a cool hundred commission––it had just come in. I plunged and bought two altar scarfs74she can use for her reading stand––she likes such things, besides all the bona-fide orders. I’ve been working for fair––and I’ve made over a thousand dollars.”
Trudy kissed Bubseley between his pale little eyes. “You Lamb! Sure you won’t have to give it back or that they will tell?”
“Of course not! They’d give their own selves away. That’s the way such things are always done, y’know. I’ve an idea that I’ll go in seriously for the business by and by. I don’t feel any compunction; I’m entitled to every cent of it; in fact, I call it cheap for Bea at a thousand.”
“But will they really pay you?” Trudy was skeptical. It seemed such a prodigious amount for buying a few trifles.
“The Constantine credit is like the Bank of England. I’ll have my money and we’ll make our getaway before Bea arrives in town.”
“Why?” Trudy did not approve of this. The contrast between her marriage and the Gorgeous Girl’s wedding rankled.
Gay hesitated. “I want to go to New York and see concert managers and father’s friends,” he evaded. “Then we’ll visit my sister in Connecticut as long as she’ll have us. And when we come back––well, you’ll––you’ll know the smart ways better.”
He was a trifle afraid of Trudy and he did not know how best to advise her that her slips in speech and manners would be more easily remedied by setting her an example of the correct thing than by staying in Hanover and leading a cat-and-dog life, getting nowhere at all.
Trudy kissed him again. “Hurrah for the eternal75frolic!” she said, adding: “But we’ll know Beatrice and Steve socially, won’t we?”
“Of course!” he said, in helpless concession.
His one-cylinder little brain had not yet reckoned with Trudy’s determination to conquer the social arena. He knew he must have her to help him; his efforts with creditors were failing sadly of late. Besides, he admired her tremendously; he felt like a rake and a deuce of a chap when they went out together, and he relied on her vivacity––Pep had been his pet name for her before he originated Babseley––to carry him through. It really would be quite an easy matter to live on nothing a year until something turned up. The graft from Beatrice was the open sesame, however, and the Gorgeous Girl would never suspect the truth.
“Keep right on working hard,” Trudy said, fondly, as they kissed each other good-night. “I’ll tell Mary to-morrow. I want to leave my big trunk here because we might want to stay here for a few days when we come back.”
“Never!”––masterfully pointing his cane at the moon. “My wife is going to have her own apartment. One of father’s friends has built several apartment houses and he’ll be sure to let me in.”
“Are we dreaming?” Trudy asked, thinking of how indebted she was to Beatrice O’Valley, yet how she envied and hated her.
“No, Babseley, I’ll phone you to-morrow and come down. If you see me flying about in a machine don’t be surprised; I’m to use their big car as much as I like. But it would be a little thick to have us seen together––just yet.”
“I’ll see that the whole social set gets a draft from76me that will open their eyes,” Trudy promised, loath to have him go.
“If old man Constantine knew I drew that money down!” Gay chuckled with delight. “When his favourite after-dinner story is to tell how Steve O’Valley lay on his stomach and watched goats for an education.”
“I’d hate to have my finger between his teeth when he learns the truth,” Trudy prompted.
She spent half the night taking inventory of her wardrobe, her debts, and her personal charms, practising airs and graces before her mirror and calculating how long the thousand would last them. All the world was before her, to Trudy’s way of thinking. She would be Mrs. Gaylord Vondeplosshe, and with Gay’s name and her brain––well, to give Trudy’s own sentiments, they would soon be able to carry the whole show in their grip and use the baggage cars to bring back the profits!
77CHAPTER V
Gaylord’s sudden marriage and departure for New York caused no small comment. In the Faithful family Mary and Luke stood against Mrs. Faithful, who declared with meaning emphasis that some girls had more sense than others and it was better to marry and make a mistake the first time than to remain an old maid. With Trudy’s style and high spirits she was going to carry Gaylord into the front ranks without any effort. Luke described the event by saying that a bad pair of disturbers had teamed for life, and relied upon Mary to take up the burden of the proof.
“Don’t mourn so, mother. I’m a happy old maid,” she insisted when the comments grew too numerous for her peace of mind. “Trudy was not the sort to blush unseen, and it’s a relief not to have to cover up her mistakes at the office. Everything will be serene once more. As for Gay’s future––I suppose he is likely to bring home anything from a mousetrap to a diamond tiara. I don’t pretend to understand his ways.”
“Of course it isn’t like Mrs. O’Valley’s wedding,” her mother resumed, with a resonant sniffle. “You have been so used to hearing about her ways that poor little Trudy seems cheap. Perhaps your mother and brother and the little home seem so, too. But we can’t all be Gorgeous Girls, and I think Trudy was right to take Gaylord when he had the money for a ring and a license.”
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“He had more than that,” Mary ruminated. “People don’t walk to New York.”
“Did he win it on a horse race?” Luke had an eye to the future.
“Maybe his father’s friends helped him,” Mrs. Faithful added.
“Can’t prove anything by me.” Mary shook her head.
Neither Trudy nor Gaylord knew that all Beatrice’s bills were sent to Mary to discount, and Mary, not without a certain shrewdness, had her own ideas on the matter. But it amused more than it annoyed her. Gay might as well have a few hundred to spend in getting a wife and caretaker as tradesmen whose weakness it was to swell their profits beyond all respectability.
“I wonder where they will live.” Mrs. Faithful found the subject entirely too fascinating to let alone.
“Not here,” her daughter assured her. “And if you’d only say yes I could get such a sunny, pretty flat where the work would be worlds easier.”
“Leave my home? Never! It would be like uprooting an oak forest. Time for that when I am dead and gone.” The double chin quivered with indignation. “I don’t see why Trudy and Gay won’t come here and take the two front rooms. They’d be company for me.”
She approved of Trudy’s views of life as much as she disapproved and was rather afraid of this young woman who wanted to bustle her into trim house dresses instead of the eternal wrappers.
“I kept Trudy only because she needed work––and a home,” Mary said, frankly; “and because you wanted her. But my salary does nicely for us. Besides, it79would be a bad influence for Luke to have such a person as Gay about. We must make a man out of Luke.”
“Don’t go upsetting him. He eats his three good meals a day and always acts like a little gentleman. You’ll nag at him until he runs away like my brother Amos did.”
“Better run away from us than run over us,” Mary argued; “but there is no need of planning for Trudy’s return. Their home will be in a good part of the city, if it consists in merely hanging onto a lamp-post. You don’t realize that Gay is a bankrupt snob and married Trudy only because he could play off cad behind his pretty wife’s skirts. Men will like Trudy and the women ridicule and snub her until she finds she has a real use for her claws. Up to now she has only halfway kept them sharpened. In a few years you will find Mr. and Mrs. Gaylord Vondeplosshe in Hanover society with capital letters, hobnobbing with Beatrice O’Valley and her set and somehow managing to exist in elegance. Don’t ask how they will do it––but they will. However, they would never consider starting from our house. That would be getting off on a sprained ankle.”
Mrs. Faithful gulped the rest of her coffee. “No one has any use for me because I haven’t money. Our parlour was good enough for them to do their courting in, and if they don’t come and see me real often I’ll write Trudy a letter and tell her some good plain facts!”
“Be sure to say we all think Gay’s mother must have been awful fond of children to have raised him,” Luke suggested from the offing.
Mary tossed a sofa pillow at him and disappeared. She could have electrified her mother by telling her80that Steve was to return that morning, that the office was prepared to welcome him back, and that Mrs. O’Valley would be anchored at the telephone to get into communication with her dearest and best of friends.
As she walked to the street car she reproached herself for not having told the news. It was a tiny thing to tell a woman whose horizon was bounded by coffee pots, spotted wrappers, and inane movies.
“You’re mean in spots,” Mary told herself. “You know how it would have pleased her.”
She sometimes felt a maternal compassion for this helpless dear with her double chins and self-sacrificing past, and she wondered whether her father had not had the same attitude during the years of nagging reproach at his lack of material prosperity. She resolved to come home that night with a budget of news items concerning Steve’s return, even bringing a rose from the floral offering that was to be placed on his desk.
“After all, she’s mother,” Mary thought, rounding the corner leading to the office building, “and like most of us she does the best she can!”
She tried to maintain a calm demeanour in the office as she answered inquiries and opened the mail. But all the time she kept glancing at her desk clock. Half-past nine––of course he would be late––surely he must come by ten. She wished she had flung maidenly discretion to the winds and worn the white silk sport blouse she had just bought. But she had made herself dress in a crumpled waist of nondescript type. The floral piece on Steve’s long-deserted desk made her keep glancing up to smile at its almost funeral magnificence.
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She answered a telephone call. Yes, Mr. O’Valley was expected––undoubtedly he would wish to reserve a plate for the Chamber of Commerce luncheon––unless they heard to the contrary they could do so. ... Oh, it was to include the wives and so on. Then reserve places for Mr. and Mrs. O’Valley. She hung up the receiver abruptly and went to making memoranda.
Even if she demanded and would receive a share of Steve’s time and attention it would be the thankless, almost bitter portion––such as reserving plates for Mr. and Mrs. O’Valley or O.K.ing Mrs. O’Valley’s bills. Still it was hers, awarded to her because of keenness of brain and faithfulness of action. Steve needed her as much as he needed to come home to his miniature palace to watch the Gorgeous Girl display her latest creation, to be able to take the Gorgeous Girl fast in his arms and say: “You are mine––mine––mine!” very likely punctuating the words with kisses. Yet he must return each day to Mary Faithful and say: “You are my right-hand man; I need you.”
“A penny for your thoughts.” Steve O’Valley was standing beside her. “You look as if work agreed with you. Say something nice now––that a long holiday has improved me!”
She managed to put a shaking hand into his, wondering if she betrayed her thoughts. Being as tall as Steve she was able to look at him, not up at him; and there they stood––the handsome, reckless man with just a suggestion of nervous tension in his Irish blue eyes, and the plain young woman in a rumpled linen blouse.
“Ah––so I don’t please,” he bantered. “Well,82tell us all about it. I’ve a thousand questions––my father-in-law says you are the only thing I have that he covets. How about that?” He led the way into his office, Mary following.
Then he fell upon his mountain of mail and memoranda, demands for this charity and that patriotic subscription, and Mary began a careful explanation of affairs and they sat talking and arguing until the general superintendent looked in to suggest that the shop might like to have Mr. O’Valley say hello.
“It’s nearly eleven,” Steve exclaimed, “and we haven’t begun to say a tenth of all there is to discuss. See the funeral piece, Hodges? Why didn’t you label it ‘Rest in pieces’ and be done with it, eh? I shall now appear to make a formal speech.” Here he cut a rosebud from the big wreath and handed it gravely to Mary; he cut a second one and fastened it in his own buttonhole. “Lead me out, Hodges. I’m a bit unsteady––been playing too long.”
Mary stood in the doorway, one hand caressing the little rose. That Beatrice should have had the flower was her first thought. Then it occurred to her that Beatrice would have all the flowers at the formal affairs to be given the bridal couple, besides sitting opposite Steve at his own table. She no longer felt that she had stolen the rose or usurped attention. There was a clapping of hands and the usual laughter which accompanies listening to any generous proprietor’s speech, a trifle forced perhaps but very jolly sounding. Then Steve returned to his office to become engrossed in conversation with Mary until Mark Constantine dropped in to bowl him off to the club for luncheon.
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“She’s kept things humming, hasn’t she?” Constantine asked, sinking into the nearest chair.
“A prize,” Steve said, proudly. “I don’t find a slip-up any place. I’ll be back at two, Miss Faithful, in case any one calls.... How is Bea?” His voice softened noticeably.
Mary slipped away.
“Bea doesn’t like one half of her things and the other half are so much better than the apartment that she says they don’t show up,” her father admitted, drolly. “She is tired to death––so you’ll find her at home, my boy, with a box of candy and the latest novel. Belle was talking her head off when I left the house and the girls keep calling her on the telephone for those little three-quarters-of-an-hour hello talks. It seems to me that for rich girls, my daughter and her friends are the busiest, most tired women I ever knew––and yet do the least.” He put on his hat and waited for Steve to open the door.
“I don’t pretend to understand them,” Steve answered. “Maybe that’s why I’m so happy. Bea fusses if the shade of draperies doesn’t match her gown, and if Monster has a snarl in her precious hair it is cause for a tragedy. But I just grin and go along and presently she has forgotten all about it.”
“I tried to get that young woman helper of yours to help me fix up Bea’s things,” Constantine complained. “Let’s walk to the club––my knees are going stiff on me.”
“Well?”
“She looked round the apartment and plain refused to put away another woman’s pots and pans. It was just spunk. I don’t know that I blame her. So Belle got that low order of animal life–––”
84
“Meaning Gaylord?”
“Yes; and now the husband, I understand, of one of your thinnest clad and thinnest brained former clerks. Gay was in his element; he kept the machine working overtime and flattered Belle until he had everything his own way. Yet Beatrice seems quite satisfied with his achievements.”
“You must have been hanging round the house this morning.”
“I couldn’t get down to brass tacks,” he admitted. “You’ve had her all summer––but you can bet your clothes you wouldn’t have had her if I hadn’t been willing.” He slapped Steve on the shoulder good-naturedly.
Steve nodded briskly. Then he suggested: “Bea has the New York idea rather strong. Has she ever hinted it to you?”
“Don’t let that flourish, Steve. Kill it at the start. She knew better than to try to wheedle me into going. I’m smarter than most of the men round these parts but I’d be fleeced properly by the New York band of highbinders if I tried to go among them. And you’re not as good at the game as I am. Not–––” He paused as if undecided how much would be best to tell Steve. He evidently decided that generalities would be the wisest arguments, so he continued: “Don’t wince––it’s the truth, and there must be no secrets between us from now on. Besides, you’re in love and you can’t concentrate absolutely. My best advice to you is to stay home and tend to your knitting.
“You and Bea can go play round New York all you like. Let the New York crowd come to see you and be entertained, they’ll be glad to eat your dinners85and drink your wine if they don’t have to pay for it. We can get away with Hanover but we’d be handcuffed if we tried New York. When I made a hundred thousand dollars I was tempted to try New York instead of staying here––to make Bea the most gorgeous girl in the metropolis. But horse sense made me pass it by and stay on my own home diamond. So I’ve made a good many more hundreds of thousands and, what’s to the point, I’ve kept ’em!”
Here the conversation drifted into more technical business detail with Steve expostulating and contradicting and Constantine frowning at his son-in-law through his bushy eyebrows, admiring him prodigiously all the while.
Beatrice had telephoned Steve’s office, to be told that her husband was at lunch and would not be in until two o’clock.
“Have him come to our apartment,” she left word, “just as soon as he can. I am just leaving Mr. Constantine’s house to go there.”
After which she began telling Aunt Belle good-bye.
“Dear me, Bea, what a wonderful hat!” her aunt sighed. “I never saw anything more becoming.”
It took ten minutes to admire Bea’s costume of rosewood crape and the jewelled-cap effect, somewhat like Juliet’s, caught over each ear by a pink satin rose.
“Steve doesn’t appreciate anything in the way of costumes,” she complained. “He just says: ‘Yes, deary, I love you, and anything you wear suits me.’ Quite discouraging and so different from the other boys.”
“I’d call it very comfortable,” suggested her aunt.
“I suppose so––but comfortable things are often86tiresome. It is tiresome, too, to see too much of the same person. I was really bored to death in the Yosemite––Steve is so primitive––he wanted to stay there for days and days.”
“Steve comes from primitive people,” her aunt said, soberly, not realizing her own humour.
“Don’t mention it. Didn’t he force me to go to Virginia City, the most terrible little ghost world of tumbledown shacks and funny one-eyed, one-suspendered men, and old women smoking pipes and wearing blue sunbonnets! He was actually sentimental and enthusiastic about it all, trying to hunt up old cronies of his grandfather’s––I was cross as could be until we came back to Reno. Now Reno is interesting.”
She spent the better part of an hour describing the divorcees and their adventures.
“Well, I’m off for home. I think I shall entertain the Red Cross committee first of all. It’s only right, I believe”––the dove eyes very serious––“they’ve been under such terrible strains. I’m going to send a large bundle of clothes for the Armenian Relief, too. Oh, aunty, the whole world seems under a cloud, doesn’t it? But I met the funniest woman in Pasadena; she actually teed her golf ball on a valuable Swiss watch her husband had given her! She said her only thrills in life came from making her husband cross.”
“Was he––when he found it out?”
“No; she was dreadfully disappointed. He called her a naughty child and bought her another!”
When Beatrice reached the apartment she found Steve standing on the steps looking anxiously up and down the street.
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“What’s happened?” he asked, half lifting her out of the car.
“Don’t! People will see us. I was telling aunty about Reno. Oh, it’s so good to be here!” as she came inside her own door. “I hope people will let me alone the rest of the day. I’m just a wreck.” She found a box of chocolates and began to eat them.
“A charming-looking wreck, I’ll say.” He stooped to kiss her.
The rose-coloured glasses were still attached to Steve’s naturally keen eyes. Like many persons he knew a multitude of facts but was quite ignorant concerning vital issues. He had spent his honeymoon in rapt and unreal fashion. He had realized his boyhood dream of returning to Nevada a rich and respected man with a fairy-princess sort of wife. The deadly anaesthesia of unreality which these get-rich-quick candidates of to-day indulge in at the outset of their struggle still had Steve in its clutch. He had not even stirred from out its influence. He had accomplished what he had set out to accomplish––and he was now about to realize that there is a distinct melancholy in the fact that everyone needs an Aladdin’s window to finish. But under the influence of the anæsthesia he had proposed to have an everlasting good time the rest of his life, like the closing words of a fairy tale: “And then the beautiful young princess and the brave young prince, having slain the seven-headed monster, lived happily ever, ever after!”
With this viewpoint, emphasized by the natural conceit of youth, Steve had passed his holiday with the Gorgeous Girl.
“What did you want, darling?” he urged.
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“To talk to you––I want you to listen to my plan. You are to come with me to New York for the fall opera and all the theatres––oh, along in November. It’s terribly dull here. Jill Briggs and her husband and some of the others are going, and we can take rooms at the Astor and all be together and have a wonderful time!”
“I’d rather stay in our own home,” he pleaded. “It’s such fun to have a real home. We can entertain, you know. Besides, I’m the worker and you are the player, and I don’t understand your sort of life any more than you can understand mine. So you must play and let me look on––and love me, that’s all I’ll ever ask.”
“You’re a dear,” was his reward; “but we’ll go to New York?”
“I’ll have to take you down and leave you––I’m needed at the office.”
“But I’d be the odd one––I’d have to have a partner. Steve, dear, you don’t have to grub. When we were engaged you always had time for me.”
“Because you had so little for me! And so I always shall have time for you,” the anæsthesia causing his decision. “Besides, those were courtship days––and I wasn’t quite so sure of you, which is the way of all men.” He kissed her hair gently.
She drew away and rearranged a lock. “I don’t want a husband who won’t play with me.”
“We’ll fix it all right, don’t worry. Now was that all you wanted?”
“I want you to stay home and go driving with me. I want you to call on some people––and look at a new cellaret I’d like to buy. It is expensive, but no one else would have one anywhere near as charming. I89need you this afternoon––you’re so calm and strong, and my head aches. I’m always tired.”
“Yet you never work,” he said, almost unconsciously.
“My dear boy, society is the hardest work in the world. I’m simply dragged to a frazzle by the end of the season. Besides, there is all my war work and my clubs and my charities. And I’ve just promised to take an advanced course in domestic science.”
“I see,” Steve said, meekly.
“I think it is the duty of rich women to know all about frying things as well as eating them,” she said, as she took a third caramel.
“Quite true. Having money isn’t always keeping it”
“Oh, papa has loads of money––enough for all of us,” she remarked, easily. “It isn’t that. I’d never cook if I were poor, anyway; that would be the last thing I’d ever dream of doing. It’s fun to go to the domestic-science class as long as all my set go. Well––will you be a nice angel-man and stay home to amuse your fractious wife?”
“I’ll call Miss Faithful on the phone and say I’m going to play hooky,” he consented. “By the way, you must come down to the office and say hello to her when you get the time.”
Beatrice kissed him. “Must I? I hate offices. Besides, Gaylord has married your prettiest clerk, and there will be no one to play with me except my husband.”
“Funny thing––that marriage,” Steve commented. “If it was any one but Gay I’d send condolences for loading the office nuisance onto him.”
“Wasn’t she any use at all?” she asked, curiously.
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“None––always having a headache and being excused for the day. That was the only thing I ever questioned in Mary Faithful––why she engaged Trudy and took her into her own home as a boarder.”
“Oh, so Mary isn’t perfection? Don’t be too hard on the other girl. I’d be quite as useless if I ever had to work. I’d do just the same––have as many headaches as the firm would stand for, and marry the first man who asked me.”
“But think of marrying Gay!”
“Poor old Gay––his father was a dear, and he is terribly well behaved. Besides, see how obliging he is. Your Miss Faithful refused to help me out, and Gay ran his legs off to get everything I wanted. I’ll never be rude to Gay as long as he amuses me.”
“That’s the thing that leads them all, isn’t it, princess?”
91CHAPTER VI
After the first round of excessively formal entertainments for Mr. and Mrs. O’Valley, Steve found a mental hunger suddenly asserting itself. It was as if a farm hand were asked to subsist upon a diet of weak tea and wafers.
In the first place, no masculine mind can quite admit the superiority of a feminine mind when it concerns handling said masculine mind’s business affairs. Though Steve insisted that Mary had done quite as well as he would have done, he told himself secretly that he must get down to hard work and go over the letters and memoranda which had developed during his absence.
With quiet amusement Mary had agreed to the investigation, watching him prowl among the files with the same tolerant attitude she would have entertained toward Luke had he insisted that he could run the household more efficiently than a mere sister.
“Poor tired boy,” she used to think when Steve would come into the office with a fagged look on his handsome face and new lines steadily growing across his forehead. “You don’t realize yet––you haven’t begun to realize.”
And Steve, trying to catch up with work and plan for the future, to respond graciously to every civic call made upon him, would find himself enmeshed in a desperate combination of Beatrice’s dismay over the cut of her new coat, her delight at the latest scandal,92her headaches, the special order for glacé chestnuts he must not forget, the demand that he come home for luncheon just because she wanted him to talk to, the New York trip looming ahead with Bea coaxing him to stay the entire time and let business slide along as it would. All the while the anæsthesia of unreality was lessening in its effect now that he had attained his goal.
The rapt adoration he felt for his wife was in a sense a rather subtle form of egotism he felt for himself. The Gorgeous Girl or rather any Gorgeous Girl personified his starved dreams and frantic ambitions. He had turned his face toward such a goal for so many tense years, goading himself on and breathing in the anæsthesia of indifference and unreality to all else about him that having obtained it he now paused exhausted and about to make many disconcerting discoveries. Had the Gorgeous Girl had hair as black as his own or a nose such as Mary Faithful’s she would have still been his goal, symbol of his aims.
Having finished the long battle Steve now felt an urge to begin to battle for something else besides wealth and social position. He felt ill at ease in Beatrice’s salon and among her friends, who all seemed particularly inane and ridiculous, who were all just as busy and tired and nervous as Beatrice was for some strange reason, and who considered it middle class not to smoke and common to show any natural sentiment or emotion. He soon found it was quite the thing to display the temperament of an oyster when any vital issue was discussed or any play, for example, had a scene of deep and inspiring words. A queer little smirk or titter was the proper93applause, but one must wax enthusiastic and superlative over a clever burglary, a new-style dance, a chafing-dish concoction, or, a risqué story retold in drawing-room language.
Before his marriage Beatrice had always been terribly rushed and he had had more time in which to work and glow with pride at the nearing of his goal. She kept him at arm’s length very cleverly anchored with the two-carat engagement ring and Steve had to fight for time and plead for an audience. It fired his imagination, making him twice as keen for the final capture.
But when two persons live in the same apartment, notwithstanding the eleven rooms and so on, a monotony of existence pervades even the grandeur of velvet-panelled walls. There are the inevitable three meals a day to be gone through with––five meals if tea and a supper party are counted. There are the same ever-rising questions as to the cook’s honesty and the chauffeur’s graft in the matter of buying, new tires. There are just so many persons who have to be wined and dined and who revenge themselves by doing likewise to their former host; the everlasting exchanging of courtesies and pleasantries––all the dull, decent habits of ultra living.
Steve found his small store of possessions huddled into a corner, his pet slippers and gown graciously bestowed upon a passing panhandler, and he was obliged to don a very correct gray “shroud,” as he named it in thankless terms, and to put his cigar and cigar ashes into something having the earmarks of an Etruscan coal scuttle, though Beatrice said it was a priceless antique Gay had bought for a song! There were many times when Steve would have94liked to roam about his house in plebeian shirt sleeves, eat a plain steak and French-fried potatoes with a hunk of homemade pie as a finish, and spend the evening in that harmless, disorderly fashion known to men of doing nothing but stroll about smoking, playing semi-popular records, reading the papers, and very likely having another hunk of pie at bedtime.
Besides all this there were the topics of the day to discuss. During his courtship love was an all-absorbing topic. There were many questions that Beatrice asked that required intricate and tiring answers. During the first six weeks of living at the apartment Steve realized a telling difference between men and women is that a woman demands a specific case––you must rush special incidents to back up any theory you may advance––whereas men, for the most part, are content with abstract reasoning and supply their own incidents if they feel inclined. Also that a finely bred fragile type of woman such as Beatrice inspires both fear and a maudlin sort of sympathy, and that man is prevented from crossing such a one to any great extent since men are as easily conquered by maudlin sympathy as by fear.
When a yellow-haired child with dove-coloured eyes manages to squeeze out a tear and at the same moment depart in wrath to her room and lock the doors, refusing to answer––the trouble being why in heaven’s name must a pound-and-a-half spaniel called Monster, nothing but a flea-bearing dust mop, do nothing but sit and yap for chocolates?––what man is going to dare do otherwise than suppress a little profanity and then go and whisper apologies at the keyhole?
After several uncomfortable weeks of this sort of95mental chaos Steve determined to do what many business men do––particularly the sort starting life in an orphan asylum and ending by having residence pipe organs and Russian wolfhounds frolicking at their heels––to bury himself in his work and defend his seclusion by never refusing to write a check for his wife. When he finally reached this decision he was conscious of a strange joy.
Everything was a trifle too perfect to suit Steve. The entire effect was that of the well-set stage of a society drama. Beatrice was too correctly gowned and coiffured, always upstage if any one was about, her high-pitched, thin voice saying superlative nothings upon the slightest provocation; or else she was dissolving into tears and tantrums if no one was about.
Steve could not grasp the wherefore of having such stress laid upon the exact position of a floor cushion or the colour scheme for a bridge luncheon––he would have so rejoiced in really mediocre table service, in less precision as to the various angles of the shades or the unrumpled condition of the rugs. He had not the oasis Mark Constantine had provided for himself when he kept his room of old-fashioned trappings apart from the rest of the mansion.
Steve needed such a room. He planned almost guiltily upon building a shack in the woods whither he could run when things became too impossible for his peace of mind. If he could convince his wife that a thing was smart or different from everything else its success and welcome in their house were assured. But an apple pie, a smelly pipe, a maidless dinner table, or a disorderly den had never been considered smart in Beatrice’s estimation, and Steve never attempted trying to change her point of view.