“It was with a charming timidity that she tip-toed into the office”
“It was with a charming timidity that she tip-toed into the office”
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“Why can’t I tell you? I have no one else to whom I can tell things––and I’m so everlastingly tired. Goat tending and living off dried buffalo meat never fagged me like trying to dance with Trudy and living on truffles and champagne. First you are mentally bewildered and physically fagged, then you become defiant; then you realize that that is no use, you’ve brought this on your own self––it is quite the common fate of men like myself––and so you keep on with the steady grind; and by and by you find yourself longing to play in your own way with your own sort. The other sort have no use for you so long as you pay their bills; you are hardly missed, if the truth were told.
“Well, you must keep on with the grind. And you want your sort of playmates and fun, and it’s such decent, upright fun in comparison––oh, pshaw!” He stood up, kicking the edge of the rug with his foot in almost boyish, shamed fashion.
“Business isn’t quite so good,” he began anew in an impersonal, even voice. “Mr. Constantine thinks that the abnormal prosperity is on the wane for keeps––we must prepare for it––but Mr. Constantine has practically retired since you have been away. He’s not well. To-morrow morning, if you don’t mind, I’ll take you over there and we can straighten out some things for him. He is selling the greater share of stock to men from the West. And he’s saved out some pretty nice sugar plums to hand over to me. I haven’t been asked whether or not I want them.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I knew you would be, Miss Iconoclast.”
“Why do you accept them?”
“How can I refuse?”
“By saying you are not prepared to be a mental190wreck at forty––which you will be if you try such a gigantic scheme with so little preparation. I’ve an idea that when Mr. Constantine is known to have withdrawn from the business world there will be a change in many things. And when you are known to be alone in the fort––” She paused.
“Go on,” he demanded, irritably. “Can I never make you understand how much I want your advice, your opinions, your scoldings?”
“I think you will have new enemies with whom to deal––enemies you never thought existed. I don’t believe you can deal with them because you have always been so cotton-woolled, so to speak, by being Constantine’s special project–––”
“I’ve done what I’ve done myself,” he interrupted, “and I’m afraid of no one.”
“You think you have,” she corrected. “You have done what you have because Constantine was back of you––and now he is an old, tired man, and very soon he will think more of his days with Hannah than of the present. Which is perfectly safe for him to do. Because Mr. Constantine reckoned on his enemies he knew to a man who hated him and who was afraid of him, who admired him and who would be indifferent; and that is just as essential to success as to reckon on your friends. You never did that––you hadn’t the time––it was all so dazzling and sudden with the war helping things along at breakneck speed. You will find that if you have an Achilles’ heel it will be because you did not reckon on your enemies and are somewhat like a blindfolded man with money in your purse set down in a strange locality.... There. How does that sound for a welcome?”
Steve was pacing up and down the floor. “I’d like191enemies,” he said. “I’d like to see them try jumping at my throat. I’d make them cry quits. You don’t frighten me; you stimulate me.”
“That was my intention”––picking up her purse.
“Don’t go––or let me come to supper,” he begged.
She shook her head. Someone came in just then to whom she spoke of the pleasure it was to be back at the office; the word spread that Miss Faithful was back and girls came in groups to smile and say some pretty thing, and the men nodded with a pleased expression. Watching the procedure Steve realized that Mary was as dominant a personality in his office as he was himself, and instead of feeling a vague disapproval of the fact he was genuinely elated that it was so.
After the last of the visitors had gone and the clock pointed to five he said: “Of course I’m going to be dragged some place this evening, so I wouldn’t have much time––but may I come to supper? I’m going out of town next week. There, isn’t that a good reason to come to-night?”
“Suppose the world knew this––our little business world?”
“Hang the world!”
“You never did. You flattered it, and were delighted when the world patted you on the head and said, ‘Nice Stevens, come in and bring your bags of gold––the living’s fine.’”
“Are you starting in to tell me that people would misunderstand my motives? Sezanne del Monte has chapters along those lines. And Beatrice has quite a fad of slumming and taking a notebook along to write down new slang phrases or oaths or bits of heart-broken philosophy spilled in a drunken moment....192I’ve grown careless to everything presumably orderly and conventional. I’m ready to walk the plank for my indifference if need be––but I do want to come home with you for supper!”
Mary did not answer for a moment. Then she said, in a quick breathless tone, as if she did not want to hear her own words: “I wonder if it would do any good to try explaining––really explaining and not fibbing or pretending–––”
“It has always done me good when you have explained––and I can’t imagine you telling cheap untruths.”
“Then I will try it.” The gray eyes grew stormy. “For if we are to continue as employer and secretary––and you must have such a person and I must earn my living––it would be much easier if you really understood and it was all settled. You’ve talked about early hardships, misunderstood childhood, goat tending, and what not; and the world gives you credit for your achievements. Then surely you must understand the woman’s end of the game––the American woman’s part in business, for it’s not easy to be errand girl or to fill endless underpaid clerical positions. It’s not easy to pile out every morning at such and such an hour and stand at a desk and work as if you had neither heart nor eye for the other things in life until gradually the woman part of yourself is changed and it is often too late to enjoy anything but desk drudgery––and a bonus!
“Now the man in the business game forgoes nothing; he has the world’s applause if he succeeds and the kisses of the woman he loves for his recreation, and all is complete and as it should be. But we commercial women of to-day do a man’s work and193earn a man’s wage. We do stay starved women, even if that fact doesn’t appear on the surface. We cannot have the things of romance as well as our livelihood. And by the very nature of the average business woman’s life she is often in love with someone in her office––from propinquity if for no other reason. She must. Don’t you see? They’re practically the only men she really comes to know or who come to know her, and she just can’t stab her heart into sudden death.
“So she wears her prettiest frock for this man––a wooden-faced bookkeeper perhaps; or a preoccupied president––and she dreams of him and is jealous of him and very likely gossips about him. And the years pass and she stays just as shut away and misunderstood and starved. And sometimes a woman, originally the most honest in the world, under these circumstances will deliberately steal another woman’s husband if she has the chance. Yes, she will––she does.”
“What do you mean, Mary?” He was almost unconscious of using the name.
“That I am no different from the others. I came here with the same starved heart and woman’s hopes, and I put into your career the devotion and service and very prayers that I should have put into a home and a family––your joys were my joys, your problems mine. It has not been my clever brain that has made me worth so much to you. That is what the superficial public says, but I know better. It’s been the love––yes, the love for you that has made me indispensable! The unreturned and unsuspected and I presume wicked love I felt for you. And now I’ve told you––broken precedent and told the truth.194And as you don’t love me you’ll feel very uncomfortable with me about. And you won’t want to play off pal; you’ll fight shy of me except for everyday work. So it has been the only square thing to do––humiliate myself into telling.
“I love you, I always have, and I always will––but I’m no home-wrecking, emotional being and I expect that you will resume our old relationships and I shall go on serving you and knowing my recompense will be a handsome farewell gift and a pension.
“Oh, the business woman’s life isn’t all beer and skittles. We’re expected to lie about our hearts, yet be as reliable as an adding machine about our columns of figures; to be shut away from the social world, thrown with men more hours a day than their wives see them and yet remain immovable, aloof, disinterested! Just good fellows, you know. Isn’t it hideous to think I’ve really told the truth?”
At this identical moment their platonic friendship, alias tropical twilight, ended, and Mary’s evening star of romance rose to stay. But such being the case Steve was the last person in the world to try to convince her that it was so.
All he said was: “I never appreciated you before. Please don’t feel that telling me this will make any difference save that I’ll stay aloof––as you suggest. I can forget it, somewhat, if that will make you feel any better about it. It is all quite true and equally hopeless––true things usually are––and if you like I’ll send you home in the car, because you must be a trifle tired.”
“Thank you,” she remembered answering as she told Steve’s chauffeur where to drive.
“You look as tired as before we went away,” Luke195complained that same night when Mary sat at her desk adding up expenses and making out checks.
“Oh, no. This shade makes everyone look ghastly,” she said.
“I’ll have to get a hump on and make my pile,” he consoled. “I don’t want my sister being all tired out before she’s too old to have a good time.”
“A good time?” Mary repeated. “Are you inoculated, too?”
“What’s wrong with a good time? I guess Steve O’Valley plays all he likes!”
“Yes, dear, I guess he does,” Mary forced herself to answer.
When Steve returned home that evening he found one of those impromptu dinner parties on hand instead of a formal engagement. They had become quite the fad in Bea’s set. The idea was this––young matrons convened in the afternoon at one of their homes for cocktails and confidences; very likely Sezanne del Monte would drop in to read her last chapter or Gay Vondeplosshe would arrive brandishing his cane and telling everyone how beautiful the Italian villa was to be; and by and by they would gather round the piano to sing the latest songs; then when the clock struck six there would be a wild flutter and a suggestion:
“Let’s phone cook to bring over our dinner. Then our husbands can come along or not just as they like. We’ll have a parlour picnic; and no one will bother about being dressed. And we’ll go to the nickel dance hall later.”
This was followed by a procession of cooks arriving in state in various motor cars and carrying covered trays and vacuum bottles and departing in high196spirits at the early close of their day’s work. Then the procession of subdued husbands would follow, and conglomerate menus would be spread on a series of tea tables throughout the rooms, with Sezanne smoking her small amber-stemmed pipe and describing her sojourn in a Turkish harem while Gay picked minor chords on his ukulele. After a later diversion of nickel dance halls and slumming the young matrons would say good-bye, preparing to sleep until noon, quite convinced that any one would have called it a day.
Such a party greeted Steve, with Gay showing plans for Beatrice’s secret room with a sliding panel––clever idea, splendid when they would be playing hide and seek––and the cooks en route with the kettles and bottles of wine and the husbands meekly arriving in sulky silence.
A little before two in the morning Steve escorted Aunt Belle back to the Constantine house.
Beatrice had started to go to bed, but thinking of something she wished to ask Steve she stationed herself in his room, some candy near at hand and Sezanne’s manuscript as solace until he should arrive.
“I wanted to ask you if Mary Faithful has returned,” she said, throwing down the manuscript as he came in. “Heavens, don’t look like a thundercloud! You used to complain about getting into evening dress for dinner; and now when they are as informal as a church supper you row even more. How was papa? Did you go in to see him? Does the house look terrible?”
“Of course I didn’t see your father at two in the morning; he was asleep. Your aunt fell into a bucket of plaster.”
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“Plaster! Why did the men leave it where she could fall into it? Did it hurt her dress?”
“No, just her bones.” Steve laughed in spite of himself. “The dress hadn’t started to begin where the bones hit the bucket.”
Beatrice giggled. “Aunt Belle will try to look like a Kate Greenaway creation. And isn’t Jill stout? I’d eat stones before I’d get like her. Well, what about the Faithful woman?”
“Why such a title? It was always Mary Faithful, and even Mary.”
“I don’t know––but ever since I worked with you this summer I’ve realized what an easy time she has. She isn’t burdened with friends and social duties. It’s all so clearcut and straight-ahead sailing for her. I suppose she laughs at her day’s work.”
“She has returned.”
“Then we can go to the Berkshires. Sezanne knows an artist and some people from Chicago who are ripping company and they are going to visit her cousin at Great Barrington and we are all invited there–––”
“Once and for all,” Steve said, shortly, to his own surprise, “I am not in on this! Just count yourself a fair young widow for the time being. I cannot run my business, help close up your father’s affairs, be a social puppet, and go chasing off with bob-haired freaks to the Berkshires, and expect to survive. I’m going to work and keep on the job––it will be bad enough when I have to live in an Italian villa. Who knows what new tortures that will bring? But for a few months I am certain of my whereabouts, so plan on going alone.”
“So you won’t come with me! Oh, Steve, sometimes198I can just see the whole mistake––you should never have made a fortune. Rather you should have been a nice foreman with a meek little wife in four-dollar hats and a large portion of offspring. You should have lived in a model bungalow with even a broom closet in the kitchen and leaded windows at one side. You would have been a socialist and headed labour-union picnics. But as my husband and my father’s assistant and all that––you are as impossible as that Faithful woman would be if she tried to be a lady!”
For a moment Steve hesitated. But the average day does not include losing ten thousand on the stock exchange from sheer folly, finding out that your blood pressure is too high, that your faithful secretary loves you and is truer blue than ever, and discovering at the same moment that you love her yet may not tell her so. Nor is a day so hectic usually concluded by finding an impromptu parlour picnic in full swing at home where rest was sought––finding, too, the full realization that you not only do not love your wife but you do not even approve of her.
So he said, quietly: “If you wish to make some radical change regarding your husband would you mind waiting until he has had a chance at a shower bath and some breakfast?”
For the first time in her life the Gorgeous Girl found herself gathering up Monster, the candy, and the novel manuscript in her lace-draped arms and standing outside her husband’s firmly closed door.
The shock was so great that she could not squeeze out a single tear.
199CHAPTER XIV
Mary Faithful felt no regrets at having told the truth about her love for Steve O’Valley. The regrets were all on Steve’s side of the ledger. Contrary to customary procedure it was he who practised nonchalance and indifference, and the office force saw no whit of difference in the attitude of the president toward his private secretary or vice versa.
Long ago the force had accepted the attitude of these two persons as strictly businesslike and their conception of Mary Faithful was tinged with awe and a bit of envy at her success. To imagine her desperately in love with her employer, working for and with him each day, and finally in extreme desperation telling the truth as brutally as women sometimes tell it to women over clandestine cups of tea––was farthest from their comprehension.
Nor would they have thought it credible that Steve, married to his coveted fairy princess, should first become attached to Mary Faithful by friendship and then find that friendship replaced by a deep and never-to-be-changed love. It was an impossible situation, they would have said.
The morning following Beatrice’s parlour picnic and Mary’s hard-wrung confession Steve made it a point to be at his desk when Mary came in, despite the few hours’ sleep and the fact that Beatrice had200willfully chosen to take breakfast with him in sulky, tearful reproach. When Mary was taking off her hat and coat he came to the door of her office and made a formal little bow.
He found himself more in love with her than the night previous. There was something so pathetic and lonely about her, successful business woman that she was; the very fact of people’s not suspecting it, labelling her as self-sufficient and carefree, only emphasized this loneliness now that he looked at her with a lover’s eyes. He realized that whereas he had had to win a fortune to marry the Gorgeous Girl it would be as necessary to lose a fortune to marry Mary––if such a thing were possible; that she was a woman not easy to win, one who would find her happiness not in taking hastily accumulated wealth but in making a man by slow processes and honourable methods until he was fitted to obtain a fortune and then enjoy it with her.
“Good morning”––wondering if he looked confused––“I wanted to say that I am on the country-club committee to welcome English golfers, and I’ll be away this week off and on. And––and whenever you want me to I’ll try to keep under cover for a bit.... I think I do appreciate your telling me the truth last night more than anything else that has ever happened to me; there was something so stoically splendid about it––and I don’t want to abuse the confidence. Please don’t mind my just mentioning it, I’ll promise not to do so again; and we’ll go on as before. I was a cad to play about your fireplace––quite wrong––and you had to make me realize it. Do you know, I was half afraid you’d send in your resignation this morning? Women always201do those things in books. Please say something and help a chap out.”
Mary was at her desk opening mail with slow, steady fingers.
“I have my living and Luke’s living to make, and I could not resign unless you asked me to do so,” she told him. “I wondered whether or not you would feel it the thing for me to do. It is a unique situation,” she said in a slightly more animated tone––“not the situation, but my calm betrayal of it. Usually my sort go along in silence and take our bursts of truthful rebellion on our mothers’ shoulders or in sanitariums. I really feel a great deal better now that I have told you.” Her gray eyes were quite fearless in their honesty as she glanced up. “I feel that I can settle down in an even routine and be of more service to everyone.”
“We’ll be friends,” he urged, impulsively. It seemed hard not to say foolish, loverish little things, try to make her believe in miracles, make wild and impossible rainbow plans, precluding any Gorgeous Girls and newly remodelled Italian villas.
“I wanted to add a postscript,” she interrupted. “That’s only running true to form, isn’t it? Here it is: If you ever at any time, because you are emotional and in many ways untried, find yourself unhappy and at cross purposes, and try to lean on a sentimental crutch which inclines in my direction––I shall leave this office just as they do in novels. And I shall not come back, which they always do in novels. This would deprive you of a good employee and myself of a good position and be foolish all round. You men are no different from us women; once a woman knows a man loves her she cannot quite hate him202even if her heart is another’s. Instinctively she labels him as a rainy-day proposition and during some wild thunderstorm––well, idiotic things happen! Whereas if she never knew he cared she might go about finding a mild mission in life. A man is the same; and since I have trusted you with my secret, and that secret happens to concern yourself, the logical consequence is that you will never quite hate me because I care. In some moods you might even try telling yourself that you cared, too. Then I should not only leave your employ but I should stop caring.”
She went on with the morning’s mail. Outside, the office force was stirring. Raps at the door and phone calls would soon begin.
“Would you really?” he asked, so soberly that Mary’s hands trembled and she blotted ink on her clean desk pad as she tried to make a memorandum.
“Really. I never can bring myself to believe in warmed-over magic.”
“Then I shall never have any such moods.”
He answered a phone call and there fell upon the office an atmosphere of strange peace which had been missing for many months.
During the winter the rift between Steve and Beatrice became noticeable even to the Gorgeous Girl’s friends, to Trudy’s infinite delight; and by the time spring came it was an accepted thing that Steve’s share in the scheme of things was to write checks and occupy as little space as possible in the apartment, whereas Beatrice’s part in the scheme of things was to badger and nag at her husband eternally or be frigidly polite and civil, which was far harder to endure than her temper.
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The Gorgeous Girl’s endeavours to become an advanced woman, an intellectual patroness and so on, were amusing and ineffectual. She soon found neither pleasure nor satisfaction in any of her near-lions. Nor did she succeed in making them roar. Whether it was a parlour lecture on Did a Chinese Monk Visit America a Thousand Years before Columbus? or a Baby Party at which Beatrice and Gay dressed as twins and were wheeled about in a white pram by Trudy, dressed as a Frenchbonne––the reaction was one of depression and defeat. Though Beatrice still had her name printed on the reports of charity committees she no longer took what was termed an active part. She shrugged her shoulders carelessly and gave the reason that it was all so hopeless––and no fun at all.
Inanimate things afforded the most satisfaction; at least she could buy an individual breakfast service costing a thousand dollars and have the item recorded in all the fashion journals, with her photograph, and she could have the most unique dinner favours and the smartest frocks, and they never disappointed her.
Besides, the Italian villa was to be finished shortly and that would necessitate a new round of entertainments and minor adjustments and no end of enviable publicity and comment. This diversion would take her through the late spring and summer, and in the fall she fully intended to take up dress reform and become a feminist. She had an idea of wearing nothing but draped Grecian robes––which could be made to look quite fetching if one had enough jewellery to punctuate the drapes––and of going in for barefoot dancing on the lawn. It would be more convenient if she could persuade her204father and aunt not to stay on at the Villa Rosa, as it was to be called. And certainly it would have been more æsthetic to look across the street and see something besides another expensive and hopelessly mediocre brick house which another rich man somewhat after Constantine’s own heart had built with pride and joy. She wished she had bought a site back from the town and created a real estate. The fact that she had not done so made her miserable for over a week, during which Gay consoled her in most flattering fashion, neglecting his own wife to do so.
Well, after the Villa Rosa––what then? Life seemed very empty. With a certain natural squareness of nature Beatrice was not the sort of woman to indulge in unwise affairs beyond a certain discreet point. She had never learned how to study, so she could not become a devotee of some fascinating and exacting subject. Her really keen mind had merely skimmed through her studies.
Nor was she over fond of children. As she told Trudy, children were absorbing things and goodness knew if she ever had any of her own she would have a wonderful enough nursery and sun parlour with panels designed by a child psychologist; there was everything in first impressions. But take care of one of them? The actual responsibility? Heavens, what a fate! She would engage a trained baby nurse––and then drop in at the nursery for a few moments each day to see that everything was going well.
Later, after the trying first years, she would be very proud of her children. Besides, planning children’s clothes was a great deal of fun; and if she had a daughter she would see that the daughter married205properly. Whether or not she was thinking of Steve, Trudy did not dare to ask; but she evidently was, as she added that one might better marry an impoverished nobleman and live in an atmosphere of culture and smart society than marry someone who never attempted to be anything.
A child demanded of one intelligence up to a certain point, and faithful service, but it did not require keen intellect. A primitive knowledge of what their hurt or hunger or plain-temper cry meant––and a primitive tender fashion of coping with whichever it might be––were all that young babies demanded; and hence the Gorgeous Girl, like all finely bred and thoroughly selfish women of to-day who are bent on psychological nursery panels, refused to be tied down to the narrow routine of a nursemaid, as she called it. Love-gardening is the title old-fashioned gentlewomen originated.
Then Beatrice cited how carefree Jill Briggs was with her four children. Goodness knew that Jill was always within hailing distance of the big time; and except for a few little illnesses and the fact that the oldest boy had died of croup the children were a complete success and perfect darlings, and Jill dressed them like old-style portraits. Besides, Jill had tried out a new system of education on the oldest boy; he had been taught to develop his individuality to the highest possible degree. At eight, just before the croup attack––though he did not know his alphabet or how to tell time and had never been cuddled or rocked to sleep with nursery jingles as soothing mental food––he could play quite a shrewd game of poker and drive a bug roadster. Beatrice, in talking over the child problem with Trudy, decided that if206she ever had a son she, too, would develop the poker shark in him rather than the admirer of Santa Claus and the student of Mother Goose.
“Of course Steve thinks a woman should drudge and slave over those crying mites as if the nation depended upon it,” she concluded, “but I should never pay any attention to him. He said, in front of Jill, that he always felt well acquainted with rich children, for he had passed a similar childhood––meaning that living in an orphan asylum and being brought up by a nursemaid were much the same thing. Quite lovely of him, wasn’t it?”
Trudy could not suppress her giggle.
“I’m sure the children get on well enough. Just think, if you had to plan all the meals and dress and undress them and all the baths––ugh, I never could! And when Steve begins his eloquent stories about these nursemaids who neglect children or dope them or do something dreadful I simply leave the room. He actually told Mrs. Ostrander that he saw her nurse slap her child across the face, and proceeded to add: ‘It is never fair to strike a child that way. It breeds bad things in him. And he wasn’t doing anything; it was just nurse’s day for nerves.’ Of course the Ostranders will never forget it. Now, Mrs. Ostrander is a member of the Mothers’ Council, and a dear. She just slaved over her children’s nursery and she reads all their books before she allows the nurse to read them aloud. I’m sure no children were ever brought up as scientifically; they have a wonderful schedule. She told me she had never held them except when they were having their pictures made––never!––and that crying strengthens the lungs. Of course Steve says we feed our lap dogs when they207whine but close the door on the baby when he tries it. So what can you do with such a person?”
To which Trudy agreed. Trudy agreed to anything Beatrice might say until the bills for the villa were settled and the O’Valleys established in the gondola-endowed home. Trudy sometimes pinched herself to realize that in such a short space of time she was living in the Touraine apartment house and that her husband, whom she loathed more each day, had actually scrambled into the position of being the best decorator in Hanover and was busy splitting commissions and wheedling orders from New York art dealers and Hanover’s social set.
Sometimes Nature takes her own methods of revenge, and to Mark Constantine’s child she saw fit to send no son or daughter. Constantine never mentioned his hunger for grandchildren. He had a strange shyness about admitting the desire and the plans he had made for them. But when he saw the completion of this villa and realized the thousands of dollars squandered upon it and the impossible existence his daughter would lead living therein he went to his untouched plain room, looking out on sunken gardens, to try to figure out how this had all come about.
He fumbled in mental chaos as to the meaning of all this nonsense and longed more than ever for a grandchild, someone who should be quite unspoiled and who would not approach him with light, begrudged kisses and a request for money.
The formal Venetian ball which Beatrice gave to open her new home merely amused Steve, who had really dreaded it with the hysteria of a schoolgirl. He hated the whole scheme of the house and the man208who was reaping a rich harvest by engaging the army of persons who had done the work therein. He rejoiced openly at each delay on the part of the plumber, the tinsmith, the decorator; and openly gave a thanksgiving when the illustrated wall paper for the halls, which told the legend of Psyche and Cupid, had been sent to Davy Jones’s locker en route from Florence. Steve’s name for the Villa Rosa was the Fuller Gloom.
But when they did move into the new-old home and Steve was led through each room of gammon and spinach, as he had faintly whispered to Mary Faithful, he found himself only amused. Now that he considered it, it was a relief to know Beatrice had such a new and absorbing plaything to take up her time and keep her aloof from his personal affairs. He sought out his father-in-law in his plain room with its walnut set and stand of detective stories, and sat down in relief, though the two men honourably refrained from criticizing a certain person openly.
At the ball Beatrice appeared in a wonderful black gown, so wonderful and expensive that its creator had given it a distinct title––The Plume. Steve did his duty as a handsome figurehead, as someone called him; after which he was free to stroll in the gardens and smoke and wonder what manner of folks inhabited the stars.
An inspection of the house had taken place with Beatrice and Gay leading the procession, and Aunt Belle bringing up the rear. The oh’s and ah’s and exclamations of approval, resultant of fairy cocktails, rewarded Beatrice for her expenditure. When she brought them into her own apartment she stood back,209while Gay lisped out the story of the greatest achievement and novelty of the entire house, watching the faces of her guests so as to catch the first expression of envy which should reveal itself.
The novelty consisted in the set of bedroom furniture, which, though the rest of the house was Italian, as Gay hastily explained, was of Chinese workmanship, carved and inlaid in intricate design––two dragons fighting over pearls, with the various stages of the struggle represented on the bed legs, the bureau drawers, the easy-chair, the dressing table, and so on. The set had been made for the Emperor of China, but when his private council inspected it, it was found that one of the carved dragons on top of the four-poster bed had captured the pearl for which they had been fighting in sixty-seven or so other carvings. This signified bad luck for the emperor; misfortune and rebellion would be his lot if he slept in the bed. Though regretting the loss of the furniture the emperor felt the loss of his kingdom would be even greater, and the furniture was placed on the market. To Mrs. Stephen O’Valley was awarded the ownership as well as the privilege of writing the check that made the purchase possible. On the bed was a pillow of the material woven for emperors only, thrown in on account of the ill luck that would attend him who slept in the bed beneath the conquering dragon; and on a carved bone platter was an antique Maltese shawl which gave a rare note to the entire room.
Steve, who had regarded the emperor’s rejected furniture as a cross between a joke and an outrage, gave way to his feelings by pacing up and down the hall and capturing a tray of sandwiches being carried to the supper room. But Beatrice, after Gay’s210speech, felt a rare joy––for every guest in the room hated her for having won the prize. What more could she ask by way of reward?
When they were alone in the new-old home Steve felt it only decent to congratulate her. Somehow he had come to feel that keeping up sham courtesies made everything easier.
“You have worked very hard, haven’t you?” he asked. “But you have wonderful results.”
“Do you think so? Everyone hates me now, for there will never be another royal bedroom set like mine on the market––when you think that Gay skirmished about and won it for me, it is quite remarkable. And it shows what Gay can do when he has a little encouragement. Alice Twill was almost cross-eyed and crying; her husband nipped the château idea in the bud. New York men are coming here to take photographs next week. I wish the garden were in better shape. They are going to run feature stories about it.... Oh, Steve, do you think of any new place to go this summer?”
“I thought we had just moved to Venice,” he said, still dazed at the amount of carved fire screens, tapestries, dim, impractical candlelights, and soft-eyed Madonnas which smiled at him on all sides.
“I must have all the office force come and see this––it would be such a treat. And we can serve tea on the lawn.”
“Do. They don’t often take time to go to museums.”
Steve’s bad nature was getting the better of polite resolves. He was thinking of Mary’s clear, witty eyes as she would view the remains of a plain American house.
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The next thing of interest to keep Beatrice at home was the advent of a real lion cub, following Monster’s departure to canine heaven. Being too impossible of shape and disposition for any one’s pride or comfort, Monster was disposed of and buried in a satin-lined coffin with a neat white headstone telling salient facts of her short existence.
While Steve was giving devout thanks for the event Beatrice was realizing that the gardens needed a dominating note, as Gay said. During her reading of old fables and romantic legends about superwomen or extremely wicked matrons she had discovered that they nearly all possessed a lion or a bear or a brace of elephants to gambol on the green. Such a pet symbolized its owner’s power and fearlessness, and any young woman who could have the Emperor of China’s bedroom suite brought post haste into Hanover, U. S. A., was surely entitled to something in the jungle line for her front yard!
For the first time in his daughter’s life Mark Constantine made a faint protest, suggesting that she have a taxidermist mount several lion cubs and group them about the hall––while Steve sat back in cynical amusement and asked if she were going to request the goldfish to step aside in favour of a few Alaska seals?
“If she gets a live lion––and she will, because I’m writing to a circus man now,” Gay told Trudy––“I’m going to sprain my ankle and be laid up from the day the beast arrives until he goes––he won’t tarry long, the police won’t have it. But I’m not going to take any chances. Still, it would never do to make a fat commission on the deal and then act as if I were afraid to come over and play cannibal212with him. I guess you can go,” he added, insolently.
Trudy looked at him in scorn. “You are cheap,” she said. “Well, I will go! I’d just as soon be eaten by a lion as to have to live with a shrimp.”
The lion arrived in due time and was named Tawny Adonis. Beatrice considered him a perfect love. He was a gay young cub and quite effective in the new background, well intentioned but lonesome for his old atmosphere of circus life and his mother and brothers. He was given a large run in the Constantine grounds, and while Aunt Belle stayed locked in her room the greater share of the time and Gay immediately sprained his ankle and was forced to send Trudy as his messenger, Mark Constantine and Steve found their time well occupied in convincing the authorities that the town infantry would not be devoured piecemeal. Hanover had never really approved of having an Italian villa crammed down its throat, and it was certainly not agreeable, to say the least, to have a lion cub at large as a dominating garden note.
“You cannot keep him, even if you pulled all his teeth and taught him to be a dope fiend,” Steve said in desperation after the roars of Tawny Adonis had been reported to the police as annoying. “He is growing bigger every day and all he has done is demolish flowers and shrubs and chew up fence posts. I’m sorry for him, and I’m not particularly afraid of him, but if there was an accident with a child even the owner of a dominating garden note could not expect to go scot-free.”
Her father and her friends championed Steve’s stand in the matter and after a little rebelling and213pouting and having the pleasure of seeing her name in all the papers as the owner of the lion cub and so on, Beatrice consented to part with him on the condition that she be allowed to give him a farewell birthday party, he being nearly a year old. She was going to ask the children of all her friends. But getting a hint of the event her friends hastily arranged a Tom Thumb wedding for charity, and then assured Beatrice it was merely a coincidence that the two things interfered with each other, wasn’t it a shame? Realizing that this dominating note was not a social asset Beatrice hastily sided in with her father and the authorities.
Besides, she was tired of Tawny Adonis; he was destructive, and a secret source of worry if she could have been made to admit it. So she prepared for a birthday fête and determined to have the public-school children as the guests. But these refused her invitation as well; so she went into the slums and collected thirty harmless waifs who felt that a lion’s birthday party was not to be despised, and brought them triumphantly into the Italian gardens.
The waifs gathered round an outdoor table, too busy swallowing food to bother about their possible and likely fate. In the centre of the table was a huge birthday cake for Tawny Adonis. It was made of raw hamburger steak, generously iced with bone marrow, and the single anniversary candle took the form of a balanced soup bone. After the children had eaten their fill Tawny Adonis was let loose upon the scene and at the birthday cake, and during the wild smashing of glass and china and the excited shrieks of the waifs Tawny went to the birthday cake and devoured it, soup bone and all.
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Gay was out of town the day of the party but Trudy bravely assisted, as did one or two others, Mark Constantine and his sister sitting in the windows to watch the procedure while Beatrice in a gown of turquoise velvet with a coronet of frosted leaves played Lady Bountiful and dismissed the slum brigade as soon as possible, sending them home with the confused knowledge that a beautiful lady in angel clothes and a wild animal sometimes meant plenty of ham sandwiches and ice cream, as well as the opportunity to slip a fork into one’s pocket.
Steve declined to take any part in the celebration, but at the conclusion of the event he appeared with policemen and a patrol wagon containing a cage, and amid gay farewells and grim coaxings Tawny Adonis was escorted to the railway station and shipped back to the circus man, at a loss of five hundred dollars––not counting the damage done––to the Gorgeous Girl!
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CHAPTER XV
Trudy was keen as a brier whenever her own realm was threatened. With the shrewdness which caused her to refrain from ever speaking ill of a woman when talking to a man and never speaking aught but ill of women when talking to their own kind, she foresaw in Gay’s constant attendance on the Gorgeous Girl the possibility of an unpleasant situation.
For the Gorgeous Girl had said not only to her husband but to her friends that she must find some other kind of a good time now the novelty of the Villa Rosa was exhausted. Even inky people bored her, she added; poets were no longer permitted in her drawing room, and the circle of pet robins and angel ducks had somehow wandered out of her safe keeping. An unusually pretty flock of sweetsome débutantes had thinned the bachelor ranks, and Jill Briggs’s youngest boy died of some childish ailment, disturbing Beatrice more than she admitted, for some reason, and making her own thoughts poor company.
It was while she was talking of this child’s death with Trudy that the latter glimpsed the handwriting on the wall, and with scantily concealed enmity determined to beat Beatrice at her own game.
“Jill is going away for the winter, poor thing,” Beatrice said. “I don’t blame her; it would be too horrible to have to stay and see all his things about. And it’s the second child she’s lost. Goodness me,216she has spent hundreds on baby specialists and nurses! Well, you know yourself, Trudy––you’ve seen how wonderful she has been. This boy’s death has so distressed her that she has decided to have two nurses stay with the children instead of one. Mighty sweet of her, as it all comes out of Jill’s pocketbook and not her husband’s. She says she cannot think of leaving them with one person, and she must go away because her nerves are frazzled.
“She is going to the West Indies with an artist friend, and they are going to make a marvellous collection of water-colour paintings of birds and flowers, a sort of memorial to the boy. Jill says she will sell them and give the proceeds for thecrèchecharity. Well, that is all very well for Jill to do; she has a real heartache to live down. But when you have no earthly reason to go and paint wild birds and flowers and you are bored to distraction with everything––” She shrugged her shoulders.
“Meaning yourself?” asked Trudy. “Really?”––delighted that this was so.
“Are you ever bored?”
“Only enough to be fashionable. You see I have to live Gay’s life and career and my own at the same time.” Instinctively Trudy knew this caused envy in her hostess’s heart for a multitude of reasons. “Gay never amounted to anything until we were married”––she paused for this to take full effect––“and I enjoy playing the game. I have grown fond of makeshifts and make-believes and hedging, bluffing, stalling, jumping mental hurdles––it’s fun––it keeps you alive and never weighing more than a hundred and ten pounds.”
Trudy rose to go. She was achiclittle vixen in a217fantastic costume of black velvet with a jacket of blush pink. No one but Trudy could have worn such a thing––a semi-Dick-Whittington effect––and have gotten away with it. Though she was physically very tired from sewing late the night before, and mal-nourished because she was too indolent to bother to cook, Trudy looked quite fit for a long stretch of hard running.
“Why don’t you diet seriously?” she purred. “It’s only right for your true friends to tell you. The double chin is permanent, I’m afraid.” She shook her shapely little head, to Beatrice’s inward rage.
As Beatrice sat looking up at this impertinent little person she suddenly became angered to think she had ever bothered with an ex-office girl or permitted Gaylord to coax her into being nice to his wife. And if this impossible person could bring Gaylord into the ranks of prosperity in a short time, making everyone accept her, what couldn’t she, Beatrice O’Valley, do with Gay if she tried––seriously tried? He would not linger beside Trudy if Beatrice gave him to understand there was a place for him at her own hearth. She knew Gaylord too well; he suddenly assumed the figurative form of a goal, as she had once assumed to Steve––a play pastime––in the true sense. A real man would not play off property doll in the hands of any woman, not excepting his own wife; which Beatrice realized. Living with a cave man had taught her many things. Yet it would be rare fun to have a property doll all one’s own, different from the impersonal, harmless herd of boys and poets, a really innocent pastime if you considered it in the eyes of man-written law. What a lark––to switch Gay from this cheap, red-haired218little woman, dominate his life, suddenly assert her starved abilities, and make him become far greater than anything Trudy had ever been able to do! It would cause such a jolly row and excitement and pep everyone up. Pet and flatter him and show Trudy that after all she had only been an incompetent clerk in Steve’s office!
“Perhaps I will diet,” was all she said, smiling sweetly. “And tell Gay he must come see me to-morrow. I have a plan that I want to tell him––and no one else. Besides, there is a flaw in the last pair of candlesticks he bought for me.”
Trudy realized perfectly well that sweetness from the lips of an obese lady, after one has assured her of the arrival of a double chin, always augurs ill for everyone.
Originally Trudy had determined to use Gaylord as a stepping-stone, a rather satisfactory first husband. But since Beatrice’s commission to do the villa and the stream of like orders from the new-rich who were trying to unload their war fortunes before they were caught at it, Trudy had grown content and even keen about Gaylord in an impersonal sense. She felt that she could not better herself if he continued to do as well as he had the last few months, and that she would continue to do her share of hill-climbing indefinitely. In other words, having won Gaylord in the remnant department, Trudy decided to keep him and make him answer the purpose of paying her board bill.
Besides, though she admitted it only to Mary, she felt anything but well. The more money Gaylord made the more he spent on himself, and he seemed to expect Trudy to manage out of the ozone,219yet to appear as the indulged wife of her enterprising young husband. It never ended––the eternal searching for bargains; dyeing clothes and mending, cleaning, and pressing; living on delicatessen food; sitting up nights to help out with the work, often doing odds and ends of sewing, and appearing the next afternoon in the customer’s house to admire the effect of the new drapery and tell of the bright-eyed Italian woman who had done the work.
Trudy saw little of Mary. Her better self made her stay aloof lest she win from her friend other details to add to her already safeguarded secret. And she never attempted to amuse Steve. She fought shy of him when he was about, wisely limiting herself to shy nods and smiles and occasionally a very meek compliment, which he usually pretended not to hear.
As she walked home from the villa––Gay had the roadster––she told herself that she must watch out or Beatrice would attempt to spoil Gay to the extent of making him wish to be rid of his wife. She realized that Gay was extremely scornful and careless of her. Having married her and satisfied his one-cylinder brain that he was a deuce of a chap and a democratic rake in marrying this dashing nobody Gaylord turned bully and permitted Trudy to take the cares of the family on her shoulders. He was now enjoying the fruits of her industry with a fair credit rating, very different from formerly, a bank account of which Trudy knew nothing, and the congenial work of pussyfooting about boudoirs and guzzling tea while perched on Beatrice’s blue-satin gondolas.
He no longer needed Trudy. He could see now220that to be single-handed once more, but with his new standing and profession, would be a most satisfactory state of affairs. In fact, if Trudy would only fall in love with a travelling man and decamp––what a chap he would soon rise to be! For a broken heart is often a man’s strongest asset and a woman’s gravest suspicion. Trudy, however, gave him no hope in this direction. She hung about her fireplace contrary to her former plans concerning it. She really put in an eighteen-hour day as both slavey and sylph, and seemed filled with everlasting patience and jazz.
Coming into the Touraine apartment Trudy found Gaylord showing old prints to some woman customers and advising as to the smartness of having them framed and used in sun parlours or any intriguing little nook. Trudy wasde trop––she was prettier than the prospective customers, but in their eyes she had only a Winter-Garden personality––and Gay frowned his welcome.
Had Trudy not come in Gay would have served cocktails of his own making, which would cause them to order the prints at fabulous prices; and then sat in the dusk talking about the occult and the popularity of Persian pussy cats and how to make pear-and-cottage-cheese salad and serve it on cabbage leaves, which was quite the mode. It never does for an interior decorator, particularly if specializing in boudoirs, to have a wife, Gaylord decided as his customers patronized Trudy and departed, Gaylord seeing them to their car and standing bareheaded to wave his bejewelled hand as they whirled round the corner.
He then returned to give Trudy his unbiassed opinion.221“I thought you were going to stay away until evening,” he said. “You spoiled the sale.”
“Did I? What were you about to do––play soul mate if they’d take the old things? I’m the one who found those prints in a second-hand store and had sense enough to buy the lot. I’m the one who found the remnants of cretonne you paste them on––and told you to charge ten dollars each––and I’m the one who sits out in the little back room and pastes them on, too!”
She threw her purse down with an angry gesture.
“You are the crudest thing,” he said.
“I slapped you once for calling me a crude little fool––and the next time you try it I’ll do better than that!” She was unable to control her temper. “If you think being a bachelor and languishing in this place would keep you afloat you’re mistaken. It’s me––I’m the one that buys the bargains and runs the sewing machine half the night, sends out the bills and wheedles the salesmen into looking at you––to say nothing of doing the housekeeping, and keeping every good-looking woman afraid of me, yet polite. Why, if you were alone any real business man could come in here and start a shop and put you behind the bench overnight. You’re nothing! You never were. You lived on a dead man’s reputation until you married me, and now you’re living on a redheaded girl’s nerve. I’ll scold as shrilly as I like. If the neighbours hear, all the better!”
Trudy had lost control of herself. Besides, she was very tired. “Who told you to wear gray-velvet smocks in your drawing-room shop and to have soft ties poured down softer collars? You look a hundred per cent, better than when you hopped222round in a check suit that gave you a gameboard appearance. I did that. If I’d ever worked for O’Valley as I have for you, thinking I’d get a good time out of it somehow, I’d have had Mary Faithful on the run.”
She did not add the rest of her ideas––that Beatrice O’Valley, not contented with her store of possessions and avenues of interests, contemplated playing property doll with this half-portion little snob who stood before her in his ridiculous smock costume, half afraid and half sneering.
The interview concluded with Trudy’s going to the kitchen for some kind of a supper and Gay’s driving off post haste to see Beatrice.
When Steve returned from his hurried two-day trip he asked Beatrice if she realized the amount of money she was spending.
“Why should I?” she answered, aggrievedly. Steve looked unusually handsome this afternoon, and seemed to fit into the antique chair; and, in contrast to her contemplated property doll, Beatrice felt amiable and willing to play for favour. “I haven’t asked you for one quarter of it.”
“That’s the trouble––your father has gone on paying your bills, and you don’t seem to realize I am not an enormously rich man––and never will be, abnormal business conditions having ceased. We are back where we started, so to speak, and I don’t look for a time of unheralded prosperity for some days to come. I was figuring up while I was away, in detail; and here are the results.” He handed her a memorandum. “You see? I earn a splendid living and I have a neat nest egg not to be223despised. But I have no Italian-villa income. Your father has, so you came back to your father to take his money and I am merely a necessary accessory to the entire ensemble.” His voice was bitter.
“Oh, no, Stevuns!” She was quite the romantic parasite as she came and knelt beside him in coaxing attitude. “Why, papa wishes me to have everything I want. He would be terribly worried if he thought I had to do without a single shoe button!”
“But must all the shoe buttons be of gold?” Steve interpolated.
She paid no attention to him. “I’m papa’s only heir––the money is all mine, anyway, and it always has been. You know how simple papa’s tastes are.”
“Like my own––like those of all busy people who are doing things. We haven’t time to pamper ourselves.”
“Someone has to buy up the trash! And you ought to thank us rich darlings of the gods for existing at all––we make you look so respectable by contrast.” She waited for his answer.
He rose and went over to the carved mantel, standing so he could look down the long room crowded with luxuries.
“But this place isn’t the home of an American man and his wife. It’s a show place––bought with your father’s money! And I’ve failed. I’m not supporting my wife. Good heavens, if I were I’d have to be cracking safes every week-end to do it. I can’t make any more money than I am making––and stay at large––and you cannot go on living off your father and being my wife. I won’t have it! I won’t be that kind of a failure!”
“What shall I do with the money, throw it to the224birds?” Her head began to ache, as it always did when a serious conversation was at hand.
“Wait until it is yours and then spend it on something for the good––not the delight––of someone else, or of a great many other people. Be my wife––let me take care of you,” he begged, earnestly.
Beatrice hesitated. “I couldn’t,” was her final answer. “I couldn’t manage with the allowance you give me––don’t worry, dearest, there’s no reason at all that we shouldn’t have as good a time as there is. Papa wants us to.”
“Don’t you see what I’m trying to get at?” he insisted. “Won’t you try to see? Just try––put yourself in my place, make yourself think with my viewpoint as a starting place. Suppose you had been a dreamer of a boy with a pirate’s daring and a poet’s unreal delusions, and you combined the two to produce a fortune, a fortune everyone marvelled at, the lucky turn of the wheel. Suppose you used that fortune with the same daring and fancy, loving someone with all your heart, to make money in a regular business and under the guidance of a well-trained merchant like your father––and then you married the person you loved and saw her deliberately belittle your manhood by going to her father’s house to live, spending her father’s money, and leaving you quite alone and without the joyous and needed responsibility of supporting your wife. Now what would you do?”
“I’d start right in spending my own money for things I wanted,” she decided, glibly.
“But suppose you did not want things––cluttery, everlasting things, glaring, upholstered, painted, carved, what not––lugged from the four corners of225the earth, not harmonizing with your own aims or interests? Suppose you wanted to create an individual and representative home and take care of it and the guardian angel who presided therein––then what would you do?”
“Oh––you mean you want another style of house? Then let’s buy a country tract––and I promise to let you build and furnish just as you wish. That’s a bully idea, dear, to have an abrupt contrast to this house––old-English manor type would be wonderful!”
The dinner gong brought a merciful release. Beatrice danced through the archway throwing him a kiss as the rest of her decision.
It was at this identical moment that Steve concluded it was too late for his wife ever to develop anything more than a double chin or so.