CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
For the first week a feeling of relief in going without writing to Jean had persisted in the background of Gregory's mind. But as the heat increased, and the improvements suggested by Amos Palmer and his wife rasped Gregory's nerves to snapping, he realized that he had been colossally rude. He had acted so badly that he could not write except to apologize, and he could not do that without explaining; which was impossible because there was nothing to explain, at least nothing that would not prove him the fool he had been.
What had been his motive? He did not know, and now that he was speeding back on the Express to New York, he did not care.
From Harlem to the Grand Central, Gregory sat in the smoker, his suitcase at his feet, his hat on, hoping that Jean had no engagement that would prevent her from going to dinner. He wanted to sit opposite Jean and tell her about the Palmers, the endless alterations that every few days, had thrown him into a rage and a resolution to quit. He wanted to tell her about the house, as it was finally working out, a compromise between Amos' ideals and his own efforts to keep the man from being a laughing stock. He wanted to hear Jean's chuckle of appreciation, for now that he had left it all definitely behind, it certainly was funny.
When Jean heard the telephone in the outer office ring, she answered quickly. It was one of those blindingly hot afternoons in late September, after a comparatively cool spell, when summer comes back with vindictive pleasure, like a cantankerous relative from the verge of the grave, to spoil one's just expectations. For two hours Jean had clutched her patience and held on through the exhausting insistence of the Friday Committee to do its duty. With the excuse that she was expecting an important message and would have to answer personally, Jean escaped for a moment.
At the sound of Gregory's voice, Jean's heart beat furiously and then seemed to stop.
"Hello. HELLO. I want to speak to Mrs. Herrick, please."
"This is Mrs. Herrick."
"Hello. This is Gregory Allen."
"Well!" It came with just the right degree of heartiness. "When did you get back?"
"About two minutes ago. Am I in time to take you to dinner? Hello.Hello.I say, Central, you've cut me off. I want——"
"Hello. No, they haven't cut off. I'm trying to 'phone, and listen to a meeting in the other room at the same time." With the ease of this falsehood, Jean's composure crept back.
"Who is it,—The Dalton?"
"Yes, after a month's rest."
"I'll come straight down and rescue you. Give everybody a ton of ice all around and close the meeting."
"It's milk," Jean whispered into the receiver, "the Caseys have had a quart a day for three weeks! We've been half an hour on it now."
"It sounds like an all-night session, but I'm coming just the same. Six thirty, will that be all right?"
"Six would be better. I promised Rachael to see her to-night before eight."
"All right. Six. How's everything?"
"Beyond our dreams. Did you put on the turret?"
"Worse. A cupola with an electric globe on top, a kind of spherical Star of Bethlehem."
"Nothing but a blue-print will convince me. Bring it down."
She hung up and sat staring at the floor until a sudden cessation of voices in the next room attracted her. Reluctantly she went back.
"We've decided to continue the Casey milk for another week, Mrs. Herrick, until I have had time to look more thoroughly into the reason of Casey's losing his last job."
Mrs. J. William Dalton's expression conveyed that after that, not even Jean herself could do anything.
"Very well, I think that would be wisest." Jean did not sit down again, but stood at the table fingering the mass of records. "And I think we've done enough for to-day."
Mrs. Dalton opened her lips, thought better of it, and made no objection. It was hot, and if she started to fight out the Monarco case with Berna it would be another hour before she could get home, take off her corsets, and have William forbid her "once and for all to go getting all tired out with that Charity dope."
"Very well."
The Friday Committee groaned with relief, pushed back the chairs, and gradually rustled away.
Jean washed her hands and changed to the clean blouse that she kept for emergencies. She had just finished when the elevator stopped, the outer door opened and Gregory crossed to the private office. Jean opened the door before he knocked, and they stood for a moment, one on each side of the threshold.
"My, but it's good to get back. You look ripping."
Every pulse in Jean answered so suddenly and unexpectedly to the clasp of his fingers, that she almost lost the non-committal greeting flitting in her brain.
"So do you, and I don't believe a word about the Star of Bethlehem."
"Well, it's true, whether you believe it or not. A heavily-powered arc-light right on top."
Jean withdrew her hands and turned to get her hat from its peg. Gregory watched her. She was extraordinarily strong and cleanly cut for a woman. Every motion she made was firm and carried decision with it, as if from a mass of possibilities she chose that particular thing and nothing else.
"All right, I'll believe it. After all it's not more extraordinary than what we accomplished. You're not the only one with news."
"Is Fenninger still alive? Or did he make his will in your favor and die of indigestion?"
"Neither. But you'll have to wait. I'm not going to read my lines without the proper back-drop."
"Will The Fiesole do, or isn't that swell enough for the Doctor?"
"It will do nicely; he'll think he's slumming."
The Fiesole was Mary's favorite place, and this was the first time they had eaten there without her. Jean wondered if that were why it seemed so different. She felt that this was a new environment, and yet there were the same long rooms, stretching back from the street balcony on which they sat. There were the same waiters, hurrying at the same gait, as if they had been wound by machinery to a set speed which they could never lessen or increase by their individual wills. There was the same orchestra, sheltered behind the dingy palms, playing the same semi-classical, popular music. There was the steady buzz of talk and the same people might have been sitting there for months. The heat had in it the same feel of dust, as if it held the disillusioned souls of millions, ground to powder in their struggle for forgetfulness; there was the same odor of highly spiced food, like too strong scent; the same sensuous music, the passion in its heart hidden under the cloak of form, except when it broke through and flicked the senses, till men touched women's hands in filling their glasses and the women leaned across the table.
"Well, you look as if you had never seen it before. Doesn't it suit Fenninger, after all?"
Across the table Gregory was smiling. He looked happy and younger than Jean had ever seen him.
"Perfectly. But he'd like any place where he was the richest man in it and people could see him spend money."
While they waited for the first course, Gregory told her of Palmer's suggestions and Mrs. Palmer's struggle between pride at being able to spend as much as she liked, and uncertainty as to the taste.
"She has just one criterion, a hotel she once worked in that had green marble walls in the hall, and blue velvet furniture in the lobby. It was evidently large and rather quiet because she has kept an impression of something 'terribly genteel.' She measures everything by it, the timbre of your voice, the way you take off your hat, and the thickness of the stair carpet. She's as pretty as a picture. The whole thing would be repulsive, that old man wallowing in his money and passion for this child, except for a kind of honest eagerness in the girl herself. He wants to take her somewhere abroad to get the edges rubbed off, and give his grown children a chance to cool down. She'll get the edges rubbed off, and some of his, too, long before he thinks it's time to come home. But she'll always be grateful, and never let people make fun of him."
"Poor child. I hope they won't get rubbed too smooth before she sees the star again."
"No. It'll take a bit longer than that. Besides the pergola will be the first to go; she isn't sure of it even now, with Turkish lamps of colored glass and Japanese wind-bells. In about three years she'll make him sell it."
"I'll keep an eye on it. It's rather far, but it would make a glorious convalescent home, if we could get it for nothing."
"No doubtyoucould."
They laughed in understanding.
"Exit Amos. What did you do to Fenninger?"
"It worked like a charm. We didn't tell mummy a thing except that a friend of Mary's was in town for a few days, and she wanted him to have one really good home dinner. Mummy rose to the bait and begged for more. As a relative I can't brag about that dinner but, by the time we got to a frozen dream of mummy's invention, he believed that the whole idea had originated with himself. And by the time the percolator got to bubbling he gave me a check for three thousand as if he were hiring me to attend to a few minor details he had no time for."
"Poor devil! And his part's only just begun. Does he know he's going to operate on people for the remainder?"
"He's not. He just advises the operations; Mary and I do the surgery."
"Who is it?" Gregory was grinning, his small-boy grin.
"It's not a 'who.' It's an it. Fenninger's pet case is a millionaire, cirrhosis of the liver, with two pieces of property on the East River, one in the upper fifties and one in the nineties. He thinks we can get either on a small lease; it can't be deeded over altogether because of some legal tangle, but it's perfectly safe. Mary and I are going to make our choice this Sunday."
"I want to help, may I?" There was a pause. Something hung in the balance. And then Gregory said dully:
"Be sure to choose the right one."
"We will. Mary is good at that kind of thing."
The waiter brushed off the crumbs and brought the coffee. When they began talking again the mood had changed. Gregory told Jean of a competition to build a Peoples' Auditorium in Chicago. It was open to the architects of America, and he had played with the idea through the hot, lonely nights of the past month.
"Whenever the pergola got too much, I took a swat at this."
"Well?"
Gregory shrugged. "It was good fun. It saved Palmer's life more often than he knew."
"When can I see them?"
Gregory ground the ash of his cigarette into the cloth as he answered:
"They're in the waste-basket. I was afraid to keep them around, like a drunkard with a bottle of whiskey."
"Why?"
After a moment, Gregory answered: "It's years since I've done anything but Stephens and Palmer houses."
Jean reached for the little silver coffee pot and held it over her cup. But it was several moments before she noticed that there was no more coffee in the pot. She put it down.
"That's no reason."
"Oh, yes, it is. If I don't try, I can't fail."
Gregory's lips smiled but his eyes were tired. Jean looked away.
"You wouldn't fail. I'm sure you wouldn't fail."
"It's almost twelve years since I left the Beaux Arts, and I'm putting electric stars on Palmer pergolas."
"You are not!"
"Yes, I am, and glad to do it. You don't understand. Why, the night that I thought most seriously about entering the contest, I felt as if I were presuming, doing something I had no right to do. I walked till almost morning in the woods, and then I threw the beginnings I had made away. You don't understand. The worms have been at work too long inside."
"They havenot." The emphasis pricked like a sword. Jean was leaning to him across the table. "You are not glad to put arc lights on pergolas, and the worm has never gnawed at all. It's not what you do that makes a failure or what you don't do. It's what we no longer dream of doing, and—youdowant to enter."
The throbbing assurance drew Gregory's eyes. He tried to smile.
"But think of all the young, undefeated men whose souls have not been Palmerized."
Jean's eyes were black and stern, as Puck's were sometimes.
"Your soul has not been Palmerized. Nothing can hurt us unless we let it."
Gregory's fingers trembled as he lit another cigarette. Did she believe that really, of every one? Was it abstract faith, a gauge by which she measured men, or was it for him? He had to know.
"Then why didn't I go ahead? There's nothing exterior to prevent me."
"Because," Jean said slowly, "because, when we can really do big things, the light at first blinds and rather confuses. But you get used to the light and go ahead. You will draw the plans again."
There was a long silence, before Gregory said, without looking up:
"I believe I shall. And it will be all your fault."
Jean's smile was uncertain, too, as she replied:
"All right. I'm willing to take the blame."
They drank the last drops of cold coffee to The Auditorium, and then Jean looked at her watch and got up quickly.
"There seems something specially fatal about plans and the strike. I promised Rachael to see her to-night. I've got to run."
"Wait. I'll walk down with you."
"I may have to stay some time. I'm worried about Ray——" Before the look in Gregory's eyes, Jean stopped. She knew he had not heard although he was looking directly at her. She sought for words to prevent his coming, but she knew they would be useless even if she found them.
Gregory paid the check and they left the restaurant. In absolute silence they walked along Division Street, between the rows of shrieking hucksters, and past the babies tumbling in their path. They halted before a dirty tenement on Essex Street. Again Jean tried to think of something to say that would turn Gregory back, and could not. So close that she could almost feel his body touching hers, they mounted the first two flights with their imitation tiling and flickering gas, the third with its cracked plaster, the fourth with no lights at all, and the fifth, so dark that they had to feel their way by the greasy wooden wall.
There was no light under Rachael's door. "I don't believe she's in. There must be something wrong. Terribly wrong."
Gregory did not answer. She could hear him breathing in quick, deep breaths. She began knocking sharply and calling. But no one answered. Jean turned the handle. The door opened. It was silent and dark and stifling.
"I think I had better leave a note." Jean entered the kitchen, and Gregory crossed the threshold and stood close.
"Have you a match? I—think—I'd better—leave a note." Against the weight holding her back, Jean forced herself forward toward the front room, lit palely in the light from the street lamps far below. Gregory could see her outlined in the hot blackness. He turned and closed the outer door.
"Haven't you a match?" Jean groped in the space before her, for Gregory was crossing the kitchen now, was coming to her.
"Haven't you—one—match?"
"No," Gregory answered at random, "no." His mouth was parched, although his whole body was bathed in cold damp.
Jean's hand touched a little brass match safe under the wall gas-bracket. Her fingers closed on it, and for a moment she stood gripping it, leaning against the bamboo table under the bracket. Then a yellow glare absorbed the darkness, and Jean sat down at the table. Gregory drew one quick, deep breath and moistened his lips.
Jean found a scrap of paper and a pencil in her handbag, and the pencil, obeying a law of its own, moved. Jean folded the note and stuck it in a corner of the mirror. If Rachael came home she must see it.
"There." Jean rose and stood with her hand on the gas-cock. "If you'll light the light on the landing first—it's just outside, it's hard negotiating this labyrinth."
Gregory obeyed. Jean turned out the gas and followed. They went down the stairs in silence. Without a word they walked through the crowded street and turned west to the nearest Subway. At the entrance Gregory stopped.
"I think I'll take the El. It's just as near for me and a lot cooler. Good-night. And don't abscond with the strike benefits."
Jean nodded. "No. I won't. And don't put a pergola on the auditorium."
The tone was brisk. Jean smiled back as she vanished into the entrance hole. Gregory turned away. He hated her.
Jean was grateful for the stifling air of the tunnel, the noise, the lights, the groups waiting for the train. It was familiar and safe. Wedged between a fat Jew in a black alpaca coat, and a sleeping Italian plasterer, covered with the dust of his trade, Jean stared before her. Had she said those last words at all, or only mouthed them?