L
THE marriage ceremony was fixed for the second week of the new year. All London was invited. The Childwicks liked to do things well, and however well they did them made no impact on their wealth. They were really rich people and of late years their stock had been going continually up.
Still it was generally felt that Gwendolen had done very well. She was a cut and polished jewel, but a setting was needed for her. What choicer setting could mortal girl desire than an old and distinguished marquisate and that beautiful and historical place Warlington Towers? These things would supply the essential background her millions lacked. Then, too, Bill was a popular young man. His feelings, as his sister said, might not run deep, but in his way he was immensely attractive. Everybody liked Bill. Even his fecklessness was a point in his favour. And he would be all the better for having a shrewd and clever American wife to keep him up to the mark.
Mame received an invitation from the Childwicks; her friends saw to that. It was duly accepted; yet when the day came she did not feel equal to facing the music. Lady Violet did her best to persuade her to come to the church and to the reception in BerkeleySquare, until she realised that it would not be kind to persist. Good, brave little puss! Those quaint furry paws had been rather nastily trapped. She was still suffering. For all her wonderful grit, when the day came she could not help groaning a bit over the throbbing of her wounds.
It went to Lady Violet’s heart to leave her behind. But there was no help for it. The child could not face the music. And it was hardly reasonable to expect that she should.
Even as Lady Violet stood in her regalia, which emphasised her fine points, and took a tender and affectionate leave of poor Mame, she could not help saying in her frank way: “I’m not going to enjoy this one bit. We’re shown up too badly. I wish now I hadn’t interfered.”
It was no more than the truth. She felt on a low plane. Compared with her friend and business partner she had a sense of inferiority which was new and decidedly unwelcome.
“You were quite right, honey.” Mame was brave and magnanimous to the end. “Had I been you I’d just have done that. It’s nature. And it’s no use trying to go against nature.”
But Mame’s eyes were so tragic, that her friend, without venturing to say another word, made a sort of bolt for the door and for the lift beyond it. No, Lady Violet did not feel that she was going to enjoy her day.
The day, for Mame, was very far from being one ofenjoyment either. A great deal of it was spent walking about London. Now the pinch had really come it was the go-getter who mounted to the saddle and took command. The practical side of a dual nature was not slow to inform her that she had gone back on herself. She had betrayed, at the beck of a mere whim, all that she had stood for.
Life had always been against her until a few months ago. She had had to fight so hard for bare existence that she might at least have had the sense to ensure the future when opportunity arose. But no, she had denied her luck. There was a Tide. Well, the Tide had come and she had deliberately ignored it. A great position, social security had been offered her. She had even accepted her chance and then, just for a whim, had passed it on to her enemy and rival.
The go-getter spared her nothing. It had a royal time. She had been a fool. The lot of the fool was suffering. “You’ve broken a paw, honey. Always you’ll be a little mucker now. You’ll never be able to fix on anything again. No more will you be able to mark down your bird and fly at it. You’ll be unsettled for the rest of your days. Not always will you be brisk and quick; your looks, such as they are, and they’ve never been much to bank on, honey, are going already. These folks in London, England, who mocked at you and pulled your leg, you could have handed them a haymaker. But no, you must get fanciful and highfalutin.”
Yes, the go-getter with the sardonic voice and a flowof rather second-rate conversation had a royal time. He spared her nothing. She was unworthy of herself, of her breed, of her clan. Idealism. The hearty fellow landed his simp of a partner a blow on the point. If some of these honest-to-God Americans didn’t watch out, Idealism was going to be their ruin. You didn’t catch the dyed-in-the-wool Britisher playing around with flams of that kind. He was a pretty successful merchant, the Britisher, but he was content to leave idealism to other people. As a business man he was a model for the world. And why? Because with all his lip service he knew how to keep the soft stuff apart from the hard.
Poor Mame! She trudged half the day about the streets of a hostile city. With that pressure upon her spirit it was impossible to stay quiet indoors. Her very soul seemed to ache. Every syllable was true that was whispered in her overwrought ear. She had gone back on all she had ever stood for. They had put one over on her, these hard-roed Britishers. Yes, she must be cuckoo. You came over to pull big stuff, whispered the relentless voice. And by cripes, Mame Durrance, you’ve pulled it!
Tired out at last with tramping the West End parks and squares, she took a little food in a restaurant in a by-street of Soho. There she was likely to meet no one she knew. She was not in a mood to face her kind. As she ate her soup a nostalgia came upon her. After all, she was in a strange land, an alien. Their ways were not her ways; they had a different viewpoint; theirmethod of doing things was not the same. She began to long for the sight and the sound of the homely, hearty, warm-blooded folks she had known; the folks who spoke the same language as herself, in the curious drawl that lately she had been taking such pains to get rid of.
Her thoughts went back to the land where she belonged. In the bitterest hour she had known since she had started out from her home town to see life, she had a craving for the friendly easy-goingness of her own kind. She had crowded a lot of experience into her European pilgrimage; in certain ways her luck had been truly remarkable. Mame Durrance had made good at her job; but this evening with a very large size “black monkey” upon her, she had a sudden yearning for the larger and freer air of her native continent.
Miserably unhappy she returned to the flat about nine o’clock. Lady Violet had been home from the revels, had inquired for her anxiously, but had changed her dress and gone out to dinner. Evidently she was making a day of it. Mame was not sorry. She had no wish to be caught in this mood. Yet she had no desire for bed. She would not be able to sleep if she turned in. The ache in her heart was terrible. If she could not learn to subdue it, for the first time in her life she would be driven to take a drug.
Suddenly her eye lit on a package on the writing table. It bore the label of a New York publisher and was addressed to herself. Perfunctorily she tore off the wrapper. A novel in a gay jacket was revealed.It was calledPrairie City; and the name of the author was Elmer Pell Dobree.
Mame’s heart leaped. Coincidence has an arm notoriously long, but nothing could have been more timely than the arrival of this book. Her thoughts rushed back to the source of its being. And as if to speed them on their way, a letter had been enclosed in the parcel.
Characteristically it ran:
Dear Mame,You are such a girl now, among your slick friends in London, and you are pulling such big stuff with your weekly columnising, that I daresay you have forgotten your obscure Cowbarn epoch, and the junk whose early chapters you had the honour (sic) of typing for your first and most distinguished (sic) editor, with which the boob filled in his spare hours. You used to tell him how good these opening chapters were and the boob used to believe you. The consequence is ... well, this is the consequence. By the way, it was clever you that invented the title, after we had shaken a leg—and you were always some dancer—at that dive at the top of Second Street, one wet afternoon.Well, Mame, that title was lucky.Prairie Cityhas made good. It has, if I may say it modestly, made quite surprisingly good. ’Tis hardly six weeks since it was first issued here by Allardyce, Inc., but already it’s gone big. Early next month their London house will publish it, and if it can repeat in England what it has done in New York, the undersigned Elmer Pell Dobree is a permanent whale. So go to it, Mame, you little go-getter. Corral the bigdrum and get around the comic town of your adoption—worse luck!—and see if for the sake of old times—good times they were, too, I’ll tell the world—you can’t put one over, in the name of an old friend, on the doggone Britisher.P.S. When do we see you again here? As I’ve told you more than once, this continent is a poorer place for your absence. If you’ve left us for keeps it’s a great, great shame; and there’s one young man who won’t forgive you.
Dear Mame,
You are such a girl now, among your slick friends in London, and you are pulling such big stuff with your weekly columnising, that I daresay you have forgotten your obscure Cowbarn epoch, and the junk whose early chapters you had the honour (sic) of typing for your first and most distinguished (sic) editor, with which the boob filled in his spare hours. You used to tell him how good these opening chapters were and the boob used to believe you. The consequence is ... well, this is the consequence. By the way, it was clever you that invented the title, after we had shaken a leg—and you were always some dancer—at that dive at the top of Second Street, one wet afternoon.
Well, Mame, that title was lucky.Prairie Cityhas made good. It has, if I may say it modestly, made quite surprisingly good. ’Tis hardly six weeks since it was first issued here by Allardyce, Inc., but already it’s gone big. Early next month their London house will publish it, and if it can repeat in England what it has done in New York, the undersigned Elmer Pell Dobree is a permanent whale. So go to it, Mame, you little go-getter. Corral the bigdrum and get around the comic town of your adoption—worse luck!—and see if for the sake of old times—good times they were, too, I’ll tell the world—you can’t put one over, in the name of an old friend, on the doggone Britisher.
P.S. When do we see you again here? As I’ve told you more than once, this continent is a poorer place for your absence. If you’ve left us for keeps it’s a great, great shame; and there’s one young man who won’t forgive you.
When, at a decidedly late hour, or, rather, an early one, Lady Violet returned from the festivities, she invaded Mame’s bedroom. She wanted to see if the child had come back and that she was all right. In spite of the excitements of the day her thoughts had been pretty constantly with her little friend. She was a good deal concerned about Mame. And now it was something of a relief to find her propped up in bed, simply devouring a book with a red cover.
It was so good to see a smile on a countenance which a few hours ago looked as if it would never smile again, that the intruder exclaimed, “Why, why, whatever have you there?”
“Elmer’s written a book.” A glow of excitement was in Mame’s tone and in her eyes. “It’s all about Cowbarn and the folks we used to know.”
“True to life, I hope.” Mame’s friend, gazing at her furtively, sought to read what lay behind that rather hectic air.
“Better than life ever was or ever will be. It justgets you feeling good. And it keeps you feeling good all the time.”
“He must be a clever man, your friend Elmer P.”
“Clever is not the name for Elmer.” Mame spoke excitedly. “A genius—that baby! All the Cowbarn folks are in it. I’m in it. And I’ll say he’s let me down light.”
“I hope he’s made you the heroine of the piece. Anyhow, he ought to have. You are fit to be the heroine of the best piece ever written.”
“Say now, honey,” expostulated Mame in the way her friend had learned to love, “that’s where you get off. Heroine-ism and that fancy jake is no use to me. I’ll never be able to get away with it. But Elmer has let me down light.”
“You must let me read it.”
Mame laughed. She actually laughed. “Why, you shall so. It’s the goods. That boy has an eye to him. He can see into things. And he knows a lot about human nature, does that boy.”
Already Lady Violet was feeling a lively sense of gratitude towards the famous and legendary Elmer P. The poor child was transformed. Her own people, for whose homely and abounding kindliness she had in her misery been longing, were alive in those magic pages. Yes, they were alive and they were dancing, Mame declared. And half America was dancing with them.
The mirth of the simple creatures she loved so well had lifted a weight from her heart. The relief mightonly be temporary, but Lady Violet was very willing to do homage to the wizardry of Elmer P.
“There’s his letter.” Mame tossed it excitedly across the bright green expanse of counterpane.
Lady Violet read with a smile. And then suddenly there came a mischievous little clutch at her heart. Yes, why not? It was an idea. The brilliantly clever woman of the world again glanced furtively at Mame. This intoxicating moment, which was doing so much to heal the child and to keep her sane, must, if possible, be held. But how? Like all things in time it was fleeting, transitory. With the coming of daylight it would surely pass. A pitiless January dawn would throw her back upon hard and cruel reality. Yet this moment of happiness might be extended; perhaps there was a chance of making it permanent.
She fixed her wise eyes upon those of the feverish Mame. “Yes, my dear, we’ll go round with the big drum. We’ll corral the Press all right. IfPrairie Citydoesn’t knock London endways it shall not be our fault.”
“You can bet your life it won’t be!”
“Well, write to-morrow and tell him so.”
“I will.”
“And tell him, my dear, in a postscript, strongly underlined, that if he will do the one thing you ask you’ll guarantee the success ofPrairie Citythis side the Atlantic.”
Mame was all ears. “What’s that, honey?”
“He must come over himself as soon as ever he can.We’ll promise the very best that can be done for him in the way of a good time. After all there is no advertisement for a book quite equal to the person who wrote it.”
Mame gave a chuckle of pleasure. Sure, it was an idea. Why had not she thought of it herself?
“Yes, hon, if Elmer comes that’ll fix it.”
But would he come? That stern question at once invaded Mame’s mind.
“We’ll make him,” said Lady Violet.
“He’s not easy to make do anything he don’t want to. And he’s pretty busy these days and rather important, too.”
“We’ll get at him somehow.” Lady Violet had an arch look. “For his own sweet sake,” she added artfully.