Louis came, and smoked Gerry’s good cigars, and listened, and remembered his promise with a true inkster’s pang of regret.
“Now, the one thing that Avenue-robin can’t stand, the one thing be doesn’t want, in all this, is printer’s ink. So it’s up to us to give him what he’s afraid of. It’s up to us to hold a full-page Sunday story over his fat head. I want you to go right up to him as a reporter fromThe Star, with every detail I’ve given you. I want you to let him see just what it’ll look like when it’s unrolled, the entire unsavory story. And if he isn’t sending a hurry-call in for the soft pedal before you’re out of the elevator I’ll buyThe Starand give it to you to play with when you’ve got writer’s cramp in the coco and can’t dream up cable-despatches any more.”
“And supposing our Romeo doesn’t weaken?”
“He can’t help it. But if he’s crazy enough not to, I’ll bring Gunboat Dorgan up there myself. And if that doesn’t turn the trick, I’ll call the rotter out myself and give ’im what he deserves. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll put a bullet into him!”
The man fromThe Staroffice smiled a bit wearily.
“Say, Gerry, doesn’t this strike you as going pretty far for a mere client?”
“A mere client!” echoed the other. “A mere client?” he repeated as he looked his confederate straight in the eye. “She’s a darned sight more than that. She’s the girl, please God, that I’m going to marry!”
“So at last I get you,” announced the solemn-eyed Louis as he reached over the desk-end and solemnly shook hands with the other man. “And now I’ll know how to put the screws to that palette-scraper!”
“Then let’s get busy,” suggested Gerry as he reached for his hat and coat, after a moment’s talk over the wire. “They’ve got that Reamer girl for me, and the sooner we have our pow-wow the better!”
WhenTeddie left Gerald Rhindelander West’s office she left behind her more than a blue-fox canteen muff. She left the last of her confidence in life, the last of her belief in mankind. She found herself compelled to face a world that seemed too big and brutal for even the valorous spirit of youth. And after a vast amount of frantic and quite fruitless thinking she also found herself compelled to eat crow. The current was too strong for her. It had tired her out, and baffled her, and broken down both her will-power and her pride. Much as she hated to do it, she felt that her only way out was to compromise with Raoul Uhlan. Right or wrong, she would pay the man’s claim and get the thing over with.
A quick assessment of her immediate means, however, showed her that she had little more than half enough money to meet his demand. So she promptly stopped in at the Waldorf telegraph desk and sent a message to her Uncle Chandler at Hot Springs.
“Please wire my banker,” she said, “eleven thousand dollars without delay or foolish questions, as it is urgent. Lovingly, Teddie.”
Her Uncle Chandler, after frowning for a full hour over this unexpected message, none too willingly wired instructions for eleven thousand dollars to be placed to the credit of his niece. Then, after still another hour of troubled thought, he sent a day-letter off to old Commodore Stillman at the Nasturtium Club explaining that he had reason to believe that Theodora was in some sort of trouble and requesting him to drop quietly down to the girl’s studio and have a look around to see just what was wrong.
And the Commodore in question, instead of being upset by this calamitous intimation of beauty in distress, adjusted his cravat and stopped in at Thorley’s for the insertion of a Richmond rose-bud in the button-hole of his right-hand lapel. Then he toddled blithely down to the wilds of Greenwich Village, where he arrived at Teddie’s studio just in time to see an urbane old gentleman pocket, with an air of quiet but unqualified satisfaction, a narrow slip of paper which looked remarkably like a bank-check. He stood aside, however, until this triumphant-eyed old gentleman had bowed himself triumphantly out, whereupon it came to his attention that his somewhat abstracted young hostess remained undeniably divorced from the customary buoyancies of youth.
He was so impressed, in fact, by the shadows of fatigue about Teddie’s starry eyes and the world-weariness in her forlorn little smile that he concluded the gravest fears of his old friend the Major to be quite well founded. But Teddie, accepting him as an emissary from a world of pomp and order which seemed eternally lost to her, was glad enough to ensconce him in the brown velvet armchair and make tea for him in the battered old samovar. It was not particularly good tea, he soon discovered, but that in no way dampened his ardor or discouraged him in the object of his visitation. So he hummed and hawed, and touched lightly on the prerogatives of the elderly, and ventured the assertion that New York was an extremely bewildering city, especially for the young, and he became paternal and platitudinous over the perils of the wide, wide world in general, and then with rather awkward unconcern announced his hope that Teddie was making a go of it.
But Teddie wasn’t making a go of it, as she very well knew, and for one weak moment she was tempted to take this kindly-eyed and clean-hearted old gentleman into her confidence and exteriorate her troubles by freely and frankly talking them over with one of her own kind. But a revival of her old spirit of independence nipped this impulse in the bud, so she merely gave the Commodore another cup of tea and somewhat pensively asked if the autumn ball at Tuxedo had been a success this year. Whereupon the old Commodore admitted that it had been a success, if you could call such things a success. But they weren’t like the good old days of the Patriarchs and the Assemblies and The Howling Swells. The spirit of the times had changed, had lamentably changed, and the relationship of the sexes in the younger generation seemed disturbing to the survivors of the older era when a lady was accepted as a lady and treated as one. And from this diatribe on the degeneration of the present day Teddie’s counsellor glided easily and eloquently into the advantages, for the girl of to-day, of early marriage and adequate guardianship. Every girl of spirit ought to marry. Even Teddie herself, he finally ventured, ought to marry.
“No young whippersnapper, mind you,” discreetly qualified the old Commodore, “but some older and steadier man who knows the world and its ways, a man to be relied on in times of trouble, a man who’d be a harbor of refuge when the seas got to kicking up a bit!”
But this didn’t seem to impress Teddie as he had hoped it would.
“I’ve seen all I want to of men,” she announced with unexpected passion. “I despise ’em, the whole pack of them!”
“And you don’t intend to marry?” demanded the scion of the statelier years.
“Never!” retorted Teddie, staring fixedly at her unfinished sketch of the Macauley Mission by Moonlight.
“Then what, may I ask, do you intend doing?” inquired her stiff-shouldered old visitor.
She had intended to say that she wanted to live for Art. But she hesitated. For Art, at that particular juncture, seemed a very anemic and elusive thing to live for. She had no idea, in fact, just what shedidintend living for. She was less impatient of others than she might once have been. She even recognized kindliness under the intentions of that over-personal emissary from her older world, however heavy-handed he may have been in his executions of those intentions. And that, impinging on her desolated young spirit, intrigued her into a brief but depressing mood of self-pity. There was no trace of tears in her eyes, for Teddie was not habitually lachrymose. But before she found that mood conquered and killed she was unable to resist the temptation to let her bobbed head sink wearily into the crooked arm which rested on one end of the none-too-orderly cherrywood table.
“Oh, I say, you know; this sort of thing won’t do!” ejaculated her obviously disturbed visitor. “It won’t do, my dear,” he repeated as he patted what was left of the bobbed hair with his fatherly old hand.
Teddie, however, was without the spirit either to agree or disagree with that statement. And her unhappiness so melted the heart of the benignant old Commodore that he took her hand and stroked it as he talked to her. And so gratified was he to see even the ghost of a grim little smile about her lips that a paternally commiserative impulse prompted him to stoop down and kiss the magnolia-white cheek.
So intent, indeed, had he been on his contemplation of this white cheek, faintly shot through with its shell-pink, that the door had opened and a third person had stepped into the studio without his being conscious of the fact. And it was the voice of this intruder, more than Teddie’s sudden recoil of startled wonder, that promptly brought the Commodore to attention.
“Sohe’sdoin’ it too!” called out Gunboat Dorgan, with a quaver of incredulity in his Celtic young voice. Whereupon he threw down his hat and advanced slowly toward the table-end. “Say it quick,” he commanded. “D’ yuh want me to knock his block off?”
“No, no,” cried Teddie, already on her feet. “There’s been too much of that already!”
“But I saw the old bird tryin’ to kiss yuh!” proclaimed the indignant youth.
“Who is this young jackanapes?” interrupted the older man, in no way intimidated by the interloper with the cauliflower ear.
“Didn’t I see this old mutt pullin’ that muggin’-stuff?” persisted Gunboat, ignoring the stately old gentleman with the rose-bud in his lapel. But Teddie was herself by this time and she fixed her champion from the East Side with a cold and steely stare.
“I want to talk to you!” she said, with great deliberation. And she made that announcement with such an unlooked-for note of masterfulness that, unimpressed as it left the newcomer, it rather bewildered the old Commodore.
“And I guess I gotta earful or two to unload to yuh!” countered Gunboat, betraying that he was laboring under an excitement which more recent events had only temporarily eclipsed.
“I should be obliged to know just who this young bounder is,” repeated the older man, in his most authoritative quarter-deck manner. But that manner was entirely lost on Gunboat Dorgan.
“Yuh just play dead, yuh old Has-Been, until I say a word or two to me lady-friend here,” he proclaimed as he confronted Teddie and gave his back to an all too negligible enemy. “I came here to find out what right a law-sharp named West has got to take that car of yours away from me. I wantta know what call he’s got to load Ruby up wit’ a lot o’ talk about me goin’ to State’s Prison. And I may be a prize-fighter, but I’ve got the right to ask if I ain’t lived decent and done my work on the square. I’ve got——”
“A prize-fighter?” interrupted the older man in the background. Then he strode valorously in between the two. “Do you mean to tell me, Miss Hayden, that a girl of your antecedents has—has come to have dealings with——”
But he in turn was destined to interruption.
“Say, d’ yuh want me to throw this old cuff-shooter out o’ here?” was Gunboat Dorgan’s crisp and angry demand of the girl.
“Stop it!” cried Teddie, with a stamp of the foot. “Stop it, right here and right now! I’m tired of all this. I’m so tired of it I can’t stand another moment of it!” Then, with a deep breath, she turned about to the old gentleman with the rose-bud in his button-hole. “It’s been very kind of you, I’m sure,” she said in a voice of laboriously achieved patience, “but you can’t possibly help me, and you can’t possibly do any good by remaining here. So if you’ll permit Mr. Dorgan and me to talk this quietly over, by ourselves——”
“You are requesting me to leave you?” her would-be benefactor inquired, as he reached for his hat.
“You must,” announced Teddie.
“Then permit me, Miss Hayden,” said the other with dignity, “to bid not only you, but also your—your professional boxer, a good afternoon.”
And the old Commodore buttoned his coat and took his departure. He sallied forth with considerable trepidation, trepidation which remained with him even until he stopped in at a telegraph-office on lower Fifth Avenue and despatched a none too carefully worded message to the old Major in Hot Springs, announcing that things looked very dark indeed, as Theodora seemed to be mixed up with a young prize-fighter by the name of Dorgan, and suggesting that the sooner Theodora’s uncle could get back to the city the better it might be for all concerned.
Teddie, alone with her irate young prize-fighter, turned and regarded him with a studiously narrowed eye.
“Now, what do you want to know?” she quietly demanded. She felt oddly and immeasurably older than she had done but one short week ago.
“I want ’o know who’s playin’ double in this mix-up,” Gunboat Dorgan promptly asserted.
“I don’t quite understand,” protested Teddie.
“Well, first thing, I want ’o know just what yuh said about that car?”
“When?” temporized Teddie. “And where?”
“Just b’fore I kissed yuh, right here in this room,” asserted the over-honest youth. Whereupon Teddie stiffened and winced and had to take a grip on herself before she could control her voice.
“I’m sorry there’s been any mistake about it,” explained Teddie, doing her best to be patient. “I remember now, I said you could have the car. And, as a matter of fact, you are perfectly welcome to it, or what’s left of it!”
“Then why’s this man West talkin’ so big about grand larceny and gettin’ me locked up? What’s he know about what’s been passin’ strictly b’tween yuh and me? Yuh were up ag’inst it, and I could see it, and I helped yuh out the same as I’d help any girl. And I didn’t have me hand out when I did it!”
“That was the trouble, Mr. Dorgan,” Teddie tried to tell him. “I was willing to accept service from you without stopping to consider whether or not it could be repaid, I mean adequately repaid. And that’s where I made my mistake. You’ll have to attribute that mistake, I’m afraid, to the defects in my bringing up. It’s a sort of penalty for the past. One gets into the habit of accepting things, just as one accepts cinnamon-toast from the footman, or a trip across the Hudson from the ferry-boat, without being actively conscious of any human obligation. That man had made himself unbearably offensive to me, and I asked you to punch his nose for me, without remembering the risks it involved, without appreciating the danger I was bringing——”
“Risks!” cried Gunboat, with a derisive hoot, finally arriving at a definite idea in what seemed a morass of abstractions. “Where’s the risks in standin’ up to a big stiff like that?”
“I’m afraid I wasn’t thinking of the risks to you,” Teddie rather wearily explained. “I was rather selfishly remembering the risks to myself.”
“Well, yuh ain’t suffered none from it, have yuh?” derided her still indignant-eyed cross-examiner.
“I’ve just paid Raoul Uhlan twenty-five thousand dollars as compensation for his injuries,” explained Teddie, as coolly as she was able.
Gunboat Dorgan fell back, gaped a little, and then swallowed hard.
“Yuh paid—yuh paid that mutt—that money—for—for what he’d get tarred and feathered for—down in my Ward!” he gasped, wide-eyed with incredulity.
Teddie nodded.
And Gunboat, seeing that movement of acquiescence, repeated: “Twenty-five thousand dollars!” Then he began to stride meditatively back and forth, pacing the studio-rug with his characteristic panther-like step. Teddie watched him, without speaking, without moving. She watched him until he came to an abrupt stop.
“Say, Ruby was right in this, after all,” he suddenly proclaimed. “Iwas the guy who got off his trolley. Yuh—yuh looked so good to me I got my numbers mixed. I got to dreamin’ things. But twenty-five thousand bucks in cold cash ain’t no dream. And d’ yuh know what I’m goin’ to do, and do right now? I’m goin’ up to that Uhlan guy and get that twenty-five thousand back. Just so ’s yuh can see I’m a little more on the level than yuh’ve been imaginin’. I’m goin’ to make that studio-lizard come across wit’ that dough—withthat dough,” he amended, remembering, in his excitement, certain old-time admonitions as to the utterance of his mother-tongue.
“But I don’t want you to do that!” cried Teddie, harboring a strangely muddled-up and reluctant admiration for the deluded young fire-eater with the Saint Anthony light in his blazing blue eyes.
“Of course yuh don’t, for the thing’s got yuh buffaloed the same asyuhgot me buffaloed,” proclaimed the knight of the ring. “And the whole lay-out’s wrong. The only thing that got hurt about that guy was his dignity. I knew what I was doin’ all the time. I held back on the sleep-punch, and played wit’ him. I didn’t give him anything that a pound of beefsteak wouldn’t put right inside o’ twenty-four hours—and he knows it as well as I do. But now he’s pulled this blackmail stuff I’m goin’ to put him wise to how I was toyin’ wit’ him. I’m goin’ to let him see that if he ever so much as opens his trap about this business he’s goin’ to have it decorated wit’ a double set o’ plates when I get through wit’ him—when I get throughwithhim. And the next time he’ll holler so loud for help they’ll be fannin’ him wit’ a hearse-plume before he’s finished!”
Teddie tried to stop him as he turned away.
“Noth-thing doin’!” he proclaimed with his movie-hero side-movement of the hand. “I’m Irish, I am, and me Irish is up. Yuh’re goin’ to see this goob bitin’ on a mouth-gag or yuh’re goin’ to see crape swingin’ over his door-mat!”
“It’s no use,” Teddie still tried to tell him. “It’s too late. It will only make things much worse than they already are!”
But Gunboat Dorgan hadn’t been crowned with that soubriquet of belligerency without fit and proper reason.
“I’m wise to this lay-out now,” he announced from the doorway, “and I’m goin’ to have a hand in windin’ it up. It’s no use tryin’ to flag me off. And I ain’t sayin’ yuh’re a quitter, for yuh’re only a girl. But yuh don’t see me layin’ down in the shafts wit’ a thing like this under me nose. I’m goin’ through wit’ this, and nobody’s goin’ to stop me. And maybe this’ll square up a little for—for them lamps o’ yours I put on the blink!”
Teddie, once she was alone in her studio, experienced a sense of confinement, a feeling of compression, which had hitherto been absent from her newer mode of life. She felt the need for untrammelled movement through fresh air, the craving to get out into open spaces and leave the suffocation of city walls behind her. She promptly decided, in fact, to drive her car out to Tuxedo, and even went to the telephone to order it from the garage. Then she remembered that she no longer had a car.
But this, in the face of the denudations with which life had been confronting her, did not impress her as a very vast deprivation. She merely called for another number and ordered a taxi, contenting herself with the thought of three gasoline-flavored hours in thatrus in urbeknown as Central Park.
But Teddie did not go gloom-riding in Central Park. For when she opened the door to what she thought to be a taxi-driver she found Gerry West there with his hat in his hand and a look of triumph in his eyes.
“Well, I’ve got it back,” he announced, only momentarily abashed by the iciness of her manner.
“Got what back?” asked Teddie, without so much as asking him to step inside.
“Your car,” explained Gerry, entering the abode of art on his own hook. “It’s down at the door. And I had ’em put on a new pair of lamps on the way over.”
“I’m sure that was very kind of you,” Teddie coldly admitted. But her attitude was something more than unbending. It was distinctly hostile. For there were certain things which she wasn’t quite able to forget.
“Say, Teddie,” demanded her quick-eyed visitor, entirely ignoring her expression in his comprehensive stare about the studio, “what in the name of heaven are you doing in a dump like this?”
“It seems to have proved an entirely satisfactory place to me,” Teddie responded with the utmost dignity.
“But has it?” demanded Gerry, putting down his hat.
“It would, if I were left alone,” said Teddie, biting her lips.
“And what would that mean? What would that bring you?” asked Gerry, with a suddenly sobered face.
“It would bring me the freedom I want,” retorted Teddie, with a challenge still in her gaze.
“That is the one thing it could never do, O Helen of the Ruinous Face!” corrected Gerry. But Teddie, who was in no sense a classical student, saw nothing remarkably appropriate in this allusion to the ancients.
“What makes you think that?” she asked, with a tremor in her voice. She hadn’t intended any retreat from her earlier severity of tone. She prided herself on not being the sort of girl who would willingly show the white feather. But Gerry had touched on something which had been bewildering her, of late, more than she was ready to acknowledge.
“The things that have been happening around here,” he had the brutality to retort, “the things I’m now trying to straighten out for you!”
And remembering those things, the sense of her desolation returned to her double-fold. She walked to the window, looked out, and then turned slowly about. She was neither obtuse nor unsympathetic; she was merely a girl who had been prodigiously preoccupied with her fight for freedom and the depressing discovery that it was a losing fight.
“Oh, Gerry, what’s the matter with me, anyway?” she demanded with an altogether unlooked-for note of wistfulness in her voice.
“Don’t you know?” he said as he followed her to the window. “Don’t you know, you poor little muddle-headed kid?”
Teddie shook her head. She was rather foolishly afraid that Gerry was going to be sympathetic, and she didn’t want that, for sympathy, of late, seemed the inevitable overture to the unmusical opera of mushiness.
“I’ll tell you what’s the matter with you, Teddie,” asserted Gerry, wondering why she was refusing to meet his gaze. “You’re inflammatory without quite knowing it. You’re provocative, without being foolish enough to have fathomed the fact. The Lord made you so lovely, girl, that you put an ache in men’s hearts and a mist in front of their eyes. You make them forget themselves. And that’s why I’ve got to take you in hand.”
“Take me in hand?” repeated Teddie, standing up very straight and white.
“Yes, take you in hand,” repeated Gerry in turn.
“I rather think I’ve something to say about that!”
“Teddie, I’ve loved you all my life,” said Gerry, quite simply, disregarding even the abysmal scorn in her voice.
“Then this is no time to tell me a thing like that,” she retorted with spirit.
“And you’re wrong there,” contended Gerry, quite unmoved. “It’s the only, the essential time.”
“What makes you feel that way about it?” asked Teddie, disturbed by the darkening light in his eye.
“Because heaven only knows how long we can be alone here,” was his not altogether satisfactory reply.
“I fail to see any particular advantage arising out of our—our temporary isolation,” retorted Teddie, with quite unexpected Johnsonian dignity.
“Teddie!” was Gerry’s sharp cry as he towered over her. “Don’t you understand?”
“Understand what?” asked the girl with the exasperatingly level gaze as she surveyed the none too steady hands which he was holding out toward her.
“That I can’t help kissing you!” he abandonedly exclaimed as he just as abandonedly proceeded to do so.
Teddie drew slowly away from him. He had seen children draw back, that way, from a milk-snake coiled up in a chocolate-box. Her eyes were blazing.
“Now I know you’re no better than——”
But that was as far as Teddie got. For the door was flung open and a protesting and much dishevelled Louis Lipsett was piloted into the room. He was piloted in without ceremony, and by the lapel of his overcoat. The hand that grasped that collar was Gunboat Dorgan’s, and the lines of his wide mouth were grim with determination.
“Call off this wildcat,” gasped Louis as he dropped weakly into a chair. “Call him or I’ll get a shooting-iron and kill him!”
Gerry tried to remove the steel-corded hand from the uptwisted coat-collar, but Gunboat Dorgan betrayed no slightest intention of relaxing his hold.
“Not on your life,” he irately announced. “Not until he eats every word of it!”
“Of what?” demanded Gerry, with an abstracted and mildly perplexed inspection of Louis Lipsett’s person.
“Don’t listen to him,” cried the prisoner. “He’s gone crazy. He’s gummed up the whole game. He came tearing into Uhlan’s studio when I had the big bounder scared stiff, had him eating out of my hand and willing to sign any kind of quitclaim I was ready to hand out. He blew in there ready to eat Uhlan up, until he found out I was fromThe Starand heard that tricky brush-tickler swear his lips were sealed and then step from under by saying it was me and my paper that were going to open up on a full-page story.Me, mind you, with all I’d done! Then this East Side rat-terrier let loose, and wouldn’t even give me a chance to get to a phone and have you put things straight or call up our sporting-editor to shoot a little reason into his empty nut. He’s hauled me around like a civet-bag and dragged me down here across eleven city blocks to say what you very well know I don’t even need to say. And I call this a fine line of reporting, this ghost-laying for a bunch of love-sick idiots who’re so afraid of printer’s ink they’re playing tennis with bank-checks over it. For I’m not the only thing he’s collared, I want y’ to understand. He collared old Shotwell as well and shook that twenty-five-thousand-dollar draft out of him and has got it right here in his jeans while he’s joy-riding on the back of my neck! But I’m tired of being bullyragged and manhandled and having my clothes spoilt, and if this rising star of suburban ring doesn’t get his fingers out of my back hair inside of ten seconds I’m going to let loose with something more than ink before the day is over.”
“Let him go!” commanded Gerry, in his most authoritative grand-jury voice. “This man is acting for Miss Hayden, is very generously and unselfishly acting for Miss Hayden.”
“Am I now?” gritted Louis Lipsett, breathing hard and writhing his disordered clothing back into place.
“Well, so am I,” averred Gunboat Dorgan as he tossed Teddie’s much crumpled check out on the cherrywood table. “And I want ’o know,” he continued as he confronted Gerry West, “just what call yuh’ve got for buttin’ in on this?”
“I am acting for Miss Hayden,” Gerry announced with gravity.
“We’reallacting for Miss Hayden!” mocked Louis, with a foolish upward movement of his hands. But Gunboat ignored that derisive interruption.
“In what way ’re yuh actin’ for her?” he demanded, with his shoulders squared and his chin out.
“As her husband,” said Gerry with a grimness which was quite new to him.
Gunboat swung slowly about and stared at the girl on the other side of the cherrywood table. He saw a slow flush creep up into the shell-pink of her cheeks.
“Are yuh married to this mucker?” he demanded, with a thumb-jerk toward the unobserving Gerald Rhindelander West. And he swallowed hard as he put the question, just as Teddie used to swallow hard when she beheld the castor-oil bottle being lifted down out of the medicine cabinet.
“I am not!” was Teddie’s quiet but distinct-noted reply.
“Are yuh goin’ to be?” queried the narrow-eyed Gunboat.
“I am not going to be,” replied Teddie, with an opaque eye on a slightly crestfallen young attorney.
Gunboat shook his cauliflower ear in a little nod of comprehension. Then he turned back to the girl.
“All right, then. I’m takin’ care of yuh. Remember that. We’ll cut out the hot-air artists and get busy. And that brings us round to this newspaper boob. He’s got the whole story of what’s been happenin’ here, and he’s talkin’ big about puttin’ it into print. I heard him wit’ my own——”
“He won’t put it into print,” interrupted Gerry.
“What’ll stop him?” demanded the man of battle.
“The knowledge of what we’d both do to him if he tried it,” announced the expounder of law, doing his best to overlook Gunboat’s oblique glance of contempt. “And the further knowledge that he never even intended to put it into print.”
“No, putting things into print doesn’t seem to be my business any more,” interpolated the morose-eyed Lipsett.
“Then why——” began Gunboat, but he was interrupted by the trill of the telephone bell. It was Teddie who finally crossed to the instrument and answered the call.
“It’s for you, Mr. Dorgan,” she said, without emotion, as she waited with the receiver in her hand.
“Oh, is that yuh, Ruby,” Gunboat was murmuring a moment later, into the transmitter. He spoke in a strangely altered tone, a tone with even a touch of meekness in it. “All right, Ruby,” he docilely agreed after several minutes of an obviously one-sided conversation. “Sure, Ruby, yuh’re dead right.” Then came the receiver’s turn again, with an amending “Whatever yuh say, Ruby,” gently intoned into the transmitter.
If Teddie garnered any inkling of that capitulating meekness on Gunboat Dorgan’s part, she gave out no echo of it in her own icy stare of disapproval as she stood regarding Gerald Rhindelander West. Even the rueful Louis Lipsett awakened to that oddly sustained duel of glances between the two silent figures on the far side of the room. He awakened, in fact, to the all-pervading, three-cornered preoccupation which surrounded him. And he made hay while the sun shone. He took advantage of that momentary inattention and slipped from his chair. He tiptoed discreetly out of the room and hurried away into the comparative quietness of Fourth Street, where he caught a Broadway surface-car and headed for the peace of Park Row.
Gunboat Dorgan, as he meditatively hung up the receiver, did not even miss the vanished newspaper man. He was too busy watching the strange couple still confronting each other on the far side of the studio. The girl, with ice-cold deliberation, pinned a tiptilted turban on her head, adjusted a four-piece blue-fox throw about her shoulders, and drew on a pair of wrinkled-topped gloves.
“Where are you going?” demanded the dark-browed expounder of the law, in a tone savoring unmistakably of the cave-man age.
“I regard that as entirely my own affair,” retorted the girl in blue-fox, just as unmistakably reverting to the age of ice.
“Where are you going?” repeated the neolithic young giant in tweeds.
“Will you kindly permit me to open my own door?” said Teddie, with her chin up.
“Where are you going?” demanded Gerry, for the third and last time.
For one long moment of silence Teddie inspected him as though he were something under plate-glass, something behind Zoo bars.
“I’m going home!” she finally told him.
“Why?” exacted her altogether too obtuse tormentor.
“Because I’m tired of all this!” was the intense but low-noted reply.
“Of all what?” demanded the bewildered Gerry.
“Of seeing everything that’s most sacred in life mauled over in public—of being mauled over myself as though I was something marked down on a bargain-counter—of finding out that all men are so—so disgusting and degradingly alike!”
It seemed to take time for Gerry to digest this. And even with time the process appeared to be unattended by any great degree of satisfaction.
“Haven’t I been doing what I could for you?” he demanded, with the air of a man who asked only for reason.
“Are you worrying about your fee?” countered the pale-cheeked Teddie.
“I don’t want a fee,” said Gerry.
“Then what is it you want?”
Gerry tried to square his shoulders.
“I wantyou!”
She met his eye, but it took an effort. And Gerry, for the life of him, couldn’t help thinking once more of the milk-snake in the chocolate-box.
“How about my wishes in the matter?” she asked with a slow and pointed emphasis which brought a wince to even Gunboat Dorgan’s Celtic eyes.
“Just a minute, yuh folks,” suggested the perturbed man of the ring. “This actin’ as though yuh was married for ten years ain’t goin’ to bury any tomahawks and end the war-dance! There’s been too much pullin’ at cross——”
But it was Gunboat’s turn to be interrupted. That final interruption came in the form of the unceremonious flinging back of the studio-door, disclosing the bristling but the immaculate figure of Teddie’s Uncle Chandler.
“What’s wrong here, Teddie?” demanded that perplexed-eyed old gentleman, striding into the room with all the dignity his sciatica would permit.
“She wants to go home,” said Gerry. And as he said those five words in a singularly dull tone his hands went down to his sides. The movement, in some way, was oddly suggestive of flying colors forlornly lowered.
“Well, that impresses me as an eminently sane and respectable place to want to go to,” remarked the old Major as he blinked from one to the other of the odd trio confronting him. But his eye, for some reason, was on Gerald Rhindelander West when he spoke next, though his question, obviously, was addressed to Teddie. “And just when do you want to go, my dear?”
“As soon as you can get me away from here,” was Teddie’s prompt but low-noted reply.
Ceremoniously the old Major held out his crooked right arm and dolorously the girl in the blue-fox took it. Neither of them spoke until they came to a stop beside the wine-colored shopping-car.
“I never intend to speak to Gerry West again as long as I live,” announced Teddie, with a combined suddenness and fierceness which made her Uncle Chandler forget his left hip-joint as he climbed into the car beside her.
He patted her knee, comprehendingly.
“Under the circumstances, then,” he observed as she made the motor whine with an altogether unnecessary jab on the accelerator, “it’ll be just as well, Teddikins, if you don’t see him for a week or two!” . . .
Back in the dismal emptiness of the dismal gray studio Gerry and Gunboat stood looking at each other. Then Gunboat sighed fraternally and essayed an owl-like wag of the head.
“They’re all alike, them women!” he remarked with the sagacity of one who has survived many unfair ordeals at the hands of the fair.
Teddie’shead was much clearer by the time she had motored out to Tuxedo. Her head was clearer, but the contradictory tides of feeling that eddied about her troubled young heart seemed as muddled-up as ever. Even her Uncle Chandler was not entirely oblivious of the fact that some newer ferment was working in the depths of that bottled-up young soul. But he asked no questions. There were two things which he knew too well for that: one was life in general, and the other was Theodora Lydia Lorillard Hayden in particular.
As for Teddie herself, she was tyrannical and melting and snappy and chummy all at the same time. She promptly ordered the servants back at their posts, and just as promptly proceeded to bully them in a manner which plainly betokened that she intended to be master of her fate in at least one quarter of an otherwise unconquered world. She ordered silver unpacked and moth-bags banished and the striped ticking off the furniture and the cars overhauled and the drapes restored and the drive-borders retrimmed and an absurd amount of cut flowers for every room in the house. But she prowled moodily about that house, resenting its quietness at the same time that she gave orders she was at home to nobody. She tried riding before breakfast, and found her old mount gone soft and her new groom grown sulky. She tried reading, and discovered how unbelievably dull all modern books could be. She tried motoring, and found no interest in maneuvering the old hair-pin curves on two wheels and no thrill in defying the old speed-traps at sixty miles an hour. Even the greenhouses, when she invaded them, seemed to suggest funeral set-pieces and the vanity of all earthly ways. The very walls about that lordly Hayden demense grew still again remarkably suggestive of jail walls. And that particular wall which intervened between her own and the adjacent West estate seemed to take on a particularly objectionable coloring.
As for her Uncle Chandler, he punctiliously dressed for dinner, and punctiliously sat at one end of the big dining-room table while Teddie just as solemnly sat at the other—though she did once emerge sufficiently from her self-absorption to remark that they looked exactly like two palm-trees on the edge of the Sahara. She also once ventured to ask if Watkins really oughtn’t to have a passport when he carried the joint all the way from her end of the table down to the old Major’s end of the table. And her Uncle Chandler brightened up sufficiently to inquire if he hadn’t better order a taxi to run them out to the terrace for coffee, so abysmally vast seemed the distances in that dolorous and empty house.
If the old Major remained suspiciously meek and long-suffering during these days of trial, it must be acknowledged that he made divers and undivulged trips in to the City, whence he returned oddly fortified in spirit and beguilingly abstracted in manner. The only excursion which brought him obvious displeasure was that when he brought back to Teddie a motor-truck loaded down with her studio possessions—which the lady in question solemnly committed to a bonfire on the rear end of the East Drive. And that afternoon as they sat taking tea and cinnamon-toast on the Terrace, he finally found the courage to confront the morose-eyed young lady who sat in the high-backed willow-chair so moodily tearing an Ophelia rose to pieces.
“Say, Teddie, isn’t it about time you were loosening up?” the old Major quietly inquired.
“About what?” demanded Teddie, taking her third slice of cinnamon-toast.
“About that mix-up down in the Village.”
“It wasn’t a mix-up,” corrected Teddie.
“Then what was it?”
“It was a revelation!”
“A revelation of what?” asked Uncle Chandler as he put his teacup down.
“Of what men are!” asserted the abstracted-eyed Teddie.
“Of course,” said the old Major as he took out a chased gold case and meditatively extracted a cigarette. “So let’s have it, Teddikins, hook, line and sinker!”
But Teddie shook her head.
“I telegraphed to father,” she inappositely remarked.
“WhereisTrummie this summer?” her uncle inquired.
“He’s still at the Arizona Camp Observatory,” explained Teddie.
“Trummie moves so slowly,” complained the old Major. “The poor man can’t help it, I suppose, trailing that chain of D. S.’s, and F. R. S.’s and F. R. G. S.’s around after him all the time. But I suppose you felt he was the proper person to talk such things over with?”
Teddie nodded a slightly abstracted assent.
“Yes, I felt that way. But I had a wire from father this morning. He says he’ll be through with his spectographic analysis of the Milky Way nebulæ before the end of October and that as soon as he feels sure he can synthesize an isotope of hydrogen approximating to nebulum he’ll come east and have a talk with me!”
The old Major smiled pensively.
“Yes, I remember what he said when the Rubber Trust swallowed up my little Congolo Company and squeezed me out after I’d squeezed out the original Amsterdammers: ‘The oysters eat the diatoms, and we eat the oysters!’ It makes me wish, Teddie, that I could be a philosopher now and then.”
“I wish women could be,” remarked Teddie.
“Then why not make a stab at it,” ventured the old gentleman who had been so intently studying her averted face, “by telling me what the trouble is?”
“There’s really nothing to tell, Uncle Chandler,” solemnly asserted the young lady with the moody eyes, drawing the striped ticking of reticence over the brocaded injustices of youth.
The old Major tossed away his cigarette. He sat staring at the poor little rich girl in the willow lawn-chair. He stared at her so long and so intently that she finally turned about and looked none too fraternally into his face.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“It’s queer I never noticed it before,” remarked the old Major, apparently more to himself than to the girl confronting him.
“Noticed what?” asked Teddie.
“How you’re getting a bit like your mater,” replied the placid-eyed old gentleman in the armchair, “a bit tamed and trimmed off and ironed out!”
“I won’t be!” proclaimed Teddie, with quite unlooked-for passion, as she got up from her chair.
“But how, my dear, are you going to stop it?” asked the still equable old Major.
“I won’t get like that!” reiterated Teddie, looking for all the world like a second Artemisia confronting an army of embattled males. She stood there, as though expecting some retort from him. But he said nothing. He merely took out another cigarette, lighted it, and recovered his morningHeraldfrom the grass at his feet. This he proceeded to peruse with studied unconcern, quite ignoring the young Artemisia still glowering at him over the edge of it. Then he looked up, with the ghost of a yawn.
“By the way, I saw the Commodore in town yesterday,” observed Teddie’s uncle as he leisurely turned a page. “He was telling me a queer thing about young West.”
“Indeed!” said Teddie, without moving.
“The Commodore was saying that Gerry’s going to marry that Rivers girl,” offhandedly announced the maculated old scoundrel in immaculate cricketer’s flannel.
He waited behind his paper, for several seconds. Then he heard a mirthless little laugh. Then he heard the contemptuous ejaculation of “That frump!” And then he heard quick steps along the marble walk that bisected the Terrace.
“Where are you going?” he demanded as he looked up to see Teddie making off with the stride of a Diana.
But Teddie entirely ignored that question. Instead of answering that not unnatural interrogation she was calling sharply out to Watkins: “Tell Parrish I want my car. I want itat once!” And two minutes later, as the old Major folded up his paper and watched Teddie vanish down the West Drive leaving a scurry of gravel and a residuary cloud of dust above the shrubbery, he sighed audibly, and took out another cigarette, and sat deep in thought.
Teddie, as she swung into the open road and headed for the blue hills of Forgetfulness, which receded as she approached them, remembered that she was at least mistress of that ever-responsive piece of machinery on which she sat poised like a stormy petrel on the crest of a comber. It was hers to hasten and retard, to control and direct, as she wished. It was hers to curb into submission and harry into dust-trailing violation of the state road-laws. And as she went careening along the open highway, crouched frowningly over her mahogany wheel, she sought to ease the tumult in her perplexed young body by drinking up distance very much as disheartened men drink alcohol. She did her best to drug herself with speed, letting the air whip through the opened wind-shield and sting her clouded and untalcumed young face.
When she caught sight of Luddy O’Brien, the traffic cop at the Valley Crossing, she dropped an eye to her speedometer and automatically slowed down. Quite automatically, too, she accosted that officer, after the long-established manner so disapproved of by her family, by raising her left hand to the level of her ear, holding the palm outward, and wigwagging her hunched fingers nervously up and down, very much as if she were twanging the strings of an invisible Irish harp.
Luddy grinned briefly but fraternally, saluted, and declined to commit himself, as an officer of the law, by turning to observe her as she swept past him and mounted the next hill—at a rate, be it recorded, not strictly in accordance with traffic regulations.
Teddie, in fact, was already discovering how brief and deluding can be the sense of release born of four flying wheels with nowhere in particular to fly to. She almost wished that she might hear theput-putof Luddy’s motorcycle as it rode her down. She almost wished that Luddy would arrest her and have her committed to a jail-yard with high walls where she couldn’t possibly get out and where she could spend what remained of her blighted life breaking limestone rocks with a big hammer, breaking them by thumping them until they went to pieces, the same as she’d like to thump a few heads!
Then her thoughts went back to her car. From the crest of the hill which it had mounted like a swallow, Teddie could see the familiar gray ribbon of the road where it twined through the woodlanded valley below her. It was a very inviting road. It was more than inviting, in Teddie’s present mood—it was challenging. And she breathed deeper as she saw that she couldn’t even afford to keep an eye on her speedometer dial.
She was more than half-way down the long slope when she first caught sight of the motor-truck loaded with a double tier of cement blocks. That failed to trouble her, however, for she had ample room to slither by. What troubled her, for a moment, was something coming down the opposing slope. It was a pigeon-gray roadster stripped of its top, a homely and heavy-bodied roadster which trailed rollingcumuliof road-dust in its wake. Her quick eye told her that as the different factors now revealed themselves the pigeon-gray roadster would pass the motor-truck before she could. This meant that she would have to give way and slow down and humbly wait for the autocrat piloting the pigeon-gray roadster. And this Teddie had neither the desire nor the intention of doing. For she knew who owned that roadster. She knew it even before she saw the bareheaded driver alone in the high-backed seat, the tanned and goggled face with the oil-stained old putty-colored motor-coat buttoned close up under the bony young Cæsar-Augustus chin. It was Gerry West’s car. And Gerry West was in it, imperially demanding his right-of-way as he pounded man-like down a road which he regarded as entirely and altogether his own. But it was not Teddie’s intention, that afternoon, to play second fiddle to any one.
Her heart tightened a little, for she knew it would take promptness to swing out to the left and back to the right again before the lordly roadster pounded opposite the motor-lorry. If he had to slow up, at the last moment, so much the better, for he seemed, at the moment, to stand typical of those steam-rollers of life which she had always so actively resented. It was a bigger car than hers, a distinctly male car, and as such it owed her consideration. The burden of courtesy naturally must rest upon it.
Subliminally her practised eye was measuring the distances, appraising the speed of the rival car, evaluating the advance of the motor-truck. Her hand-palm punched the horn at the same time that her shoe-sole pushed down on the accelerator. Then she careened ahead, claiming her fairway by right of conquest. She punched the horn again, for the dust was troubling her more than she had expected. She swung out to the left to clear the thundering motor-truck, rocked up to it, was abreast of it, and saw the pigeon-gray roadster opposing her, dancing down on her, with no visible decrease of speed.
He was not giving way an inch—and she knew what it meant. The truck still hemmed her in on the right, cluttering briskly forward, imperturbable and indifferent. It was too late to swing ahead and over; it was too late to slow down and drop back. Gerald Rhindelander West was refusing to give in to her!
But Gerry, at that moment, must have seen her. He must have seen her for the first time, just as he saw for the first time what was going to happen if they thundered together. And he gave way.
He gave way in the only manner possible, by throwing over his wheel and taking the ditch. There was a thump and scrape of mud-guards, a shout from the startled truck-driver, and an involuntary soprano scream from Teddie as she stiffened at her wheel and with a grinding of rubber and gravel brought her car to a stop.
When she looked back, with her heart in her mouth, she saw no sign of a roadster and no sign of Gerry along the road. This both puzzled and bewildered her. And still again she stared back through the settling dust.
Then she saw, and understood. She saw the heavy roadster half-way up the slope of the side-hill, with its nose buried in a privet-hedge, oddly suggestive of a shoat rooting for tubers. And on the dust-powdered grass beside it she saw Gerry, lying startlingly inert, with a stain of red on the putty-colored motor-coat.
She made incoherent small cries of protest as she left her car in the middle of the road and ran back to him. She bent over him, and unbuttoned his coat, and saw the little stream of red running from a cut on his wrist.
“Oh, Gerry, I’ve killed you!” she wailed as she sat down beside him and tore a band of white from her petticoat and bound up the bleeding wrist. He opened his eyes as she stooped over her work, and promptly closed them again. “Oh, my love, my love, I’ve killed you!” she said in helpless little moans as she struggled to knot the bandage tight over the well-wrapped wrist-bone.
It reminded her of her aeronautical days of old. And she tried to tell herself to be calm, and to remember what one should do in such cases. She even slipped a hand over his heart, and found it to be beating, and summoned up the courage to study his face. On his left temple she noticed a lump, almost as big as a shirred egg, and a subsidiary small pain shot through her as she remembered how much it looked like the lump Gunboat Dorgan had once brought out on Raoul Uhlan’s pallid forehead. She was brushing the dusty hair back from this slowly discoloring lump when she awakened for the first time to the knowledge that the driver of the motor-truck was not only standing there beside her, but addressing her in none too commiserative tones.
“Yuh’ve kilt him, all right, lady! Yuh’ve kilt him, and I s’pose yuh’re satisfied!”
“I haven’t killed him,” protested Teddie as she took Gerry’s head in her lap.
“Yuh sure set out to kill something,” announced the blue-denimed giant from the truck. “And this looks to me like yuh got what yuh was after!”
“Don’t be silly,” cried Teddie. “But get into my car and get back here with a doctor. Do you understand: I want a doctor right away!”
“It’d be more sensible to get the body into the truck,” maintained the heartless one in blue-denim.
“You get that doctor!” blazed Teddie with a stare which drove the truck-driver off even as naked steel might have done. And when he was gone she leaned over the still inert Gerry, and wiped the dust from his face with her tiny mockery of a handkerchief, and murmured ridiculous little incoherencies which made him open one eye, like a sleepy hound on a hearth-rug, and quite inconsiderately close it again.
“Oh, Gerry!” she moaned as she put her hand once more in under his vest, to make sure his heart was still beating, and fell to pondering the reason for a resultant small writhe of his body. She leaned closer over his face, assuring herself that he was still breathing.
Then she stooped still lower. She slipped an arm in under his head and held his dusty cheek against hers.And then she kissed him.
She kissed him grimly, determinedly, abandonedly, saying “Oh, Gerry!” in foolish little gasps and not bothering to wipe away the tear that was running down her nose.
Then she sat back, with his head still in her arms, for his eyes were open and gazing up into her face.
“How dare you do that?” demanded Gerry, in a voice singularly steady for one so recently emerging from unconsciousness.
“Oh, Gerry!” repeated Teddie, hugging him tight. And she kissed him again, out of sheer relief at finding him still anchored to the same muddled-up old world with her.
“You’ll have to marry me for this, remember!” announced Gerry, doing his best to look magisterial.
“I couldn’t live without you, Gerry,” she had the honesty to acknowledge. “And they said I was going to lose you!”
“Not if I know it,” proclaimed her captive.
Teddie looked up for a moment at the sadly wrecked roadster.
“But it wasn’t sporting of me, Gerry!”
“What wasn’t?”
“Everything—everything I’ve done!”
Gerry reached out with his one good arm.
“No queen, Teddie, can possibly do wrong. But there’s one thing, Belovedness, I want to know, I’ve got to know.”
“What is it?”
“I’ve got to know just why you kissed me!”
Teddie studied him with solemn eyes. Then she studied the lengthening shadows along the valley-slope and the blue hills beyond.
“Because, Gerry, you’re so different from other men,” she finally acknowledged.