At the moment when the Nice Boy, as brown as the proverbial berry, was playing a round of golf with Joan within sound of the sea, Howard Oldershaw, his cousin, drove up to the little house in East Sixty-fifth Street to see Martin.
He, too, had caught the sun, and his round fat face was rounder and fatter than ever. He, too, had the epitome of health, good nature, and misdirected energy. He performed a brief but very perfect double shuffle on the top step while waiting for the door to open, and then barged past the constitutionally unsurprised man servant, sang out a loud woo-hoo and blew into the library like an equinoctial gale.
Pipe in mouth, and wearing a thin silk dressing gown, Martin was standing under the portrait of his father. He slipped something quickly into his pocket and turned about. It was a photograph of Joan.
"Well, you Jack-o'-Lantern," he said. "It's better late than never, I suppose."
Howard sent his straw hat spinning across the room. It landed expertly in a chair. "My dear chap, your note's been lying in my apartment for a week, snowed under my bills. I drove back this morning, washed the bricks out of my eyes and came right around. What are you grumbling about?"
"I'm not grumbling. When you didn't show up in answer to my note I telephoned, and they told me you were away. Where've you been?"
"Putting in a week at the Field Club at Greenwich," replied Howard, filling a large cigarette case from the nearest box, as was his most friendly habit. "Two sweaters, tennis morning, noon and night, no sugar, no beer, no butter, no bread, gallons of hot water—and look at me! Martin, it's a tragedy. If I go on like this, it's me for Barnum's Circus as the world's prize pig. What's the trouble?"
There was not the usual number of laughter lines round Martin's eyes, but one or two came back at the sight and sound of his exuberant friend. "No trouble," he said, lying bravely. "I got here the day you left and tried to find you. That's all. I wanted you to come down to Shinnecock and play golf. Everybody else seems to be at Plattsburg, and I was at a loose end."
"Golf's no good to me. It wouldn't reduce me any more than playing the piano with somebody dying in the next room. Been here all the week?"
"Yes," said Martin.
"What? In this fug hole, with the sun shining? Out with it, Martin. Get it off your chest, old son."
Just for an instant Martin was hugely tempted to make a clean breast of everything to this good-hearted, tempestuous person, under whose tight skin there was an uncommon amount of shrewdness. But it meant dragging Joan into open discussion, and that was all against his creed. He had inherited from his father and his father's father an absolute incapability of saying anything to anybody about his wife. And so he slammed the door of his soul and presented an enigmatical front.
"There's nothing on my chest," he said. "Business downtown has kept me here,—legal stuff and that sort of thing. But I'm free now. Got any suggestions?"
Howard accepted this. If a pal was determined not to confide and get invaluable advice, what was the use of going for him with a can opener? But one good look at the face whose every expression he knew so well convinced him that something was very much the matter. "Why, good Lord," he said to himself, "the old thing looks as if he'd been working night and day for an examination and had been plucked. I wonder which of the two girls is at the back of all this,—the wife or the other?" Rumors had reached his way about both.
"What do you want to do?" he asked.
"I don't care," said Martin. "Any damn thing so long as it's something with somebody. What's it matter?"
He didn't quite manage to hide the little quiver in his voice, and it came to Howard Oldershaw for the first time how young they both were to be floundering on the main road, himself with several entanglements and money worries, his friend married and with another complication. They were both making a pretty fine hash of things, it seemed, and just for a moment, with something of boyishness that still remained behind his sophistication, he wished that they were both back at Yale, unhampered and unencumbered, their days filled with nothing but honest sport and good lectures and the whole joy of life.
"It's like this with me, Martin," he said, with a rather rueful grin. "I'm out of favor at home just now and broke to the wide. There are one or two reasons why I should lie low for a while, too. How about going out to your place in the country? I'll hit the wily ball with you and exercise your horses, lead the simple life and, please God, lose some flesh, and guarantee to keep you merry and bright in my well-known, resilient way. What do you say, old son?"
Martin heartily appreciated Howard's sound method of swinging everything round to himself and trying to make out that it was all on his side to go out to the house in which Joan ought to be. He was not a horseman or a golfer, and the simple life had few attractions for him. Well, that was friendship.
"Thanks, old man," he said. "That's you to the life, but I vote we get a change from golf and riding. Come down to Devon with me, and let's do some sailing. You remember Gilmore? I had a letter from him this morning, asking if I'd like to take his cottage and yawl. Does that sound good?"
"Great," cried Howard. "Sailing—that's the game, and by gum, swimming's the best of all ways of dropping adipose deposit. Wire Gilmore and fix it. I'll drive you out to-morrow. By the way, I found a letter from my cousin Harry among the others. He's in that part of the world. He's frightfully gone on your wife, it appears."
Martin looked up quickly. "Where is she?" he asked.
"Why, they're both staying at the Hosacks' place at Easthampton. Didn't you know that?" He was incredulous.
"No," said Martin.
Howard metaphorically clapped his hand over his mouth. Questions were on the tip of his tongue. If Martin were not in the mood to take him into his confidence, however, there must be a good reason for it, but,—not to know where his wife was! What on earth was at the bottom of all this? "All right," he said. "I've one or two things I must do, and I'll be round in the morning, or is that too soon?"
"The sooner the better," said Martin. "I'll send the cook and Judson down by the early train. They'll have things in shape by the time we show up. I'm fed up with New York and can smell the water already. Will you dine with me to-night and see a show?"
"I can't," said Howard, and laughed.
"I see. To-morrow, then."
"Right. Great work. So long, old son. Get busy and do what you have to do to-day, then we can leave this frying pan to-morrow with nothing on our minds."
"I haven't anything to do," said Martin.
Howard picked up his hat and caught it with his head in the manner of a vaudeville artist. But he didn't go. He stood waiting, keyed to a great sympathy. There was something in Martin's voice and at the back of his eyes which made him see him plainly and suddenly as a man standing all alone and wounded. But he waited in vain. There was a curious silence,—a rather painful and embarrassing silence, during which these two lads, who had been pretending to be men, dodged each other's eyes.
And then Howard, with an uncharacteristic awkwardness, and looking very young, made a quick step forward, and with a sort of gentle roughness grasped Martin by the arm. "But you've got something to say," he said. "Good God, man, have we been pals for nothing? I hide nothing from you. I can help."
But Martin shook his head. He tried to speak and failed. There was something hard in his throat. But he put his hand very warmly on his friend's shoulder for a moment and turned away abruptly. "Joan, Joan," he cried in his heart, "what are you doing, what are we both doing? Why are we killing the days that can never come back?"
He heard Howard go out. He heard the front door close and the honk of the horn. And for a long time he stood beneath the portrait of the man who had gone so far away and who alone could have helped him.
The telephone bell rang.
Martin was spoken to by the girl that lived in the rabbit warren in West Forty-sixth Street in the rooms below those of Tootles. "Can you come round at once?" she asked. "It's about Tootles—urgent."
And Martin answered, "Yes, now, at once."
After all, then, there might be something to do.
Master of all the sky, the sun fell warmly on the city, making delicious shadows, gliding giant buildings, streaming across the park, chasing the endless traffic along the Avenue, and catching at points of color. It was one of those splendid mornings of full-blown Tune, when even New York,—that paradox of cities,—had beauty. It was too early in the year for the trees to have grown blowsy and the grass worn and burnt. The humidity of midsummer was held back by the energy of a merry breeze which teased the flags and sent them spinning against the oriental blue of the spotless sky.
Martin walked to West Forty-sixth Street. There was an air of half-time about the Avenue. The ever-increasingly pompous and elaborate shops, whose window contents never seem to vary, wore a listless, uninterested expression like that of a bookmaker during the luncheon hour at the races. Their glittering smile, their enticement and solicitation, their tempting eye-play were relaxed. The cocottes of Monte Carlo at the end of the season could not have assumed a greater indifference. But there were the same old diamonds and pearls, the same old canvases, the same old photographs, the same old antiques, the same old frocks and shoes and men's shirtings, the same old Persian rugs and Japanese ware, the same cold, hard plates and china, the very same old hats and dinks and dressing-gowns and cut flowers and clubs, and all the same doormen in the uniforms that are a cross between those of admirals and generals, the men whose only exercise during the whole of the year is obtained by cutting ice and sweeping snow from just their particular patch of pavement. In all the twists and changes, revolutions and cross currents, upheavals and in-fallings that affect this world, there is one great street which, except for a new building here and there, resolutely maintains its persistent sameness. Its face is like that of a large, heavily made-up and not unbeautiful woman, veil-less and with some dignity but only two expressions, enticement and indifference. A man may be lost at the North Pole, left to die on the west coast of Africa, married in London, or forcibly detained in Siberia, but, let him return to life and New York, and he will find that whatever elsewhere Anno Domini may have defaced and civilization made different, next to nothing has happened to Fifth Avenue.
Martin had told Howard of the way he had found Joan on the hill, how she had climbed out of window that night and come to him to be rescued and how he had brought her to town to find Alice Palgrave away and married her. All that, but not one word of his having been shown the door on the night of the wedding, of her preference for Palgrave, her plunge into night life, or his own odd hut human adventure with Susie Capper as a result of the accident. But for the fact that it wasn't his way to speak about his wife whatever she did or left undone, Martin would have been thankful to have made a clean breast of everything. Confession is good for the soul, and Martin's young soul needed to be relieved of many bewilderments and pains and questionings. He wished that he could have continued the story to Howard of the kid's way Joan had treated him,—a way which had left him stultified,—of how, touched by the tragedy that had reduced the poor little waif of the chorus to utter grief and despair, he had taken her out to the country to get healing in God's roofless cathedral, and of how, treating her, because of his love and admiration of Joan, with all the respect and tenderness that he would have shown a sister, it had given him the keenest pleasure and delight to help her back to optimism and sanity. He would like to have told Howard all the simple and charming details of that good week, giving him a sympathetic picture of the elfish Tootles enjoying her brief holiday out in the open, and of her recovery under the inspiration of trees and flowers and brotherliness, to all of which she was so pathetically unaccustomed. He wouldn't have told of the many efforts made by Tootles to pay him back in the only way that seemed to her to be possible, even if he had known of them,—he had not been on the lookout for anything of that sort. Nor would he, of course, have gone into the fact that Tootles loved him quite as much as he loved Joan,—he knew nothing of that. But he would have said much of the joy that turned cold at the sight of Joan's face when she saw Tootles lying on the sofa in his den, of her rush to get away, of the short, sharp scene which followed her unexpected visit, and of his having driven Tootles back to town the following morning at her urgent request,—a curious, quiet Tootles with the marks of a sleepless night on her face. Also he would have said something of his wild despair at having been just ten minutes too late to find Joan at the house in East Sixty-fifth Street, of his futile attempts to discover where she had gone, and of the ghastly, mystifying days back in the country, waiting and wondering and writing letters that he never posted,—utterly unaware of the emotion which had prompted Joan to walk into his den that night, but quite certain of the impression that she had taken away with her.
It was with a sense of extraordinary isolation that Martin walked down Fifth Avenue. Two good things had, however, come out of his talk with Howard Oldershaw. One was the certainty of this man's friendship. The other the knowledge of the place at which Joan was staying. This last fact made him all the more anxious to get down to the cottage. Devon was only a short drive from Easthampton, and that meant the possibility of seeing and speaking to Joan. Good God, if only she could understand a little of what she meant to him, and how he craved and pined for her.
The dressmaker on the street floor of the rabbit warren had gone out of business. Failed probably, poor thing. Tootles had once said that the only people she ever saw in the shop were pressing creditors. A colored woman of bulbous proportions and stertorous breathing was giving a catlick to the dirty stairway. A smell of garlic and onions met Martin on his way to the rooms of Tootles' friend, and on the first landing he drew back to let two men pass down who looked like movie actors. They wore violet ties and tight-fitting jackets with trench belts and short trousers that should have been worn by their younger brothers. The actor on the next floor, unshaven and obviously just out of bed, was cooking breakfast in his cubby-hole. He wore the upper part of his pajamas and a pair of incredibly dirty flannel trousers. The marks of last night's grease paint were on his temples and eyebrows. He hummed a little song to the accompaniment of sizzling bacon.
When Martin knocked on the door of the apartment of the girl to whom he had never spoken except over the telephone and whose name he remembered to be Irene Stanton, a high-pitched, nasal voice cried out.
"Come right in." He went right in and was charged at by a half-bred Chow whose bark was like a gunman's laugh, and a tiny pink beast which worked itself into a state of hysterical rage. But when a high-heeled shoe was flung at them from the bedroom, followed by a volley of fruit-carrier words of the latest brand, they retired, awed and horror-stricken, to cover.
Martin found himself in a small, square living room with two windows looking over the intimate backs of other similar houses. Under the best of conditions it was not a room of very comfortable possibilities. In the hands of its present occupant, it was, to Martin's eyes, the most depressing and chaotic place he had ever seen. The cheap furniture and the cheaper wall paper went well with a long-unwhite-washed ceiling and smudged white paint. A line of empty beer bottles which stood on a mantelpiece littered with unframed photographs and dog-eared Christmas cards struck a note so blase that it might almost have been committed for a reason. On the square mission table in the center there was a lamp with a belaced pink shade at a cock-eyed angle which resembled the bonnet of a streetwalker in the early hours of the morning. An electric iron stood coldly beneath it with its wire attached to a fixture in the wall. Various garments littered the chairs and sofa, and jagged pieces of newspaper which had been worried by the dogs covered the floor.
But the young woman who shortly made her appearance was very different from the room. Her frock was neat and clean, her face most carefully made up, her shoes smart. She had a wide and winning grin, teeth that should have advertised a toothpaste, and a pair of dimples which ought to have been a valuable asset to any chorus. "Why, but you HAVE done a hustle," she said. "I haven't even had time to tidy up a bit." She cleared a chair and shook a finger at the dogs, who, sneaking out from under the sofa, were eyeing her with apprehensive affection. The Chow's mother had evidently lost her heart to a bulldog. "Excuse the look of this back attic," she added. "I've got to move, and I'm in the middle of packing."
"Of course," said Martin, eager to know why he had been sent for. "It's about Tootles, you said."
"Very much so." She sat on the edge of the table, crossed her arms, and deliberately looked Martin over with expert eyes. Knowing as much about men as a mechanic of a main-road motor-repairing shop knows about engines, her examination was acute and thorough.
Martin waited quietly, amused at her coolness, but impatient to come to cues. She was a good sort, he knew. Tootles had told him so, and he was certain that she had asked to see him out of friendship for the girl upstairs.
Her first question was almost as disconcerting and abrupt as a Zeppelin bomb. "What did you do to Tootles?"
Martin held her examining gaze. "Nothing, except give her a bit of a holiday," he said.
"I saw you go off with her that morning." She smiled and her eyes became a little more friendly. "She wrote me a letter from your place and said she'd found out what song writers meant by the word heaven."
"Did she?" said Martin. "I'm glad."
It came to her in a flash that her little pal had fallen in love with this boy and instantly she understood the mystery of Tootles' change of method and point of view—her moping, her relaxed grip on life. She meant almost nothing to the boy and knew it.
"But don't you think you might have been to see her since you brought her back?" she asked.
"I've been very worried," said Martin simply.
"Is that so?" and then, after another pause, this girl said a second astonishing thing. "I wish I didn't see in you a man who tells the truth. I wish you were just one of the ordinary sort that comes our way. I should know how to deal with you better."
"Tell me what you mean," said Martin.
"Shall I? All right, I will." She stood up with her hands on her hips. "If you'd played the usual game with little Tootles and dropped her cold, I wouldn't let you get out of this room without coming up to scratch. I'd make you cough up a good-sized check. There's such a thing as playing the game even by us strap-hangers, you know. As it is, I can see that you were on the square, that you're a bit of a poet or something and did Tootles a good turn for nothing, and honestly, I don't know the next move. You don't owe her anything, you see."
"Is money the trouble?" asked Martin.
Irene Stanton shot out an odd, short laugh. "Let me tell you something," she said. "You know what happened at the dress rehearsal of 'The Ukelele Girl'? Well, the word's gone around about her chucking the show at the last minute, and it's thumbs down for Tootles. She hadn't a nickel when she came back from your place, and since then she's pawned herself right down to the bone to pay her rent and get a few eats. She wouldn't take nothing from me because I'm out too, and this is a bad time to get into anything new. Only two things can stop her from being put out at the end of the week. One's going across the passage to the drunken fellow that writes music, and the other's telling the tale to you. She won't do either. I've never seen her the way she is now. She sits around, staring at the wall, and when I try to put some of her usual pep into her she won't listen. She's all changed since that taste of the country, and I figure she won't get on her feet again without a big yank up. She keeps on saying to herself, like a sort of song, 'Oh, Gawd, for a sight of the trees,' and I've known girls end it quick when they get that way."
Martin got up. "Where do you keep your pen and ink?" he asked. Poor old Tootles. There certainly was something to do.
Irene bent forward eagerly. "Are you going to see her through this snag?"
"Of course I am."
"Ah, that's the talk. But wait a second. We got to be tricky about this." She was excited and tremendously in earnest. "If she gets to know I've been holding out the hat to you, we're wasting time. Give me the money, see? I'll make up a peach of a story about how it came to me,—the will of a rich uncle in Wisconsin or something, you know,—and ask her to come and help me blow it in somewhere on the coast, see? She gave me three weeks' holiday once. It's my turn now, me being in luck.... But perhaps you don't trust me?"
"You trust me," said Martin, and gave her one of his honest smiles.
He caught sight of a bottle of ink on the window sill. There was a pen of sorts there also. He brought them to the table and made out a check in the name of his fellow conspirator. He was just as anxious as she was to put "a bit of pep" into the little waif who had sat beneath the portrait of his father. There was no blotting paper, so he waved it in the air before handing it over.
A rush of tears came to Irene's eyes when she saw what he had written. She held out her hand, utterly giving up an attempt to find words.
"Thank you for calling up," said Martin, doing his best to be perfectly natural and ordinary. "I wish you'd done so sooner. Poor old Tootles. Write to the Devon Yacht Club, Long Island, and let me know how you get on. We've all three been up against some rotten bad luck, haven't we? Good-by, then. I'll go up to Tootles now."
"No, no," she said, "don't. That'd bring my old uncle to life right away. She'd guess you was in on this, all right. Slip off and let me have a chance with my movie stuff." With a mixture of emotion and hilarity she suddenly waved the check above her head. "Can you imagine the fit the receiving teller at my little old bank'll throw when I slip this across as if it meant nothing to me?"
And then she caught up one of Martin's hands and did the most disconcerting thing of all. She pressed it to her lips and kissed it.
Martin got as red as a beet. "Well, then, good-by," he said, making for the door. "Good luck."
"Good-by and good luck to you. My word, but you've made optimism sprout all over my garden, and I thought the very roots of it were dead."
For a few minutes after Martin was gone, she danced about her appalling room, and laughed and cried and said the most extraordinary things to her dogs. The little pink beast became hysterical again, and the Chow leaped into a bundle of under-clothing and worried the life out of it. Finally, having hidden the check in a safe place, the girl ran upstairs to break the good news of her uncle's death to Tootles. Why, they could do the thing like ladies, the pair of them. It was immense, marvellous, almost beyond belief! That old man of Wisconsin deserved a place in Heaven.... Heaven—Devon.
It was an inspiration. "Gee, but that's the idea!" she said to herself. "Devon—and the sight of that boy. That'll put the pep back, unless I'm the original nut. And if he doesn't care about her now, he may presently. Others have."
And when she went in, there was Tootles staring at the wall, and through it and away beyond at the place Martin had called the Cathedral, and at Martin, with his face dead-white because Joan had turned and gone.
It was a different Tootles who, ten days later, sat on a bank of dry ferns that overlooked a superb stretch of water and watched the sun go down. The little half-plucked bird of the Forty-sixth Street garret with the pale thin face and the large tired eyes had almost become the fairy of Joan's hill once more, the sun-tanned little brother of Peter Pan again. A whole week of the air of Devon and the smell of its pines, of the good wholesome food provided by the family with whom she and Irene were lodging, of long rambles through the woods, of bathing and sleeping, and the joy of finding herself among trees had performed that "yank" of which her fellow chorus lady had spoken.
Tootles was on her feet again. Her old zest to live had been given back to her by the wonder and the beauty of sky and water and trees. A child of nature, hitherto forced to struggle for her bread in cities, she was revived and renewed and refreshed by the sweet breath and the warm welcome of that simple corner of God's earth to which Irene had so cunningly brought her. Her starved, city-ridden spirit had blossomed and become healthy out there in the country like a root of Creeping Jenny taken from a pot on the window-sill of a slum house and put back into good brown earth.
The rough and ready family with whom they were lodging kept a duck farm, and it was to this white army of restless, greedy things that Tootles owed her first laugh. Tired and smut-bespattered after a tedious railway journey she had eagerly and with childish joy gone at once to see them fed, the old and knowing, the young and optimistic, and all the yellow babies with uncertain feet and tiny noises. After that, a setting sun which set fire to the sky and water and trees, melting and mingling them together, and Tootles turned the corner. The motherless waif slept that night on Nature's maternal breast and was comforted.
The warm-hearted Irene was proud of herself. Devon—Heaven—it was indeed an inspiration. The only fly in her amber came from the fact that Martin was away. But when she discovered that he and his friend had merely gone for a short trip on the yawl she waited with great content for their return, setting the seeds in Tootles' mind, with infinite diplomacy and feminine cunning, of a determination to use all her wiles to win even a little bit of love from Martin as soon as she saw him again.
Playing the part of one who had unexpectedly benefited from the will of an almost-forgotten relative she never, of course, said a word of why she had chosen Devon for this gorgeous holiday. Temporarily wealthy it was not necessary to look cannily at every nickel. Before leaving New York she had bought herself and Tootles some very necessary clothes and saw to it that they lived on as much of the fat of the land as could be obtained in the honest and humble house in which she had found a large two-bedded room. Her cigarettes were Egyptian now and on the train she had bought half a dozen new novels at which she looked with pride. Hitherto she had been obliged to read only those much-handled blase-looking books which went the round of the chorus. Conceive what that meant! Also she had brought with her a bottle of the scent that was only, so far as she knew, within reach of leading ladies. Like the cigarettes and the books, this was really for Tootles to use, but she borrowed a little from time to time.
As for Irene Stanton, then, she was having, and said so, the time of her young life. She richly deserved it, and if her kindness and thoughtfulness, patience and sympathy had not been entered in the big volume of the Recording Angel that everlasting young woman must have neglected her pleasant job for several weeks.
And, as for Tootles, it is true that her bobbed hair still owed its golden brilliance to a bottle, but the white stuff on her face had been replaced by sunburn, and her lips were red all by themselves.
She was watching the last of the great red globe when her friend joined her. There had been a race of sloops that afternoon, and there was unusual animation on the quay and at the little club house. A small power boat, on which were the starter and judges and others, had just put in with a good deal of splutter and fuss. On the stoop of the club a small band was playing, and a bevy of young people were dancing. Following in the wake of the last sloop a yawl with a dingey in tow was coming towards the quay.
Seeing that Tootles was in one of her ecstatic moods and was deaf to remarks, Irene saved her words to cool her porridge and watched the incoming yawl. She did so at first without much interest. It was merely a sailboat to her city eyes, and her good lines and good management meant nothing. But as she came nearer something familiar in the cut of the man at her helm caught her attention. Surely those broad shoulders and that deep chest and small head could belong only to Martin Gray? They did, they did. It was that boy at last, that boy about whom Tootles had gone dippy, that boy whose generosity had made their holiday possible, that boy the first sight of whom would put the last touch to Tootles' recovery—that boy who, if her friend set her mind and feminine charm to work, might, it seemed to the practical Irene, make her future safe. Strap-hangers had very few such chances.
With a tremendous effort she sat wordless and waited, knowing that Martin must come that way to his cottage. With all her sense of the dramatic stirred she watched the business of coming to anchor with some impatience and when finally the dingey was hauled in and the two men got aboard, loosed off and rowed to shore, excitement sent the blood tingling through her veins. She heard them laugh and look up towards the club, now almost deserted; cars were being driven inland in quick succession. She watched them, hatless and sun-tanned, come nearer and nearer. She got up as if to go, hesitated, caught Martin's eye, gave an exclamation of well-acted amazement and waved her hand. "Well," she cried out, "for Heaven's sake! I never thought you meant this little old Devon!"
Howard had long ago caught sight of the two girls and wondered if they were pretty, hoping they would remain until he could decide the point for himself. They were, both of them, and Martin knew them. Good enough. He stood by while Martin greeted the one who spoke and then saw the other wake suddenly at the sound of his friend's voice, stumble to her feet and go forward with a little cry.
"Why, Tootles," said Martin warmly. "I never thought of seeing you here. How well you look."
It was like dreaming true. Tootles could only smile and cling to his hand.
"By Jove, the other girl," thought Howard, with what, after all, was only an easy touch of intuition. The girl's face told her story. "What will this mean?" Then there were introductions, questions and answers, laughter, jokes, a quick exchange of glances between Martin and Irene, in which he received and acknowledged her warning, and a little silence.
"Come up to the cottage and have dinner with us," said Martin, breaking it rather nervously. "Can you?"
Tootles nodded. Devon—Heaven. How perfectly the words rhymed.
"You couldn't keep us away with a stick," said Irene. This was the way things should go. Also, the jovial, fat person with the roving eyes might brighten things considerably for her.
"Great work!" Said Howard.
And then, taking Tootle's arm and breaking into enthusiastic details of the sailing trip, Martin led the way up to the cottage among the firs. It was good to have been able to put little Tootles into spirits again.
Howard followed with Irene. "Gee whiz!" he said to himself, "some dimples!"
A few miles away as the crow flies Gilbert Palgrave In his bedroom in St. James's Palace cursed himself and life because Joan was still as difficult to win as sunshine was to bottle.
And up in the sky that hung above them all the angels were lighting the stars.
Martin was not given to suspicion. He accepted people at their face value and believed in human nature. It never occurred to him, then, that the apparently ingenuous and disarming Irene, with her straight glance and wide smile, had brought Tootles to Devon except by accident or for anything but health and peace. He was awfully glad to see them. They added to the excellent effect upon his spirits which had been worked by the constant companionship of the irrepressible Howard, before whose habitual breeziness depression could stand little chance.
Also he had youth and health and plenty to do in gorgeous weather, and so his case, which he had been examining rather morbidly, assumed a less painful aspect. His love and need of Joan remained just as strong, but the sense of martyrdom brought about by loneliness and self-analysis left him. Once more he assured himself that Joan was a kid and must have her head until she became a woman and faced facts. Over and over again he repeated to himself the creed that she had flung into the teeth of fate, and in this he found more excuse than she deserved for the way in which she had used him to suit her purpose and put him into the position of a big elder brother whose duty it was to support her, in loco parentis, and not interfere with her pastimes. However much she fooled and flirted, he had an unshakable faith in her cleanness and sweetness, and if he continued to let her alone, to get fed up with what she called the Merry-go-round, she would one day come home and begin all over again. She was a kid, just a kid as she had said, and why, after all, should she be bullied and bully-ragged before she had had time to work it off? That's how he argued.
Meanwhile, he was, thankfully enough, no longer alone. Here were Howard and the two girls and the yawl and the sun, and he would keep merry and bright until Joan came back. He was too proud and sensitive to go to Joan and have it all out with her and thus dispel what had developed into a double misunderstanding, and too loyal to go to Joan's mother and tell his story and beg for help. Like Joan and Howard, and who knows how many other young things in the world, he was paying the inevitable penalty for believing that he could face the problems of life unassisted, unadvised and was making a dreadful hash of it in consequence. He little knew that his kindness to Tootles had made Joan believe that he had exchanged his armor for broadcloth and put her in a "who cares?" mood far more dangerous than the one which had sent her into the night life of New York, or that, owing to Tootles, she was, at that very moment, for the fun of the thing, driving Gilbert Palgrave to a state of anger and desperation which might lead to tragedy. Poor young things, misguided and falsely proud and at a loose end! What a waste of youth and spring which a few wise words of counsel would retrieve and render blessed.
And as for Tootles, with her once white face and red lips and hair that came out of a bottle, Martin was to her what Joan was to Palgrave and for the same reason. Irene's hints and innuendos had taken root. Caring nothing for the practical side of her friend's point of view,—the assured future business,—all her energies were bent to attract Martin, all that was feminine in her was making a huge effort to win, by hook or crook, somehow soon, an answer, however temporary, to her love. Never mind what happened after these summer weeks were over. What matter if she went mad so that she had her day? She had never come across any man like this young Martin, with his clean eyes and sensitive soul and honest hands, his, to her, inconceivable capacity of "being brother," his puzzling aloofness from the lure of sex. She didn't understand what it meant to a boy of Martin's type to cherish ideals and struggle to live up to a standard that had been set for him by his father. In her daily fight for mere self-preservation, in which joy came by accident, any such thing as principle seemed crazy. Her street—Arab interpretation of the law of life was to snatch at everything that she could reach because there was so much that was beyond her grasp. Her love for Martin was the one passion of her sordid little life, and she would be thankful and contented to carry memories back to her garret which no future rough-and-tumble could ever take away or blot out.
For several days after the first of many dinners with the boys, Tootles played her cards with the utmost care. The foursome became inseparable, bathing, sailing and motoring from morning to night. If there was any truth in the power of propinquity, it must have been discovered then. Howard attached himself to Irene whom he found something more than merry and amusing,—a girl of indomitable courage and optimism, in fact. He liked her immensely. And so Tootles paired off with Martin and had innumerable opportunities of putting forward the challenge of sex. She took them all, but with the most carefully considered subtlety. She descended to nothing obvious, as was to be expected from one of her type, which was not famous for such a thing as self-restraint. She paid great attention to her appearance and kept a close watch on her tongue. She played what she imagined was the part of a little lady, toned down her usual exuberance, her too loud laugh and her characteristic habit of giving quick and smart back answers. But in all her long talks with Martin she hinted ever so lightly that she and he had not been thrown together from opposite poles without a reason. She tried to touch his mind with the thought that it was to become what she said it might the night of the accident,—a romance, a perfectly private little affair of their own, stolen from their particular routine, which could be ended at a moment's notice. She tried to wrap the episode up in a page of poetry which might have been torn from a little book by Francois Villon and give it a wistfulness and charm that she thought would appeal to him. But it was not until one more than usually exquisite night, when the spirit of July lingered in the air and the warmth of the sun still lay among the stars, that she made her first step towards her goal. Howard and Irene had wandered down to the water, and she was left with Martin sitting elfishly among the ferns on the bank below the cottage and above the silver lapping water. Martin, very much alive to the magic spell of the night, with the young sap stirring in his veins, lay at her feet, and she put her hand caressingly on his head and began to talk in a half whisper.
"Boy, oh, boy," she said, "what shall I do without you when this dream comes to an end?"
"Dream again," said Martin.
"Down there in the city, so far away from trees?"
"Why not? We can take our dreams with us wherever we go. But it isn't coming to an end yet."
"How long will it last?"
"Until the sun gets cold," said Martin, catching her mood, "and there's a chill in the air."
She slipped down a little so that he should see the light in her eyes. There was hardly an inch between their lips, and the only sound was the beating of her heart. Youth and July and the scent of honeysuckle.
"I thought I was dead when you helped me out of that wreck," she went on in a quivering voice, and her long-fingered hand on his face. "I think I must be really dead to-night. Surely this is too sweet to be life."
"Dear little Tootles," said Martin softly. She was so close that he could feel the rise and fall of her breasts. "Don't let's talk of death. We're too young."
The sap was stirring in his veins. She was like a fairy, this girl, who ought never to have wandered into a city.
"Martin," she said, "when the sun gets cold and there's a chill in the air will you ever come back to this hour in a dream?"
"Often, Tootles, my dear."
"And will you see the light in my eyes and feel my hands on your face and my lips on your lips?"
She bent forward and put them there and drew back with a shaking sob and scrambled up and fled.
She had seen the others coming, but that was not why she had torn herself away. One flash of sex was enough that night. The next time he must do the kissing.
Eve and July and the scent of honeysuckle!
Breakfast was on the table. To Irene, who came down in her dressinggown with her hair just bundled up and her face coated with powder, eight o'clock was an unearthly hour at which to begin the day. In New York she slept until eleven, read the paper until twelve, cooked and disposed of a combined breakfast-lunch at one, and if it was a matinee day, rushed round to the theater, and if it wasn't, killed time until her work called her in the evening. A boob's life, as she called it, was a trying business, but the tyranny of the bustling woman with whom she lodged was such that if breakfast was not eaten at eight o'clock it was not there to eat. Like an English undergraduate who scrambles out of bed to attend Chapel simply to avoid a fine, this product of Broadway theaterdom conformed to the rule of Mrs. Burrell's energetic house because the good air of Devon gave her a voracious appetite. Then, too, even if she missed breakfast, she had to pay for it, "so there you are, old dear."
Tootles, up with the lark as usual, was down among the ducks, giving Farmer Burrell a useful hand. She delighted in doing so. From a country grandfather she had inherited a love of animals and of the early freshness of the morning that found eager expression, now that she had the chance of giving it full rein. Then, too, all that was maternal in her nature warmed at the sight and sound of all those new, soft, yellow things that waddled closely behind the wagging tails of their mothers, and it gave her a sort of sweet comfort to go down on her knees and hold one of these frightened babies against her cheek.
Crying out, "Oo-oo, Tootles," from halfway down the cinder path, Irene, stimulated by the aroma of hot coffee and toast, and eggs and bacon, returned to the living room and fell to humming, "You're here and I'm here."
Tootles joined her immediately, a very different looking little person from the tired-eyed, yawning girl of the city rabbit warren. Health was in her eyes and a little smile at the corners of her mouth. Quick work was made of the meal to the intermittent duck talk of Mrs. Burrell who came in and out of the kitchen through a creaking door,—a normal, noisy soul, to whom life was a succession of laborious days spent between the cooking stove and the washtub with a regular Saturday night, in her best clothes, at the motion-picture theater at Sag Harbor to gape at the abnormality of Theda Bara and scream with uncontrolled mirth at the ingenious antics of Charlie Chaplin. An ancient Ford made possible this weekly dip into these intense excitements.
And then the two girls left the living room with its inevitable rocking chairs and framed texts and old heating stove with a funnel through the wall and went out into the sun.
"Well, dearie," said Irene, sitting on the edge of the stoop, within sound of the squeaking of a many-armed clothes drier, teased by a nice sailing wind. "Us for the yawl to-day."
"You for the yawl," said Tootles. "I'm staying here to help old man Burrell. It's his busy day."
Irene looked up quickly. "What's the idea?"
"Just that,—and something else. I don't want to see Martin till this evening. I moved things last night, and I want him to miss me a bit."
"Ah," said Irene. "I guessed it meant something when you made that quick exit when we moved up. Have you got him, dearie?"
Tootles shot out a queer little sigh and nodded.
"That's fine. He's not like the others, is he? But you've played him great. Oh, I've seen it all, never you fear. Subtle, old dear, very subtle. Shouldn't have had the patience myself. Go in and win. He's worth it." Tootles put her hands over her face and a great sob shook her.
In an instant, Irene had her in her arms. "Dear old Tootles," she said, "it means an awful lot to you, don't it? Don't give way, girlie. You've done mighty well so far. Now follow it up, hot and fast. That boy's got a big heart and he's generous and kind, and he won't forget. I brought you here for this, such a chance as it was, and if I can see you properly fixed up and happy, my old uncle's little bit of velvet will have come in mighty useful, eh? Got a plan for to-night?"
Tootles nodded again. "If I don't win to-night," she said, "it's all over. I shall have to own that he cares for me less than the dust. I shall have to throw up my hands and creep away and hide. Oh, my God, am I such a rotten little freak as all that, Irene? Tell me, go on, tell me."
"Freak? You! For Heaven's sake. Don't the two front rows give nobody but you the supper signal whenever the chorus is on?"
"But they're not like Martin. He's,—well, I dunno just what he is. For one thing there's that butterfly he's married to. He's never said as much as half a word about her to me, but the look that came into his eyes when he saw her the night I told you about,—I'd be run over by a train for it any time. He's a man alright and wants love as bad as I do. I know that, but sometimes, when I watch his face, when neither of us is talking, there's a queer smile on it, like a man who's looking up at somebody, and he sets his jaw and squares his shoulders just as if he had heard a voice telling him to play straight. Many times I've seen it, Irene, and after that I have to begin all over again. I respect him for it, and it makes me love him more and more. I've never had the luck to meet a man like him. The world would be a bit less rotten for the likes of you and me if there were more of him about, I tell you. But it hurts me like the devil because it makes me feel no better than a shoe with the buttons off and the heel all worn down, and I ask myself what's the blooming use. But last night I kissed him, and I saw his eyes glint for the first time and to-night,—to-night, Irene, I'm going to play my last card. Yes, that's what I'm going to do, play the last card in the pack."
"How?" asked Irene eagerly, sympathy and curiosity bubbling to the top.
Tootles shook her head. "It isn't lucky to go talking about it." she said, with a most wistful smile. "You'll know whether it's the heights or the depths for me when you see me in the morning."
"In the morning? Shan't you be..."
"Don't ask. Just wish me luck and go and have a good day with the boys. I shall be waiting for you at the cottage. And now I'm off down to the ducks. Say I've got a headache and don't let 'em come round and try to fetch me. So long, Irene; you've been some pal to me through this and I shall never forget."
Whereupon Tootles went off to lend the unloquacious Burrell a helping hand, and Irene ran up to the bedroom to dress.
From the pompous veranda of the Hosack place Gilbert Palgrave, sick with jealousy, watched Joan swimming out to the barrels with that cursed boy in tow. And he, too, had made up his mind to play his last card that night.
Man and woman and love,—the old, inevitable story.