CHAPTER XXXIV
Pattyhad a linen cover stretched tight over the parlor carpet. She got in an appalling amount of supper material; oyster soup in gallons,dinde aux truffesby the pound, ice cream in gallons, jellies, custards, cakes, preserves; punch by the keg, and champagne bottles by the regiment.
Everybody came. St. John’s Park was a-roar with carriages and bawling coachmen and footmen, some of them in livery. Tactless people set Patty’s teeth on edge by saying that it was well worth while coming “downtown” to see her; and Immy such a lady! She’d be making Patty a grandmother any of these days!
For a time RoBards enjoyed the thrill, the dressed-up old women and old men and the young people all hilarious and beautiful with youth.
He had his acid tastes, too, for many of the people congratulated him on the reported successes of his old crony, Captain Chalender. He was reputed to be a millionaire at least, and one of the best loved men in California—and coming home soon, it was rumored. And was that true?
“So I’ve heard,” RoBards must murmur a dozen times, wondering how far away Chalender would have to go to be really absent from his home.
The house throbbed with dance music, the clamor and susurrus of scandal along the wall line of matrons, the laughter; the eddies the dancers made; young men in black and pink girls in vast skirts like huge many-petaled roses twirled round and round.
It amazed RoBards to see how popular Immy was. She was wrangled over by throngs of men. Her color was higher than her liquid rouge explained; her eyes were bright, and she spoke with an aristocratic lilt her father had never heard her use.
Keith was as tall and as handsome as any young blade there, and his father could hardly believe that the boy could be so gallant, so gay, so successful with so many adoring girls.
It was good to see so much joy in the home he had made for the children whose sorrows had been so many and so real. But as the evening grew old and the crowd thickened, his cheerfulness flagged. Perhaps he was merely fatigued with the outgo of welcome, sickened by having to say and hear the same things so many times.
But he saw the picnic becoming a revel. The dancers, whether waltzing or polking, seemed to increase in audacity, in blind or shameless abandonment to thoughts and moods that belonged to solitude if anywhere.
As he wandered about he surprised couples stealing embraces or kisses slily, or whispering guiltily, laughing with more than mischief. Sometimes it was Immy that he encountered; sometimes Keith.
What could he say or do? Nothing but pretend to be sightless and guileless.
When the supper hour was reached, the rush was incredible. Men made a joke of the crassest behavior, and a chivalric pretense that they were fighting for refreshment to carry to their fainting ladies. But it was neither humorous nor knightly to spill oyster soup over a lace dress, to tilt ice cream down a broadcloth back, or to grind fallen custard into the expensive carpet.
It was not pretty to empty the dregs of somebody’s else champagne into the oyster tureen or under the table, and while refilling the glass let the wine froth all over the table cover.
Many of the squires forgot their dames and drank themselves into states of truculence, or, worse, of odious nausea. RoBards had to convey two young gentlemen of better family than breeding up to the hatroom to sleep off their liquor; and he had to ask some of the soberer youth to help him run one sudden fiend out to the sidewalk and into a carriage.
While RoBards was spreading one of his young guests outon a bed upstairs, another knocked over the cutglass punch-bowl and cracked it irretrievably, together with a dozen engraved straw-stem glasses Patty’s father had left to her.
When the German began at about midnight some of the men dared to carry champagne bottles with them and set them down by their chairs for reference during the pauses in the figures.
Hosts and hostesses were supposed to ignore the misconduct of their guests, but it made RoBards’ blood run cold to see Immy go from the arms of a decent respectful sober youth into the arms and the liquorous embrace of a drunken faun whom she had to support.
He ventured to whisper a protest to her once. But she answered:
“Papa! don’t be ridiculous! A girl can’t discriminate. I can’t hurt a poor boy’s feelings just because he can’t carry his liquor as well as the rest. Besides, I’m the hostess.”
Her father cast his eyes up in helplessness at such a creed.
But even Immy and Patty could not ignore the ill fortune of Barbara Salem, whose partner was so tipsy that he reeled her into a handsome buhl escritoire and broke the glass door with Barbara’s head, then fell with her to the floor and gaped while the blood from her slashed brow ran through her hair and over her white shoulders and her white dress and soaked through the linen cover into the carpet beneath.
Old Mr. and Mrs. Salem were aghast at the family calamity, while the young man wept himself almost sober with remorse. Keith’s coat was stained with red as he carried Barbara upstairs to a bedroom to wait for the doctor.
In the ladies’ dressing-room, which Keith had to invade, two young women had already fainted; both from tight stays, they said. One of them was half undressed and unlacing her corsets with more wisdom than her heavy eyes indicated.
Immy put Keith out and ministered to the casualties.
But the dance went on. Some old prudes were shocked,but the rest said, “A party is a party, and accidents will happen.”
Dear old Mrs. Piccard said to Patty:
“You’re lucky in having only two carpets ruined, my dear. I had three destroyed at my last reception. But it’s nothing to what went on in the good old days, if the truth were told. My father was with General Washington, you know. And really——! Papa was with the army that night when General Washington himself danced with General Greene’s wife for three hours without sitting down. Those were the heroic days, my dear! And drinking! Our young men are comparatively abstemious.”
Finally the more merciful guests began to go home, leaving the dregs behind. Young men who would doze and make mistakes at the counting houses the next day, lingered as if it were the last night of earth.
There was torture for RoBards in Immy’s zest, in the look of her eyes as she stared up into the unspeakable gaze of some notorious rake; and in the welding of her sacred body to his in a matrimonial embrace as they waltzed round and round giddily. Yet how much bitterer a wound it was to see her transfer herself for the next dance to another man and pour up into his fatuous eyes the same look of helpless passion!
The performance repeated in a third man’s bosom was confusion. RoBards had either to turn on his heel or commit murder. And he really could not murder all the young men whom Immy maddened. Indeed, he was not sufficiently satisfied with his first murder to repeat the experiment.
Yet Immy kept her head through it all; flirted, plotted, showed the ideal Arabian hospitality in her dances. But no one made a fool of her.
Keith, however, was overwhelmed. It was his first experience with unlimited champagne, and he had thought it his duty to force it on his guests and join them in every glass. It was disgraceful to leave a heeltap. When he could no longer stand up or dance, he had to be carried upstairs, moaning, “It’s a shame to deshert guesh.”
A boy and drunk! And weeping, not for being drunk but for not being the last man drunk!
The world was ready for the Deluge! The American nation was rotten to the core and would crumble at the first test.
This dance at the RoBards home was typical, rather more respectable than many. All over town dances were held in dance halls where the middle classes went through the same gyrations with less grace, and in the vile dens of the Five Points where all were swine.
Patty was too tired to speak or listen when the last guest was gone. She could hardly keep awake long enough to get out of her gown.
She sighed: “I’m old! I’m ready to admit it. I’m glad I’m old. I’m never going to try to pretend again! I don’t want ever to be so tired again. If anybody wakes me to-morrow I’ll commit murder. In God’s name, will you never get those stay-laces untied?”
RoBards drew out a knife and slashed them and they snapped like violin strings, releasing the crowded flesh.
Patty groaned with delight and peeling off her bodice stepped out of the petticoats and kicked them across the floor. She spent a while voluptuously rubbing her galled sides; then lifted her nightgown and let it cascade about her, and fell into bed like a young tree coming down.