KISS me again," said Jock, because it was the thing to say.
"Won't," said Molly.
But she did. That was the trouble with women, Jock reflected drearily during the kiss. If one of them would only just once decline and stick to it, he felt that the whole status of the sex would be considerably elevated and life made much more piquant. . . .
They were seated in a limousine parked outside the Country Club. The owner of the limousine, a lady much too old to be pleasant, was parked inside the Country Club, engrossed in meditations anent the letter she was going to write to the House Committee the next morning on "what goes on at these dances!" She was fortunately unaware of what went on in her automobile; of the pressure of lip to lip under its shadows; of the cigarette ashes that had been tossed upon its velvet carpet; and of the fact that Jock would, upon leaving, filch the single perfect rosebud from the little glass cornucopia and tuck it into his coat lapel. . . .
"You going to miss me this winter, Jock?"
"Of course."
"Much?"
"Frightfully."
Molly shook her head. "You won't, though," she said sadly. "You'll forget all about me the minute you get back to college."
Jock thought that in all probability she was quite right, but he refrained from saying so. He replied instead, "Now don't be a little idiot—how could I?"
"Then you care a tiny bit about me," persisted Molly.
"Sure," said Jock. But his mind groaned. He was that slightly unhappy creature, a young man whom girls loved too easily and too well and much too long. He developed fragmentary fascinations, wearied of them soon, and then invariably found to his dismay that their objects clung on with a sort of feverish desperation. Like Molly now. "Then you care a tiny bit about me?"—why, good Lord, couldn't she tell that he didn't, any longer? Couldn't she have told weeks ago? Girls were so obtuse. Or were they merely stubborn, refusing to see anything which they preferred not to see?
"Let's go in," he suggested after a pause. "We've ditched three or four dances as it is, and that music is too mean to miss."
They went, walking slowly along the gravel driveway. Jock knew that Molly was hurt because he had terminated the tête-à-tête, knew without looking that her mouth would be pursed into that pout he had once thought so adorable, which now he longed to smack with the flat of his hand whenever he saw it. He kept his eyes straight ahead, and said nothing. Molly likewise said nothing. Doubtless she was ruminating on the faithlessness of man and the cruelty of life in general.
An arc light on the porte-cochère of the clubhouse picked them out of the darkness as they approached. By its glare, Molly was revealed as daintily blonde, and Jock
He was tall. And he moved as some tall people do with a leisurely loose-jointed grace. You could imagine that he danced well. In fact you could imagine that he did most things well—there was a jauntiness and an assurance about him that told you so. His shapely head was set arrogantly on big shoulders, and he had sleek black hair, brown eyes, a straight, short nose, and a mouth that slanted up at one corner lopsidedly when he smiled. Everything about him fitted everything else except that mouth. It was a sensitive, artistic, dreamy sort of mouth. It belonged to the boy Jock Hamill was really, but it did not in the least belong to the boy he requested the world to believe that he was.
"Darn!" said Molly suddenly.
She had paused below the arc light and was peering at such atom of her countenance as a vanity-mirror the size of a quarter reflected. "Look at me!" she continued. "I'm a wreck. I'll have to run around to the lockers and fix up a little, Jock, or everybody'll know where I've been. You go on in and wait for me."
Inside, in the club's spacious living room, it was dim and shadowy again. There were frosted electric bulbs around the walls, but they shed no illumination; merely bit orange holes into the curtain of gloom. The dancers were a close-packed huddle, swaying now this way, now that, as if the floor were afloat on ocean waves that rocked it just a little. Jazz beat against the eardrums . . . the blood . . . everyone, everything, moved to its beating . . .
One Benny Webber, a fat youth faintly redolent of gin, came and paused beside Jock in the doorway. "What do you think of her," he demanded without preamble.
"Who?"
Benny's eyes widened. "Good goat, man, haven't you seen her? Where've you been the last half hour? Look—look over there—no, there—dancing with Bill Parks"
"Who is she?" queried Jock in a new tone.
"Her name's Yvonne and she's from New York," said Benny. "That's all I know about her. I've cut in four times now, but every time I no more than pop off a cordial 'hello' before some fathead cuts in on me. Did you ever see a smoother job, though, no kidding?"
Jock was forced to admit that he never had. The girl was more than lovely; she was spectacular. Red hair, tight black gown ornamented solely by a diamond bar pin and the faultless figure of the wearer—she compelled the eye, seemed to dare you not to stare at her and to laugh at you because you couldn't help it. Intently he watched her progress around the room . . . so intently that he failed at first to hear the voice of the club steward at his ear. "Mr. Hamill! Message for you, Mr. Hamill!"
A scrap of paper, folded twice, and addressed to him in Molly's writing. "I've gone home, Jock," it ran, "with Alice and her husband. You were so cool to me—and on our last evening together, too—that I just couldn't stand coming back and dancing around as though nothing had happened."
Jock thrust this missive into the pocket of his dinner coat, his sole sensation one of relief. An instant later he was bearing down upon the girl named Yvonne, the girl named Molly dismissed from his mind as completely as though she had never had a place there.
"May I cut, please?"
Another instant, and he was dancing with her. "Look here," he began abruptly, "who are you, anyway?"
"Don't you read the papers?"
Jock would have reason to remember this reply in future, but at the time he judged it to be only a part of her line. "Tell me," he begged.
"My name is Yvonne Mountford. And yours is Jock Hamill, isn't it?"
"Yes, how did you know?"
He could not hear her laugh, but he could feel it—a swift exhalation of breath against his neck. "I came to this dance with Toby Jennings," she explained, "and on the way out from New York he said, 'There'll be a man here you'll like. Jock Hamill.' I said, 'Why will I like him?' and Toby said, 'Because all women do.' The minute I saw you I knew you must be the one."
If this had been intended to flatter Jock, it missed fire. He said nothing, and presently Yvonne allowed her head to droop backward so she could look up at him quizzically. "You hate that, don't you," she observed. "I'm glad you hate it. Toby said that men liked you too—does that make you feel any better?"
"Much," Jock told her truthfully. "Fellows that women like and other fellows don't are always—well, I wouldn't want to think I was one of them. You dance," he added, "just the way you look."
"And that is?"
At this point they were interrupted by a person who whacked Jock upon the back and gathered Yvonne into his arms in one determined swoop.
Jock repaired to the wall and fumed there through an impatient interval. Then he cut in again. "You're invited to a football game."
"I accept," said Yvonne promptly. 'What football game is it?"
He told her, and then on second thought invited her to another. He would have included the autumn prom as well had it not been for Molly, whose presence at that noteworthy event he had requested in a moment of aberration weeks ago. Molly was angry tonight, but he reflected mournfully that she would not be angry by the time prom was due. Experience had taught him that girls always chirked up considerably then, like children behaving themselves just before Christmas.
He relinquished Yvonne again, this time at the plaintive behest of Benny Webber. When next he danced with her she said, after a moment, "Where are we going? Not that it matters."
"We're going out," announced Jock, who had steered her in a straight line to the nearest doorway. "I want to talk to you, and I don't want any more interruptions."
He rather expected her to protest. Most girls would have, at least a little, as a coy preliminary to giving in. But this girl did not. She accompanied him through the doorway and into the night without a murmur.
"For another thing," Jock continued, en route, "there's an arc light out here that tells no lies. I want to find out if you can possibly be as beautiful as you seem."
Under the arc light he tilted her chin with his forefinger and scrutinized her gravely and at some length. Heart-shaped face, with the firm little chin for its point and the V into which her hair grew on her forehead to form its dipping upper line. White skin, white as white flower petals, and as soft, and as fragrant. Long wise eyes, slanting. Feathery lashes. A small full mouth, open just a trifle now so that her teeth could catch the lower lip—like ivory on scarlet satin
"You are," he concluded at last.
They chose a car from the many standing empty along the driveway and climbed into it. The car was not a limousine; certainly not the limousine. Jock had an instinctive delicacy in such matters. This was a touring car with its top down, so that they were canopied only by stars and a thin blonde eyebrow of moon.
Yvonne slid low in her seat and, locking her fingers behind her head, stared upward thoughtfully. "I'm glad you brought me out," she remarked. "I was tired of being jerked around by twenty or thirty different partners, most of them drunk. It's a hard life for a girl."
"It must be!" Jock scoffed. "No doubt you have a hell of a time of it."
"I do." She sounded entirely serious. There was a pause, after which she continued. "For instance, take the present circumstance. I came out here with you because I wanted to rest, but you brought me out because you thought you could kiss me. Didn't you?" Her slanting eyes, trained on him suddenly, were challenging.
"Maybe," said Jock, a bit nonplussed but resolved not to betray it.
"You can't."
"Why can't I?"
"Because I'm not such a fool as to let you."
"I'm not such a fool as not to try!" retorted Jock. And did try. And was increasingly charmed because he did not succeed.
"Now that we have that settled," Yvonne said after another pause, "change seats with me, will you?"
He obeyed, wonderingly, and she took his place under the steering wheel and stepped on the starter. "Suppose I can get any speed out of this?"
"Say, but it's not mine, you know! Mine's parked over there."
"Who cares whose it is? Don't be dull, Jock Hamill."
She threw the car into gear and pointed it down the drive. As they fled past the clubhouse the saxophones from within seemed to be jeering at them—"Yah-yah-yah"—like impudent urchins with their thumbs at their noses. Jock looked to see whether anyone watched their departure, but apparently did no one. Swiftly they reached the main road, swung into it with a backward spatter of gravel, and headed south.
He said, "Now it's my turn to say 'Where are we going? Not that it matters.'"
"Nowhere in particular," answered Yvonne. "We're just going. Don't talk, Jock Hamill. I don't like to talk when I'm riding. I like to sing, though," she added.
She had a strange voice, haunting, with a sob in it. It made you think of things. Plantation nights. Wind in pine trees. Plaint of a restless sea. Things you had lost. Things you had forgotten. Things you were groping for blindly and would never quite achieve. . . . Jock closed his eyes as he listened. Gradually he lost the world, in a sort of way, and became conscious only of breathless motion and of Yvonne, beside him, singing into the dark . . .
They rode for half an hour. Not until they were back at the club again, and the machine was resting precisely over the puddle of oil that marked its original stand, did either of them speak. Then Jock said, "Where in the world did you learn to sing like that?"
Yvonne disregarded the question. "The only kick I get out of life any more," she said, "is driving seventy miles an hour. You love it, too, don't you?" Then, as Jock nodded, "You would, of course. You're like me. Mad. All the people worth knowing are a little mad."
She thrust a hand down the front of her gown and brought forth a powder puff and an eyebrow pencil wrapped in a scented handkerchief.
"Now don't do that!" Jock commanded quickly.
"Don't do what?"
"Don't make up when someone is looking. Other girls can if they want to, but you ought not to, ever. It spoils the illusion."
"I'm not going to make up, silly! I'm going to give you my address."
She wrote it with the eyebrow pencil on Jock's cuff, well up, so that the sleeve of his coat covered it. "That's for you, remember. Not solely for the benefit of some Chinese laundryman."
"Tomorrow," said Jock, "I'm going back to college. I'll stop in New York on my way through and take you to lunch—if I may."
She said that he might.
Retrospection is here necessary:
Jock Hamill had been born on a February night in the second year of the twentieth century. He was extremely deliberate and troublesome about it, and succeeded in so terrifying his mother that he became not only the first child she ever had, but the last. His early life was quite normal. It included the drooly period, the crawly period, and the thrilling period of walkversus-tumble. It included kindergarten, mumps, the public school, Horatio Alger, stamp-collecting, measles, circuses, and a complete disregard of the rules of personal cleanliness, all in the natural juvenile order. The Santa Claus theory was duly exploded, and Jock had learned with excitement and dismay that storks do not occupy the position of exceeding importance in the world that is so often attributed to them. He became aware that gentlemen like his father might put their feet on desks if they so desired but that ladies like his mother must not, and puzzled a good deal over the reason for such unseemly partiality.
The fact that he had no brothers was a source of intense annoyance to him throughout his childhood. He observed that his friends had brothers (sisters, of course, did not count) and he desired greatly to possess a few of his own. At the age of seven, having been carefully imbued with faith in the efficacy of prayer, he besought God to send him a twin. When God neglected to comply, Jock became a rabid atheist. Into the ears of chosen contemporaries he whispered arguments against the probability of there being such a personage as God, and for a long time maintained a deep conviction that the Supreme Being was just another myth, like Santa, devised by parents for the general befuddlement of the rising generation.
When he was eight his father died. He found this very curious, and pondered at length upon it. First you were; and then all of a sudden you were not, and they put you in a box and hid you somewhere. He missed his father at first, but not for a great while. In time he recalled him only as a big man who had known a lot about baseball but who now dwelt somewhere where there would be no baseball. It hardly seemed right, but there it was.
Not very long afterward—possibly a year—there had taken place a change in his small world, a tremendous Cinderella sort of change. He and his mother moved from a little house in Pennsylvania to a great house in northern New Jersey, and had many servants to wait upon them and many motor cars in which to ride. He was young enough at the time to take this quite for granted. The things that happened to you that were not good were the things you asked questions about; the things that were good spoke for themselves. Besides, the new home came soon to be to him merely a stopping-off place between seasons. He spent his summers at a camp beside a birch-shored lake, where he lived in a tent with ten other boys, and swam three times a day, and was sunburned a dusky gold, and worshiped his counselor because he played end for Dartmouth. In the winter he attended a boarding-school in Massachusetts, quite a famous boarding-school with ivy-clad buildings and ancient traditions. Here he mingled with the sons of the great and of the merely wealthy, and through them became acquainted with divers things not mentioned in the curriculum—notably slang, Latin trots, risqué jokes, profanity, hair-slickum, salacious literature, and the hitherto quite unsuspected importance of the opposite sex.
In due time he graduated, and went to a certain University, where he spent a bewildered first year, a rather uproarious second, and a busy third . . .
Surely there had been little in these twenty-two years of living to cause Jock to differ from other young men. And unless you were a keen analyst you probably would not have perceived that he did differ, for he concealed it well under the mask he wore before the world. Outwardly he typified Modern Youth; he was gay, unthinking, uncaring. Inwardly he was intensely emotional, visionary, an idealist. This made him ashamed. He was ashamed of the verse that he wrote sometimes in secret, and of the things he thought about, and of the things he enjoyed. He preferred Beethoven to Irving Berlin, Henry James to Ring Lardner, Leonardo da Vinci to Coles Phillips, Pavlowa to Gilda Gray—but such tastes would have earned the withering scorn of his contemporaries, and not for anything would he have acknowledged them.
Where girls were concerned his romanticism reached its apex. He had an Ideal, long cherished in his heart. She must be thus. And thus. He was forever seeking her, forever thinking briefly that he had found her, forever learning at last that he was wrong—that he had mistaken glitter for gold. It had been so with Molly, and with a long succession of previous Mollys, now relegated to that sorry corner of the memory where human beings pigeon-hole their disappointments.
At two o'clock in the morning Jock reached home. He entered through the kitchen door, having left his machine in the garage at the rear. "Company, Bennett?" he asked of the butler, whom he found in the act of loading a tray with sandwiches and bottles.
Bennett looked aggrieved. His expression said plainly, "Isn't there always company?" His lips said "Yes, sir."
"Who?"
"Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Phelps and Mr. Barbour, sir. They're playing bridge."
Jock was displeased. He wanted to talk with his mother, and he knew that if she had a bridge game on he might quite possibly have to postpone the talk for hours, late though it already was. Mrs. Hamill made a religion of bridge. She played it with a passionate intensity that amounted almost to fever, often from dinner until dawn, and she would under no circumstances allow herself to be interrupted.
"I think they'll quit soon, sir," added Bennett hopefully. "I heard Mr. Barbour say he had to go after the next rubber."
Jock scooped up a handful of sandwiches and made his way to the front of the house, munching as he went. By the door of the den he stopped and stood hesitant. He could hear the little swishing slap of thin paste-boards on a patent leather table-top; aside from that, the silence was absolute. When a sudden outbreak of voices told him that the hand was over, he sauntered in.
"But Henry, my dear!" Mrs. Hamill was expostulating. "Why on earth play the eight spot in a case like that, when you knew very well I had—" She broke off. "Hello, Jock," she said, and smiled at him. "Do sit down, my dear, and observe the peculiar maneuvers of Mr. Henry Barbour. I want you to learn from him how not to play bridge!"
Mrs. Hamill was the kind of woman who can make such remarks and, in the modern parlance, get away with them. No one ever waxed wroth at Mrs. Hamill. No man, that is. She was too altogether exquisite. She had great brown eyes, dark brows and lashes, astonishing silver hair, which she wore cut in a shingle bob, a small slim figure, and hands as soft and appealing as a baby's. Hands to be kissed, those. Hands to be caught and held in bigger hands, intensely. Hands to reach out in pretty supplication and to close tight like little white bars across what was given. . . . Her age was problematical. It seemed to vary with her gowns, with her moods, with her companions, until it ran the whole scale of the years between twenty-five and forty-five. What it actually was Jock never knew. Once, long ago, he had asked, and Madelaine Hamill had answered him almost savagely, "I have forgotten. On purpose." This served to whet his curiosity, so that thereafter he watched and wondered, and came in time to the confusing realization that his mother was young with men, middle-aged with women, and old when she was alone.
Jock sat down as she had directed, greeting the three men each in turn. They were frequent visitors to the house and he knew them all well—Saunders Lincoln, of the iron-gray hair and the still-athletic figure, so particularly well that he had called him "Uncle Link" and received from him rather breath-taking checks at Christmas almost ever since he could remember. "Uncle" was here merely a term of familiarity, however; Saunders Lincoln was not a relative. "Why don't you marry him?" Jock had demanded of his mother on a former occasion, and had learned that he was already married to, and separated from, a woman who, on account of her religion, would not agree to a divorce.
"Marriage," Mrs. Hamill had added, "is a mistake for one of my temperament, anyhow. I'm too fond of men in general." Which was quite true. Her Utopia was a world peopled solely by men, with herself a gorgeous goddess before whom all did obeisance—not too impersonally. She could not bear women and women, of course, could not bear her. She made young ones feel too young, awkward, gauche; and older ones envious and faintly antagonistic.
"When's college start up again, Jock?" asked Saunders Lincoln now.
"I'm leaving tomorrow, sorry to say."
"Not anxious to get back, eh?"
"Not at all, no."
"Jock," announced Jock's mother casually, "is a liar. He's quite wild to get back, as a matter of fact. I'll bid one no trump."
This was the signal for all conversation to cease, so Jock had no opportunity to debate the point. He sprawled in his chair, sipping at a highball that had been handed him, and followed the play languidly with his glance. Presently he took a pencil and began to scribble on the back of a bridge-score. This absorbed him for some moments, after which he left the room, taking the paper with him. It was a poem to Yvonne, a poem beginning, "Oh voice that sings a song in the night, For the wind to carry forever"
Upstairs in his own quarters he read it aloud to himself. Then he said, "Punk!" rather sheepishly, and locked it away in a strong-box.
Later, when Mrs. Hamill ascended the stairs and tapped at his door, she found him stretched out across his bed in a fantastic green-and-black dressing-gown, reading Perfect Behavior by Donald Ogden Stewart. His reaction from exhibitions of sentiment on his own part was always humor on the part of others. "Makes me snap out of it," he would have said.
He grinned sociably at his mother. "Rover Boys gone home at last?"
"Yes, they've gone."
"Good game?"
"Excellent, except for Henry Barbour. The man is a perfect nitwit and persists in leading from the ace, despite my frenzied and perpetual protestations." She seated herself on the edge of the bed, took one of Jock's cigarettes and smoked it thoughtfully. "What's on your mind, Jocky?"
"Nothing."
"Nonsense! I knew there was something, the minute you came into the room."
Jock remained silent, and Mrs. Hamill, after a long glance at him, concluded that she must by indirections find directions out. "Have a good time at the dance?"
"Wonderful."
"How's Molly?"
"All right, I guess. She went home about ten o'clock." Jock's voice was noncommittal, but to his mother, who knew him very much better than mothers usually know their twenty-two-year-old sons, he told volumes.
"Who was there," she inquired.
"The usual mob. And—and a girl from New York."
Mrs. Hamill was quietly triumphant. "Oh, so Molly went home at ten o'clock and there was a girl from New York!" She shook her head reprovingly. "Jock dear, must I remind you that ninety-nine per cent of this world's hapless husbands are gentlemen who permitted themselves inadvertently to be caught on the rebound?"
"I'm not 'caught'," Jock protested, but without conviction.
"What's her name?"
"Yvonne Mountford."
Between Mrs. Hamill's eyes there appeared a wrinkle—promptly erased, because wrinkles are vicious things with a tendency to stay where they're put. "That name sounds familiar," she mused, "but I can't think—well, what does she look like?"
"Red hair," said Jock succinctly.
"Oh."
Jock got up, with a conclusive air of having disposed of the topic to everyone's satisfaction, and began to pack the silver-lettered bowl of his pipe with tobacco. "Now!" he said. "How 'bout my allowance for this year?"
She mentioned a generous sum. Sums in that household were always generous, "That's the berries," approved Jock, "but can you afford it?"
"I think so."
"It's a lot of money."
"I have a lot of money, Jock," said Mrs. Hamill. "More than I can spend by myself."
Jock knew that this was so. Had you asked him where the money came from he would doubtless have said, "Oil, or something," rather vaguely; but that it did come, in large quantities, he was well aware. His understanding was that investments made by his father years ago had since proved unexpectedly prosperous, putting his mother and himself on easy street. Beyond a certain gratitude and a fleeting mental tribute to his father's business acumen, he gave the matter no thought whatever.
Yvonne was not again mentioned in the conversation. But when Mrs. Hamill had gone to her own room and was seated before her dressing table, gazing at her reflection over a corps of assorted bottles and jars, she repeated the name over. "Yvonne Mountford. Now where have I heard that before?" Bye and bye she sighed, "Poor Molly!"
Mrs. Hamill had more than the usual maternal conviction that if she were younger, and if Jock were not her son, she would be violently and utterly in love with him; hence she could sigh, at times, for girls he did not love.
He leaned his elbows on the ferry-boat's rail and contemplated New York as he approached it. He was thinking of many matters. Of Yvonne. Of college. Of that girl—young school teacher, wasn't she?—who had once slipped off the front of one such ferry as this in her car, with only ripples and a scattering of white flowers on dark Hudson waters to mark her final resting-place. "Tough," he told himself. "Tough!" Still, it had been rather an impressive way to die. . . .
The boat bumped into place at a landing, and from its capacious maw spat vehicle after vehicle into New York. Jock headed his roadster uptown. As always, the city disappointed him. When he was away fronmvit he thought only of its splendor, its magnificence, its capacity for romance and odd happenings. But when he was actually in it, as now, moving along between walls that reached upward toward infinity, the glamour was gone; and in its place there was only the stark reality of noise, and hustle, and endless faces that were never the same yet somehow always the same, hard and tired and over-painted.
Yvonne's apartment house was an imposing one on Park Avenue. Jock reached it at twelve-fifteen exactly, and having reached it, drove away again with only a momentary pause at the curb. He had decided that twelve-fifteen was too early.
Twelve-twenty-five found him at his own University Club, hailing a jovial ruddy-cheeked individual with marked enthusiasm. "Pink Davis! Lord, I'm glad to see you! How's the boy?"
The boy, it developed, was in excellent health and spirits. He and Jock shook hands with that weird complication of fingers that betokens a fraternal alliance, then retreated to a divan and called for ginger ale, not because they cared at all for ginger ale but because they cared even less for the acrid taste of bootleg whiskey au naturel.
"Didn't expect to see you till four," chattered Pink. "Wasn't that what you wired—four o'clock sharp, here in the lobby? Say, by the way, I ran into Dopey Lane and Bill Olmstead down in the grill a while ago, eating to beat hell so they could catch the noon train, and I told 'em to wait over and you'd take 'em down too in your bus. Hope you've got room."
"Plenty," said Jock promptly. "It's a roadster, but it's held ten in its day. Might as well make this a good trip"
"Sure," agreed Pink. "That's what I thought. Drink and be merry for tomorrow we compulsory-chapel. Well, ole hoss, what kind of a summer did you have?"
Exchange of confidences, Pink's somewhat lurid, Jock's characteristically restrained, occupied the next hour. Then Jock got into his roadster again and returned to Park Avenue. From believing that twelve-fifteen was too early he now became panic-stricken for fear one-thirty was too late, and began to dart in perilous zigzags through the traffic in an effort to get ahead. He was scolded by a policeman and sworn at by several taxi-drivers. His relief when the man at the switchboard in the imposing apartment house told him Miss Mountford was in and expecting him approached ecstasy.
She met him at the door, wearing a gown of demure color—gray—but of lines very far from demure. Her shoes and stockings matched the gown, and the string of beads tight about her throat were the shade of her hair. Study in gray and red. Even her eyes, which he had observed before only as wise and slanting, were gray, the daylight showed him—an odd blue-gray, like fog on an ocean harbor.
"You're not late," she said in response to his hurried apology. "That is, no later than most college men. Come in, Jock Hamill."
The room into which she conducted him was large, but it seemed small because it was so very full of things. A grand piano, two cushion-littered divans, many deep chairs, smoking stands, tables of all shapes and sizes heaped high with magazines, a spinet desk that oozed letters—all combined to give an effect of cheerful and luxurious confusion. While Yvonne went to don a hat, Jock had opportunity to examine it more in detail. He noted evidences of a bizarre, erotic taste in reading-matter, and the walls reminded him of a theater lobby, so decked were they with photographs of stage and screen celebrities. These were framed, and variously autographed. Yvonne, with love from So-and-So; Yvonne, with every good wish from So-and-So else. "Wonder if she's an actress herself?" Jock speculated, and became suddenly aware that he knew nothing whatever of this girl save her name and her visible loveliness.
Later, when they were seated face to face across a square of damask in a famous restaurant, he put something of this into words. "You haven't told me anything about you."
"Why should I?"
"Well, we're going to be friends, aren't we?"
"Can't we be friends without swapping biographies?"
Jock smiled. "You're the only woman I ever met in my life who didn't like to talk about herself," he told her.
"I do like to, in the abstract," said Yvonne. "I like to talk about my theories and philosophies. But where I was born, and what I do, and how I live—those things I refuse to discuss. Discussing them bores me."
"Tell me about your ideas, then."
Yvonne put her chin on her hands and looked at him reflectively—almost mockingly, Jock fancied. "You won't like them," she said at last. "They're pagan."
"I'll love them," he retorted. "They're yours."
Yvonne began. "Well, for one thing, I don't believe in God. Nor religion. Nor any hereafter. I put no more faith in the Bible than I would in a—a bedtime story! When I die I expect to be through, permanently and positively. Hence—carpe diem. I want to try everything once before I die—everything, however wicked. As a matter of fact what's wicked and what isn't? Who knows? Do you? Do the smug little men up in pulpits? Why do you think old people's eyes are sad, Jock Hamill? Do you think they're sad with repentance? I think they're sad with uncommitted sins."
All this poured from her lips in short staccato sentences, each one of them a lash across Jock's mind. He was aroused and fascinated.
"And when I do die," she continued, "I want to die the way I've lived. Sensationally." (As the girl on the ferry, thought Jock.) "If I were a man I'd be a racing-driver. I love the way they die. At the wheel. Expecting to, more or less, and not caring. I knew one who was killed a year or two ago. He had one conscious minute and all he said was, 'I think I could have gone a little faster.'"
Yvonne paused again, and traced hieroglyphics on the table cloth with the point of a glistening fingernail. Jock said nothing. Presently she went on. "I always thought it was rather pathetic about George Washington. After all he did, and all he went through, he finally died at home of a sore throat or something. He might at least have caught it at Valley Forge—that would have made it a little better. If I die of a common-or-garden disease like that I hope I catch it in some colorful way. Pneumonia from sitting at an Army-Navy game in the rain, or blood poison from putting lipstick on a cracked lip, or heart trouble from kissing somebody. Am I boring you?"
"I was never less bored in my life."
"I have a horror of boring people. Speaking of dying, I'd like to have this for an epitaph: 'Here lies the body of one who never bored anybody.' But I dare say it wouldn't be true. Anyway, to go on, I believe in freedom. In everything. I abhor rules and conventions. What right has any human being to tell me what I can and cannot do? Who are they, that they should"
Her voice ceased so abruptly that Jock glanced up in surprise—then turned his head to follow her wide stare. He saw a man approaching, a large man, perfectly groomed, and handsome in a well-kept, careful sort of way, so that you knew in all probability he carried about him that barber shop odor and was immensely fastidious about his collars and his fingernails.
He inclined his head gravely to Yvonne and raked Jock with cold light-blue eyes. He chose the table next them. As soon as he was seated, Yvonne rose without a word and left Jock to go to him.
She remained a long time. Or so it seemed. Jock sat meditating the things she had said. He disagreed with many of them—the atheistic ones in particular—and yet he rather liked them. They fitted Yvonne, somehow. She looked like a girl who would fear neither God nor man. "Probably she doesn't believe half of that, though," he told himself. "It's probably a pose. 'Try anything, however wicked'—easy to say, but she wouldn't, of course."
He wondered who the man was with whom she talked so intimately at the next table. He could hear the cadences of their voices behind him, but could distinguish no words. Until the very last; then he heard from Yvonne, "—you have me coming epigrams, Parke. Here's one: A jealous act is the X-ray picture of an inferiority complex"
When she returned to her own chair she was distrait. "Would you rather not talk?" asked Jock, after two or three unsuccessful attempts to reopen conversation.
"You talk. I'd like to listen."
To his surprise she did listen, attentively, with a quick shaking-off of her recent preoccupation. He could tell by her eyes that she was interested in what he said, and by the questions she asked that she wanted him to go on. Under this stimulus he found himself talking as he had never talked to any girl in his life; talking as he thought. And when they had finished their meal, on an impulse he would have believed impossible an hour before, he rewrote over the back of a menu-card the verse he had composed the previous night and slid it across to her.
She folded it and put it away in her mesh bag. "I'd rather read it when I'm alone," she said, and Jock liked that.
As they left the restaurant, he was conscious of a swift little hush and a hundred pairs of following eyes. He attributed such marked display of interest to Yvonne's beauty, and it elated him. He felt an immense superiority over all the men in the room with whom she had not been lunching. "You certainly knock 'em for a loop," he said in her ear with approval.
"Hum," answered Yvonne, "they look, but who knows what they're saying?"
Jock dismissed this as being mere idle cynicism, meaning nothing.
He left his machine outside the apartment house and accompanied her up in the elevator to her own door. "You won't come in, Jock Hamill," she said with her hand on the knob.
"I want to, but I can't possibly—have to meet some fellows at four and it's almost that now."
"You'll come again soon, though." It wasn't a question; it was a statement of recognized fact.
"Of course."
Yvonne stood looking at him a long moment out of her remarkable eyes,—a look that seemed to hypnotize him somehow, making him powerless to move or to say anything. Then without a word she vanished into the apartment and shut the door behind her.
Jock thought, waiting for the elevator to come for him again, how appropriate to herself were even the smallest things Yvonne did. Not commonplace. Not orthodox. Effectively different, like her appearance and her speech. "If she'd said good-bye, and thanked me for the luncheon, the way any other girl would have," he told himself, "I'd have had a let-down feeling, sort of."
After an interval he added more matter-of-factly, "Speaking of let-down feelings, where's the damn elevator?"
One finger punched the bell, and his handsome nose was thrust through the iron grating in an effort to determine what was wrong below, when Yvonne's door opened again. "Come here, Jock Hamill," she called softly.
Jock went, in two strides.
"I've just read the poem," said Yvonne. And rising on her tiptoes, put her lips against his . . .
When she withdrew them, slowly, she said, "Oh, I am sorry for you"
And was gone again.
Sublime to ridiculous was exactly the distance from Yvonne's apartment to the University Club. There Jock found an uproarious trio, who greeted him with huzzahs and immediate earnest requests to "drink up."
"As soon as you acquire as elegant a bun as we've got," said Dopey Lane, "the expedition starts."
The expedition started at quarter of five. It may best be described as seven suitcases, two instrument-cases, three traveling-bags, three bags of golf clubs, a steamer trunk, and four young gentlemen in sardine formation, all moving along in, on and about an equipage of an ilk not to be easily determined because there was little to be seen of itself except the wheels.
For a time the collective mentalities of the four young gentlemen were bent upon the intricate business of getting out of New York. But once they were out, and on the open road, they relaxed and became themselves. They hooted. They sang. Bill Olmstead rode for some time astride the hood, playing his saxophone, so that they might sing the better. Wearying of this, he perched upon the roadster's door and led a whistling chorus which all voted delightful. "The Four Horsemen of the Puckered Lips," announced Pink Davis in a shout to spellbound spectators.
As they passed through towns they bared their heads and bowed to right and left graciously, like Presidential candidates. Whenever a pretty girl was sighted they did more; they stopped the car, rose to their feet, and emitted a solemn cheer with three long "Momma's!" on the end. Once they were halted by an irate motor-cycle policeman, whom Pink soothed by slipping a flat brown bottle with a label interesting if true into his pocket.
"What did you do that for?" demanded Dopey as they drove away, waving back in a friendly fashion. "We could have talked him out of it, without shedding a pint of our hearts' blood."
"Yes," said Jock, "and besides, some day you'll get into trouble that way, Pink. You've got to remember there are a few honest cops in the world. Suppose he had happened to be a prohibition enforcement officer or something—what then?"
"Nothing then," replied Pink calmly. "That bottle didn't have a thing in it but water."
The total casualties of the trip were one dog, one—snake, and fourteen chickens. Of these, only the snake received proper obsequies; he was removed from the dust and entwined in state about the motor-meter.
They had one accident. From a hidden road running perpendicular to the highway, a small tin automobile laden—nay, jammed—with humans, hopped out at them unexpectedly. There was a slight jarring sensation, and Dopey and Bill, gazing back with interest as they dashed around a curve, reported that the small tin automobile was reclining on its side against the bank—"And heads popping out like Jack-in-theboxes, by gee!"
When the curve hid them safely from view they braked to a standstill and held consultation. Presently the occupants of the small tin automobile beheld four young men, pedestrians, coming toward them along the road. At sight of their predicament the pedestrians broke into a run and approached them in great concern, crying, "What's happened? Was there an accident?"
"Somethin' hit us," replied the owner of the machine vaguely. He was a rat-like person, little and frightened-looking, and busily engaged in extricating himself from a seething tangle of arms and legs. He addressed these collectively. "Anybody hurt?" And then individually. "Are you all right, Ma? Mary? All right, Joe? All right, Lucy? How're you, Junior? Where's Tom? All right, huh, well, who's got the baby? Baby all right?"
"The father of his country," whispered Pink to Jock.
When all had been hauled forth and set upright on the road there was found to be nothing amiss except a bump on Junior's forehead and a hole in Mary's stocking, which she lamented as loudly as though she had lost her leg. Ma, a lady twice as big as her biggest child and probably three times as big as Pa, took up the burden of narrative. "We was just comin' along, easy as you please, an' Pa tooted his horn, you did toot your horn, didn't you Pa, he did, an' then first we knew, sudden-like, somethin' hit us an' pushed us into the ditch"
"It was a otterbile!" shrieked Joe. "I seen it—it was a otterbile full of suitcases"
The four young men were all compassion. "Do you mean to tell me," demanded the one with the rosy cheeks, "that a car hit you and pushed you into the ditch and didn't even stop? Why, that's an outrage? I tell you, maniacs like that ought not to be allowed to have cars, let alone drive them around the country that way, endangering in that reckless way the lives of innocent people!"
They assisted Pa to right the small tin automobile and saw it wheeze off unharmed, fluttering hands of divers sizes from all sides. "Now warn't they nice?" Ma was sighing gratefully. She would remember them for the rest of her life as a quartet of Good Samaritans.
About seven o'clock, just as they neared a sizable city, hunger assailed them. "Shall we pay," queried Pink, "or shall we not pay?"
"Not!" chorused the others vigorously.
Their ensuing conduct was a triumph in strategy. First they paused at a second-hand shop and purchased two more suitcases, dilapidated ones, for a pittance. These they packed with empty oilcans and filthy cotton waste begged from the garage where they stored the roadster, until tentative lifting convinced them that the proper degree of heaviness had been attained. Then Jock and Dopey Lane, each carrying one of these suitcases, approached the largest and best hotel of the town and demanded a room in the grand manner. Having registered under the names (but not the titles) of the science professor and the Dean of their college, they were conducted to an excellent double room with bath on the second floor.
Scarcely had they concluded a pseudo battle as to which should be privileged to tip the bellboy—a battle staged for the bellboy's benefit and rendered somewhat anticlimactical by the tip itself, which proved to be a nickel on sight and a plugged nickel on his attempt to spend it two days later—when the room telephone jangled commandingly. Jock answered.
"What ho?"
"Two gentlemen calling, sir."
"Who are they? Get their names."
There was a longish interval. Then the room-clerk's voice said, "Mr. Haig and Mr. Walker, sir."
"No! Say, that's fine—tell them to come right up, please—we'll be glad to see them."
Mr. Haig and Mr. Walker, in the persons of Bill and Pink, appeared promptly. There ensued another telephone conversation, this time between Jock and Room Service, and having to do with "four of the best steak dinners you can toss together, served up here as soon as possible."
These were brought in good time, and the check signed by Jock with a flourish—"William Andrews, Room 239." "Have them charge it on my final bill," he said to the waiter.
An hour later, having dined riotously and to the point of actual physical discomfort, the foursome sauntered downstairs, leaving the suitcases and oilcans behind them in token of appreciation. "Want to show you around our town for an hour or so," Pink was saying as they passed the room-clerk's desk. "Best little town in the U. S. A."
They retrieved the roadster from the garage and proceeded onward rejoicing.
The return to college after a three months' vacation is always an event. One is pleasantly excited, and not a little surprised to find things looking much the same as they used to look. It seems incredible that during a period when so much has happened to oneself, nothing apparent should have happened to the University. On the other hand, should anything apparent have happened—a new dormitory rising where once was a vacant lot, a remembered tree cut down—one is highly indignant and cries forth anathemas indicative of a secret feeling that one should at least have been consulted beforehand.
"Here's Prexy's house!"
"Why, he's put on a new porch, the old son-of—a-gun!"
"Look—look there, will you—the Gamma Gammas are building an addition"
"The hell they are!"
"Law school looks just the same"
The roadster journeyed through Campus Street, the four heads jerking from side to side attentively. Though it was by this time something after midnight, the dormitories and fraternity houses that lined the thoroughfare were lively with light and moving figures. "Bed? Who thinks of bed on a night like this?" commented Pink.
Jock at the wheel said little. He was staring off over the tree-shaded green that centered this collegiate world, a green criss-crossed with pathways along which the entire student body trudged daily en route from room to classroom and back again. "Think what it means!" he meditated, stirred. "Hundreds of years it's been there—thousands and thousands of forgotten footsteps—" A line he had read once came back to him: "Where endlessly the dead go up and down"
The voice of Dopey Lane seized upon him like a rude hand and wrenched him from these reveries. "Ladies and gentlemen," he chanted, "on your right we have the home of Jock Hamill's inamorata, a lady famed far and wide for her shapely legs and for the broadmindedness of her husband"
"Soft pedal!" warned Jock, grinning. "She'll hear you. They must be up—lights on in the living room"
Throughout his sophomore year he had been heckled unmercifully about Eunice Hathaway. She was a provocative brunette from Tennessee who had come to a fraternity houseparty some years before, married Bradley Hathaway on a dare the second day, and treated him rather dreadfully ever since. Their modest bungalow was less than two blocks from Jock's fraternity house, and he had acquired a habit of dropping in there at odd hours. Actually, he went to see Bradley, whom he admired, and to find seclusion from the bedlam created by thirty-seven "brothers" bent perpetually on merry-making. But he never attempted to explain this to anyone, realizing the futility of so doing, and it was therefore taken for granted that he was devoted to Eunice—an impression strengthened materially by the behavior of Eunice herself. She was one of those women who want it known that men find them charming. She flaunted Jock in people's faces. She looked at him languishingly in public; whispered close to his ear; discussed him when he was not present in an intimate "he-and-I" tone that said plainly, "There's something to this, and don't make any mistake about it." She had even talked herself into believing it, and she would have been as astounded as anyone, if not more astounded, had she known that Jock cared nothing whatever for her—that she made him, in fact, not a little weary.
"Lights is right!" Bill Olmstead was saying. "All ablaze in there, to guide the traveler to port. Aren't you going in, Jock? Oh, better go in! Oh, do go in? Poor girl has probably spent the day with her nose pressed to the window-pane"
Just at this moment the bungalow's door swung wide and Bradley Hathaway's figure was silhouetted, black against yellow. He bent to place a milk bottle on the porch, then straightened suddenly as Jock howled, "Hul-lo, Brad!"
"Hello yourself! Who is it, anyway?"
"Jock Hamill, and three of the better eggs."
"Jock—why, come in here this minute, you big bum! We've been wondering when you'd be along!"
"You see," said Bill, sotto voce. "Nobody's invited in but Jock. I do admire a husband with some idea of the fitness of things!"
Jock stopped the car and got out. "Shut up, Bill," he said good-naturedly, "and drive along down to the house. I'll be there soon—have to see Brad a minute"
They met on the porch and entered the bungalow arm in arm, both immensely glad of the reunion. Jock's regard for Bradley Hathaway was easily understandable when you looked well at him. He had force and strength. Strength of character, writ plain in his eyes and the line of his chin; strength of body. He was the type of man of whom no one in the world can make sport except just one woman. . . .
"Eunice!" he called from the hall. "Guess who's here? Jock Hamill!"
"Ooo—really?" A remote little cry of gladness. "Comin' in just a second, soon as I can throw a wrappah on." Eunice had clung persistently to her Tennessee accent through all these years in what she was pleased to call "the raucous No'th"; hence there were no concluding g's or r's in anything she said.
"How is Eunice?" asked Jock politely, as he and Brad sat down.
"Oh, she's fine. Tickled to death to see college reopening, of course—it's devilishly stupid for her here in the summer, She wanted to take a cottage at the shore during July and August, but I couldn't quite made the grade."
There was a silence. Brad was frowning at nothing, and Jock was feeling sorry for Brad. He could imagine precisely the scenes that must have taken place, Eunice pleading, nagging, threatening, Brad gently obdurate. . . . Brad had graduated in 1917, fought in France, and come back to the University as assistant coach, a position accorded him in recognition of his sensational athletic prowess while a student. "It's a great job," he had told Jock once, "and I'd be happy in it if it wasn't for Eunice. She wants more money. She can't bear not to have the things more money would buy, and she knows I'll never make much more—this way. She's right, too, of course," he had amended hastily. "I'll have to get more for her, some way." Everything Eunice thought and did was right in Brad's eyes; love had given him an incurable astigmatism.
The pause became over-long, and to end it Jock said, "How's the football team look?"
"Good!" replied Brad, brightening instantly. "Shaping up better than we expected. Got a corking backfield—same as last year, you know, except for Weatherby—if we just had some more beef in the line, now, we'd be sitting pretty. I swear, Jock, it seems to me college boys get smaller every year! I was down at the registrar's office this morning while the freshmen were filing in, and I give you my word, of all the sawed-off runts"
A quick clatter of heels on a hardwood floor, and Eunice was with them, darkly picturesque in a yellow negligée. "You'll have to pahdon me, Jock," she said as she entered, "I was just goin' to bed, and I couldn't stop to dress propahly when I knew you were heah. How you, honey? It's mighty good to see you."
Conventional words; but Eunice had a way of saying them that was not conventional at all. She also had a way of shaking hands and smiling that made Jock feel, curiously enough, as though he were being embraced before witnesses.
She seated herself with conscious grace in a chair that had its back to the light. "Tell us everythin'," she commanded. "Did you have a mahvelous vacation? We missed you most awfully, didn't we, Brad?"
"We sure did."
"I reckon you fell in love—oh, many times?"
"Well, not too many," Jock retorted lightly. "I'm true to you, you know, Eunice." This was the sort of remark that Eunice expected, and that one almost had to make to her, just as one has to say, "Why, you don't look a bit sick," to an invalid.
"Prevaricatah!" Eunice cried, but she was pleased. "Then see that you prove it by comin' ovah heah often this yeah—oftenah than you did last. I want to make Brad jealous, to pay him back for givin' me such a perfectly mise'able summah."
She talked on about the miserable summer, with little thrusts at Brad strung along her monologue like barbs on a wire. Jock hated her for it. He saw that Brad maintained an unruffled, even a smiling, composure, as he invariably did under such attacks. "How can he?" he thought fiercely for the thousandth time. "I'd choke her!"
As soon as he could he took his departure. They followed him to the door, and Eunice put her small hand into his again. "We want to see a lot of you, Jock," she murmured, She might as well have said "I want to"; it was obvious that that was what she meant.
He went down the street feeling strangely heavy of heart. "Some one of these days," he soliloquized gloomily, "Brad's going to wake up and hear the birdies sing, and then he'll blame me for the attitude Eunice takes and I'll lose the best friend I ever had." He became angry. "Oh, damn her, anyway!" he muttered. "Damn all silly sloppy women!"
The Zeta Kappas were proud of their chapter house, and with reason. It was gray stone, and spacious, and so new that they were still spasmodically careful not to kick its doors nor to burn its mantelpieces with the forgotten ends of cigarettes. Nor was the building the only thing of which they were proud; they were proud to be Zeta Kappas, and would have been had it entailed residence in a barn. The fraternity's reputation was national, its standards high, its pin as sure a symbol of worth and geniality as a buoy in the ocean is of a submerged rock. When you encountered a man with that pin on his vest you knew you could take him home—and introduce him to your family with impunity. When you saw a girl with that pin above her heart you felt that she would beyond a doubt be quite worth meeting, since some brother unknown but trustworthy had seen fit to set the seal of his approbation thus upon her.
The fraternity's personnel was apt to include crew captains and baseball pitchers and All-American backs whenever possible; but although predominance in sports was an aid to membership, it was not necessarily a requisite. Save for golf, at which he was extremely proficient, Jock Hamill was no athlete, yet he had been pledged Zeta Kappa speedily and with mutual exultation. He was a gentleman, he had money, he played the banjo, he wrote for Blah-Blah, the college humorous publication, and everyone liked him. These were ample reasons; the last in itself would have been ample.
On this night the brothers welcomed Jock into the gray stone house with overwhelming ceremony. They opened the door and yanked him in. They surrounded him like bees and buzzed greetings in his ears. They pummeled him joyously. They mentioned Eunice grinning, and elbowed him slyly in the ribs. They thrust at him tall tinkling glasses, and bade him toast the fraternity, the chapter, the college and the world at large.
When the tumult and the shouting had somewhat subsided he separated from the throng one Bones Allen, especially dear to his heart, and together they ascended to the second floor to acquaint themselves anew with the room they were jointly to occupy. Despite the fact that it now resembled a storage warehouse more nearly than anything else, they found much in it of which to approve. It had big windows, and an open fireplace, and the beds in the alcove, they agreed after experimental pokes, were as comfortable as could be expected. "She's a lulu, that room," said Bones as they went downstairs again. "Tomorrow we'll rig her up right." In a sudden ebullience of spirits he threw an arm across Jock's shoulders and hugged him. "Boy, it's going to be a great year!"
"You bet your life it is!" said Jock, his melancholy flown.
He got to bed, finally, at four-thirty. His last drowsy thoughts were of Yvonne. Lord, what a girl! Who was she, anyway? She had certainly side-tracked him neatly when he tried to find out. And her kiss! He caught his breath, remembering. . . . But what had she meant by, "Oh, I am sorry for you?" What could she have meant? . . .
Pondering this, he fell asleep.
Jock himself could not have told why he was so deeply fond of Bones Allen, Certainly they had few traits in common aside from superficial ones. There was no romantic streak in Bones. He built no castles in the air and dreamed no dreams. He was a realist, pure and simple. Jock wondered sometimes if he ever thought, and if so, of what. When he talked, it was of girls and athletics. When he read, he read twenty-cent magazines with flamboyant, semi-nude covers. Occasionally he began frowningly to peruse a book, but he seldom got beyond the first two chapters. In his entire college career to date he had only been known to finish two: Flaming Youth by Warner Fabian, and Fitzgerald's Tales of the Jazz Age. Both of these he pronounced "corking," though he remarked that some of the stories in the latter volume were "not so hot." (Jock presumed that these were the more superior ones.) He enjoyed poker, the Follies, newspaper comic strips, motion pictures—particularly those in which Miss Pola Negri participated—dancing, any kind of sport, and the companionship of his fellow-men. He could not endure to be alone. He was fond of telling long, detailed stories, and of these he invariably made himself the protagonist. Any event of which he had heard became "a funny thing that happened to me" when Bones told it, or, if this was not possible, he took the viewpoint of the actual eye-witness. "I yelled at him, but he didn't hear me in time" . . . "I just happened to be rounding the corner at that minute" . . . Most of his sentences began with the first person pronoun, like those in a "true tale" publication.
But on the other hand, he was the soul of generosity. He was sincere in his devotion to his friends. He was even-tempered and cheerful always, as human beings are who skim the surface of life and hence encounter little to make them sad. You liked to be with him for, although he said nothing you could carry away with you, he gave you a sense that the world was light and delicious, and existence in it a treat to be appreciated.
Bones' contributions to the decorative scheme of the room he shared with Jock were just what might have been expected. Banners and pennants. Pictures of footlight favorites. Several rather obscene postcards purchased from a porter on a Pullman car. Posters depicting one phase or another of college life. Innumerable photographs of girls. . . . Jock's contributions were similar except for a sparse few choice items, representing the real Jock. These he produced rather shamefacedly and began to hang here and there in nottoo-conspicuous places. As he had feared, there was instant protest: "Hey, what's that funny-looking thing?"
"That's a Japanese print, and a darn good one."
"But say, Jock, listen"
Jock was firm, however; and as a result, the completed room presented to the eye a series of violent incongruities. The Japanese print tacked close beside a mad red poster entitled Passion. A ballet-girl pointing a lofty toe at Rossetti's Dying Beatrice. A stein suspended on a string hovering close to the celebrated smile of Mona Lisa. . . . And, in the bookshelf, Whiz Bang and The Life of Christ placed snugly side by side. . . .
College, after the first tremendous to-do and confusion, began slipping along as smoothly and normally as though it had never halted to let its young three thousand play. The first week passed in a swift kaleidoscope of classes and lectures and football rallies and "bull sessions" and busyness. The second week went more slowly. Crawled, in fact. Saturday—the Saturday of the opening game, to which Yvonne was coming—dangled at the end of it tantalizingly, like a prize hard to capture. Jock was amazed at the impatience with which he awaited Saturday. "I must be in love with that girl!" he told himself several times.
He thought of her almost continually, remembering, wondering, puzzling. He longed to know who and what she was, and yet subconsciously he was delighted not to know. She was mysterious—an enigma in a world of transparent women.
Long ago Jock had divided all femininity into six classes, somewhat as follows:
There were the Come-On girls. They were always brushing against you and stroking the lapel of your coat, and lifting their eyelashes slo-o-owly. When you danced with them you were aware of a slight flurry in the ranks of the chaperones. They walked with their hips, and used overpowering perfume, and talked in low tones about Love. They gave the impression of being divertingly naughty, but somehow you never liked them well enough to bother to find out whether or not they really were.
There were the Mouse girls. Small and ineffective and drab, and always very much embarrassed. They jumped when you spoke to them. Jock had written an essay on them once, which he ended with this telling stroke: "I think they must be the girls who eventually marry the men who wear white linen neckties."
There were the Too-Darn-Bright girls. Phi Beta Kappa keys and Ground Gripper shoes: Wrinkles in their foreheads at twenty-five. Terrible clothes, and a striding gait, and eyeglasses. They knew what the Einstein theory was about, and invariably led you in dancing.
Another group he had dubbed the Bull girls. They kept you in touch with all the other colleges. "Great party at New Haven last week" . . . "I was down at Princeton the week before" . . . "the captain of the football team at Michigan has invited me," etc., etc. Jock loathed the Bull girls with a very special loathing, and frequently told them to their indignation that he didn't believe a word they said.
Then there were the Soft girls. Like Molly. You were apt to think you were fond of them at first, but later you knew you were not and could never be. They were so easy. They made such utter asses of themselves.
And lastly, there were The girls. The regular girls. They were equally satisfactory on a dance floor, on a tennis court, on the links, anywhere. They had happy dispositions and a smart come-back to everything you said, and they were shrewd enough never to become serious or sentimental for more than five minutes at a stretch. They were the ones you always liked; the ones who mattered.
Jock had believed these six divisions sufficiently comprehensive to include all the girls in the world—until he met Yvonne. She gloriously defied any classification whatever.
He wrote her on Monday, reminding her of the game. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday passed with no word from her, and he took to haunting the University postal station like a restless wraith.
Friday noon, on his way there, he encountered Bradley Hathaway.
"Where you bound, Jock?"
"Post office, where you?"
"Home to lunch," Brad said, "but I'll go along with you first. I've hardly clapped eyes on you since the night you blew in. Where've you been keeping yourself?"
"I've been pretty busy, Brad," Jock equivocated. (How tell a man you haven't gone to see him because you cannot bear his wife?)
"I suppose so, but you might find a minute to run over now and then. We're always glad to have you, you know."
"Yes, I know, Brad. I will."
They sauntered along, talking football. Brad was dubious as to the outcome of the morrow's game. "'Fraid it's going to be bad news. This other team's too good to take on so early in the season."
Jock found two letters in his mailbox. One was from Molly. The other he knew at a glance must be Yvonne's—a huge gray envelope addressed in swooping script, most individual.
"Just a minute till I look this over," he remarked to Brad as they emerged onto the street again.
The letter had no salutation and no signature. It simply began and ended.
"I said I believed no one had any right to tell me what I could and could not do. But people do tell me, just the same, and I am occasionally weak enough to submit to them.
"Which is by way of announcing that I cannot come this time, Jock Hamill."
"What's up?" queried Brad. "You look suddenly sunk."
Jock tucked the gray envelope thoughtfully into his pocket, where it lay close to the unopened lavender one that was Molly's. "I am," he said. "My girl can't come to the game."
"That's too bad."
"Right. I'm sorry as hell."
He made these replies mechanically. His thoughts were absorbed not so much with the fact that Yvonne wasn't coming as with the words in which she had couched her refusal. "People do tell me, and I am occasionally weak enough to submit to them"—now what did that mean? Who could tell Yvonne what to do? Who had the right to dictate to her? A parent? Somehow Jock knew it was not a parent. A husband, then? He became possessed of a dismaying notion that Yvonne might be married.
Brad was speaking. "What did you say?" Jock asked absently.
"I said, you'd better take Eunice to the game, then," Brad repeated.
"Sure, glad to," said Jock. (But if so, wouldn't Yvonne have told him?)
"I can't take her myself, of course, and she hates to go alone. And I thought since you have two tickets and no girl"
"Sure, Brad." (No, not necessarily; she hadn't told him anything about her life. There was that man with whom she had talked so long in the restaurant—could it be that he—oh, but no! A thousand no's! And yet)
Once alone in his room at the fraternity house Jock read and reread Yvonne's message a score of times. It left him more bewildered than ever. He could neither imagine her married nor subject to parental discipline. Yet who but a parent or a husband could say "You cannot go," and be obeyed? Perhaps a lover? Thought unthinkable! Jock devised within his mind a hundred reasons why it was not a lover, each one of them emanating from his heart-felt desire to believe that it was not. . . . Eventually he hit upon a solution that pleased him; perhaps she did some work of some sort, and her employer had forbidden her departure. Perhaps she was on the stage (those theatrical photographs on her walls!) and could not miss the Saturday performances. The more he mulled this over the most plausible he made it seem, and it relieved him. Anything that dispelled the fear that she might be married or—or anything, would have relieved him. Mingled with his relief came the belated realization that he wasn't going to see her this weekend after all, smiting him like a pain. He had not known quite how much it meant to him. And hard on the heels of this, the memory of Brad's suggestion that he take Eunice to the game and his own unthinking agreement. . . . He spent the rest of the day in a state of deep depression. "You'ah terribly deah to do this, Jock. I know you don't really want to at all."
"Of course I want to!" Jock lied gallantly. "What could be sweeter than escorting the prettiest girl in town to a football game?"
There was almost a licking of the lips about the way in which Eunice received compliments, a hint of insatiable greed. She would laugh, but it was poor pretense. She laughed now. "Jock, you mustn't spoof an old married lady!"
They were standing in the hallway of the Hathaway's bungalow, Jock with a light topcoat flung over his arm and his hat in his hand, Eunice so close to him that he could catch the fragrance of her black bobbed hair. She patted the topcoat. "Where's yoah raccoon?" she asked.
"In mothballs. First of October's too warm for fur coats."
"Oh," wailed Eunice. "And Ive got a new one—Brad just bought it for me—and I wanted to weah it so badly! Is it really much too wahm out today? Would I die, do you reckon? Wait, I want to show it to you."
She sped away, and returned after a moment bearing a long garment of mink. Jock held it while she slipped into it, giving him meanwhile that arch backward glance such women always give under such circumstances. She held the coat tight around her as a blanket is held 'round a baby and walked to a little distance, where she stood revolving and posturing, model-fashion. "Do you like it?" she asked.
"It's beautiful," said Jock soberly. It was beautiful; he was no connoisseur of furs, but he knew enough about them to know that. It must have cost—well, a good half of Brad's year's salary. How under the sun
Eunice was stroking the coat rapturously, sliding her hands under the lapels, crossing them at her throat, rubbing her face against their softness. "I don't know what's got into Brad all of a sudden," she said. "He's loosenin' up and shellin' out in a most surprisin' mannah. Which only proves what I've always claimed—that he could have bought me things if he'd wanted to. Why, I've begged him and begged him for a mink coat for three whole yeahs, and he always said he couldn't affo'd it. And now look! He's probably had the money all the time but just didn't want to spen"
"Don't be silly, Eunice!" Jock interrupted with some heat. "Of course Brad would have bought you the coat the first time you asked him if he'd had the money. He hasn't a selfish bone in his body, and you know it as well as I do."
Eunice's eyes opened very wide, like a hurt child's. "Well, if he didn't have the money then, how come he has it now?" she defended herself. "He hasn't had a raise or anythin'. No rich uncle died and left him a legacy. And he's nevah saved a cent since we've been married"
"No, I daresay he hasn't," Jock muttered meaningly.
Eunice giggled. "Oh, you men! You stick togethah so, it isn't even funny. Anybody'd think big horrid Jock didn't want poah little Eunice to have a new fur coat and was actually soah 'cause she got one!"
Jock thought, "If Brad's got to sweat blood to pay for it the way I think he has, I am sore." Aloud he said merely, "We ought to be getting along, Eunice. It's glmost two-thirty."
When Eunice had disappeared into her room again and returned, she was still wearing the coat. "I've got to," she declared. "I'll probably wilt, but I can't go without it." She had pinned an artificial orchid on the collar, and her pert felt hat was orchid-colored. She looked extremely well, and knew it. There was a pause while she stood pulling on her gloves and smiling up at Jock—smiling an unmistakable invitation. Jock retaliated somewhat pointedly by opening the front—door and awaiting her on the porch, in full view of a dozen passing people.
"Brad's been gone since ten o'clock this mornin'," Eunice remarked as they started for the game in the roadster. "I declare, bein' married to a coach isn't any fun at all durin' football season. He's out most of the day, and when he does get home at night he's too tiahed to take me any place so I just sit at home like a bump on a log." Her voice rasped unpleasantly; a drawl can so easily deteriorate into a whine. She added, "Of course I'm always hopin' my friends will drop in to see me, but they nevah seem to."
"I've been busy as the devil," said Jock, taking this, as it was meant, personally.
"Who's the girl you asked to the game today and who couldn't come? Brad told me you seemed quite broken-hearted."
"Yvonne Mountford, her name is."
"Is she attractive?"
"Wonderful, yes." A desire to annoy Eunice, with whom he was himself more than usually annoyed at the moment, prompted Jock to continue in this strain. "I don't think I've ever seen a more attractive girl in my life. She's unique. She has red hair—sort of a tiger-lily red, if you know what I mean, and a mouth like—like Cleopatra's kiss. And absolutely perfect features. All the men darn near lose an eye when she walks into the room."
"Well," said Eunice acidly. "I should like to see this vision!"
"Oh, you will," Jock assured her. "She'll be down here often, I hope. Gosh, Eunice, look at the crowd! And for an opening game, too."
A great crowd, indeed. It swarmed ahead of them, using the whole street as a sidewalk. Jock and Eunice had an impression of thousands—myriads, it seemed—of backs. Broad staunch backs. Little gay backs with syncopating shoulders. Raccoon backs and broadcloth backs and fat backs and lean. "I feel," Jock said, "like a shepherd driving a flock before me." They crawled along, sounding the horn repeatedly—and vainly. Soon they were obliged to park the roadster and proceed on foot with the rest.
The Stadium from without was a high circular concrete wall with a picot edge of small dark heads around its upper rim. At the base there were tunnel-like entrances, into which the crowd streamed ceaselessly. The air was full of a muffled roaring and, nearer, the sharp cries of the gate-keepers: "Hold your own tickets, please! Let the lady hold her own ticket!"
Jock grabbed Eunice's arm. "Come on, let's hurry," he said. The football fever, always an autumn obsession with him, had suddenly taken hold anew.
They pried their way to and through a tunnel, and came out panting into the Stadium proper. A vast cup of people. Parti-colored atoms, these, set into place on the sides of the cup carefully, as though some master artist had put them in with pincers, saying, "We will have a red dot here, we will have a blue dot there, and there a yellow one." A human cloisonne cup. A cup for a giant to sip from, with the smooth green dregs of a giant's crême-de-menthe in the bottom.
"Boy," breathed Jock softly.
He always had rather a bad time at football games because there was a perpetual lump in his throat of which he was dismally conscious and ashamed. This had nothing, whatever to do with the score; if his team was winning he felt it even more acutely than when they were losing. It was his reaction to the spirit of the occasion—to the long low rumble of "Fight! Fight! Fi-i-ight," and to the tense electric air. When a player was hurt and borne from the field Jock felt no emotion beyond a sporting interest in how badly he was hurt and how much his loss would mean to the team. But when a player was hurt, and lay prostrate, and after a time rose doggedly to carry on—then he could have wept aloud for the thrill that ran all through him. Courage. That was what caused the lump. Grim relentless courage, and flash of glory, and the boom in his ears of forty thousand voices cheering one man.
While the game was in progress he quite forgot Eunice. She became merely a shoulder that braced itself against his and a source of murmured comments, only remotely heard. But between the halves he was made aware of her in a most unfortunate way.
They had risen to their feet to stretch themselves and to gaze down the slope of heads that lay below them. And Jock heard a girl say, "For cat's sake will you look at the coat on Eunice Hathaway!"
The remark came from back of him somewhere. A man answered, "Yeah. Good, isn't it?"
Then the girl: "Good? I should say it is good. That's real mink, and worth more money than Brad Hathaway ever saw! Either he's just struck oil or else"
Jock looked around. He had no difficulty in identifying the couple. They were in the row behind him, two or three seats to the left, a sophomore named MacLellan and Winifred James, a "college widow" whom Jock knew slightly. Winifred was whispering the rest of her sentence into MacLellan's ear, and the eyes of both were fixed, not on Eunice's coat, but very sharply and sagaciously on Jock himself. As he faced them they drew apart in haste and nodded to him with an assumption of blandest innocence. Winifred even gave a little salute and said, "Hi there, Jock!" But Jock was not deceived. "My God," he told himself, "they think I bought Eunice's coat! That's what she was whispering—that I bought it—oh my God!"
He turned back again, and the instant he had done so instinct told him that Winifred said, "Heavens, do you think he heard me?" He fancied he could almost see her saying it. . . . He shot a quick side glance at Eunice and noted that she appeared quite unconscious. He was glad of this; but the afternoon was utterly ruined nevertheless. Even the team's victory failed to rouse in him more than a fleeting enthusiasm.
He took Eunice home and left her summarily on the bungalow's porch. She implored him to come in. "Why, you must, Jock! Brad will be so disappointed if he gets home and finds you didn't stop! He'll want to talk ovah the game with you—he's always so excited after a victory, and especially today, when he didn't think they'd win. And I've got tea! Please, Jock"
"Sorry," Jock said firmly, "but I absolutely can't, Eunice. Not this time. I've got to see a man."
There was truth in this, and the man whom he felt he must see was Bones Allen. He wanted to ask Bones many questions. Now. Since the episode of the whispering couple there were things that he felt he must find out, not later, but immediately.
The fraternity house was deserted when he reached it—his roadster had beaten pedestrians home from the game. He went on up to his room and there waited. Within five minutes a bang and a thump and a whoop of laughter announced the first arrivals. Within ten, the noise had grown to an uproar. Someone started the Victrola. Girls brought in by their escorts for tea chattered shrilly, all at once, each striving to outchatter the other, as girls will when there are men to hear them. Then there came a stamp of heavy feet on the stairs, and Bones shouted, "Jock! Hey, Jock, are you up there? How's to bring the ole banjo and tweak us a little tune?"
"Come here," said Jock.
Bones entered. "All the mommas have been paging you, as usual, and I—why, what's happened? Why the owly look?"
Jock spoke with a quiet force that sobered his roommate instantly. "Look here, Bones, I want you to tell me one thing and tell it straight. Just what's the general attitude on Brad Hathaway's wife and myself?"
"You ought to know. They kid you enough, don't they?"
"Sure, they kid me, and I know they think I like her pretty well and all that, but—why Bones, good Lord, they don't really believe there's anything wrong in it, do they?"
Bones hesitated. "Nobody in the fraternity does," he said at last slowly. "But some of the fellows outside who don't know you so well—well, I guess maybe some of them think there is." He scowled darkly. "I had to sock one last year," he added.
"Who?"
"Never mind who. He's kept his mouth shut ever since, you don't need to worry about that."
"What did he say?" persisted Jock.
Bones told him.
"He said that? Some low-down skunk said that?" Swiftly as it had blazed up, Jock's anger sank again. "Oh well, hell," he continued, "he was probably somebody whose opinion isn't worth a hoot anyway. But it makes me sore just the same. Why would anybody, no matter who he was, think that? That's what I want to know. Just because I go over there a Jot—or used to? Don't they understand that Brad's one of the best friends I've got in the world?"
Again Bones hesitated. "I don't like to razz a woman, particularly one you like, but honest, Jock, if you could hear Mrs. Hathaway talk I think you'd understand a whole lot better. For instance: remember that house dance we had last year in May? She was one of the chaperones, remember? Well, I heard her telling a roomfull of girls and fellows all about how jealous her husband was of you. Boasting about it! Tickled to death about it! And later on I danced with her, and what do you think she said to me? She said, 'I hear you're going to room with my honey next year.' Well, now, what I mean, stuff like that from a married woman doesn't go down so good. It gives a wrong impression, and people who don't know you think"
"Why, she's crazy!" Jock broke in excitedly. "She's crazy as a coot! Why, I've never even kissed the girl, Bones. I've never looked at her, hardly. I don't even like her! And as for Brad being jealous, that's a downright damn lie, and the next time I see her I'm going to"
"Thing to do," said Bones, "is not to see her. That'll stop the talk quicker than anything else. She can't say much about you if you never go around there, and the minute she quits yapping about it everybody else will. For cryin' out loud what did you take her to the game for?"
"Brad asked me to."
"You were on one side of the cheering-section," Bones went on, "and I was a mile away from you, on the other side. But I'll bet you hadn't been in your seats three minutes before the word came breezing along, 'Jock's got Eunice Hathaway here, and you oughta see the coat she has on!'"
Jock moaned. "That's what started this. Somebody back of us seemed to think I'd given Eunice the coat! At least I'm pretty sure that's what they said. It opened my eyes, I'll tell the world! I'd never thought till that minute that anybody was putting that kind of a construction on the thing." He took up his banjo and picked at one string thoughtfully. "Well, I'm—cured," he finished. "I'm through going around there. Brad'll have to come here, from now on, if he and I are going to see each other."
When he went downstairs he was apparently in high spirits. But all the rest of that afternoon his heart was heavy with an odd cold sense of foreboding, insidious, impossible to dispel. "What's the matter with me?" he asked himself savagely. "Why should I feel like this? Nothing can happen as long as I stay away from there! Not a damn thing!"
But still the premonition clung, with clammy fingers. Jock missed the second football game of the season; he spent that afternoon in New York with Yvonne. She had telephoned him the night before, suggesting that he do this. "Really, Jock Hamill, I'm not at all in the mood to travel all the way out there tomorrow. You come here instead."
In any other girl, this calm change of plan without any sufficient reason would have enraged him. In Yvonne it was merely divertingly characteristic. Jock acceded to it with scarcely a protest.
And so they sat together on a huge black velvet divan that faced the fireplace in Yvonne's living room. The window shades were drawn, giving an effect of twilight at three o'clock, and here and there about the the room lamps diffused a lovely blushing glow. Yvonne leaned against a pile of cushions that Jock thought must have been chosen just to match her. A russet one, like her hair; a green one, like her tea gown; and one so precisely the hue of her gray eyes that they seemed like sample pieces of its material. She wore tiny tall-heeled slippers with French toes, and no stockings, and her legs were as delicately creamy and flawless as the skin of her neck and arms.
For an hour, while the fire blazed at their feet and their cigarettes filled the room with a thin fine mist, they talked generalities. A long dreamy lazy hour, full of a brooding peace. Jock felt drugged with it. He felt that he wanted it never to end. . . . Firelight and Yvonne. Little quiet-leaping flames, and Yvonne's voice, like a lullaby. And Yvonne's beauty to look at, to drink up with the eyes. . . . Incredible to remember that somewhere men were playing football and other men were watching them and there was a tumult and a roar and a delirium. He smiled contentedly, thinking this. He would not have parted with this hour for any game that was ever played, or ever would be.
Generalities. Religion again, poetry, music, life and letters. Ever and anon he tried to swing the conversation around to more personal topics. Always Yvonne forestalled him.
Then, unexpectedly, she did it herself. There had been a little silence, and she said, "I have been thinking of you, Jock."
Jock answered, "I was thinking of you, too. I've been thinking of you to the exclusion of everyone and everything else, since the very first instant I saw you."
Yvonne turned her head and regarded him gravely. "Yes, that's true, isn't it," she observed after a while, as though she had made quite sure it was true. "Well, what have you been thinking?"
"Mostly in interrogation-points. Wondering who you are, and—and whether or not you're married."
"I'm not married."
She said this expressionlessly, as a person might say "I'm not tired" or "I'm not hungry." But it rang in Jock's ears like a pzan of happiness. It shook him from his lethargy. He felt of a sudden that he could not sit still—that he must rise and leap about and wave his arms like a madman for the sheer joy of it. "Oh, say that again!" he implored her.
Yvonne smiled at him. "Child!"
"I know—but say it!"
"I am not married."
They stared at one another for a long intense moment. Then Yvonne laid her fingers lightly across Jock's mouth, "Don't tell me what you're thinking now," she said. "Because I don't want you to tel me.
Jock seized the fingers and kissed them, and the accumulated vague emotions of the past two weeks crystallized all at once, took definite shape, came clamoring to be cried aloud that Yvonne might hear them. He knew, now. He was sure, now. "I've got to tell you," he said huskily. "I've got to—Yvonne—I love you, I love you so"
She broke away from him and stood up, silhouetted against the mantel, gazing at him. "Do you remember the last thing I said to you when you left here the other day?" she queried.
"Of course."
"What was it?"
"You said, 'I'm sorry for you'"
Yvonne nodded. "This is what I meant."
"You were sorry because you knew I'd fall in love with you? Yvonne"
"Listen to me!" She had silenced him with a gesture. "Listen, because I shall probably never tell you the truth again. You'll be unhappy if you love me. You'll be miserable. Oh, I know—I know you. You told me more about yourself that day at luncheon than you realize—more, much more, than you actually said. And I've thought about you, and I understand you. You're very young, and sensitive, and you have something precious. You have ideals. Don't you—can't you see how I would hurt you? You look at me and think, 'I love that woman.' You don't know. You don't know. Why, Jock Hamill, can't you see there's nothing here? Nothing inside that you would love? That's what I'm trying to tell you. I've only beauty. Skin deep. That's a platitude, but it's true with me. I'm nothing but—what was that word you used? Glitter. That was it. I'm really nothing but glitter, Jock."
Her earnestness was lost on him. He knew only that she was wonderful and desirable and near, so near that he had but to put out his arms to hold her imprisoned. He fought down his impulse to do this, and answered her impatiently, almost angrily. "Yvonne—don't—you mustn't say things like that! I love you, worship you—I'll always love you—do you think love is a thing one can drop like a toy because someone says, 'That isn't what you want'? It is what I want! It's what I know now I can't live without—loving you. Yvonne, is there any reason why I can't? Do you love someone else, so that I'm only making myself ridiculous in your eyes? Is that what you want me to know?"
"No," said Yvonne slowly. "No, I don't love anyone else."
Then Jock put out his arms and caught her to him, and a thing like a sob welled up in him so that he could not speak. He touched his hands to her hair, her glorious hair, and to the line of her cheek, and very gently, very softly, he kissed her eyelids, her throat, her mouth. . . . Ethereal kisses, not of the flesh, because he was full of a tenderness and a reverence stronger and greater than passion.
And bye and bye she held herself away, at arms' length, and her eyes seemed to bear down deep into the heart of him. For an age. For an eternity. And at last she shrugged and said, "So be it. But I told you the truth. And sometime, when you learn that it was the truth, I want you to remember that I told you—once—my dear."