THE autumn prom came on with a rush. One day the town was purely academic, and the next, by some over-night miracle, it was purely social. All through the forenoon it seethed with the transformation of student into Sybarite. Flannel shirts, hats without crowns, socks that didn't match, sweaters—all the regalia of ordinary life—gave place to gala attire. Lines formed five deep in the barber shops. The swinging doors of bootblack parlors flapped inward and outward ceaselessly, like unlatched gates in a high wind. Tailoring establishments were thick with the steam of hot irons on hundreds of pairs of trousers. Taxicabs tripled their rates and cruised the streets, tempting the opulent and the hurried. The cash register in the store of Beatty the Florist gave forth a perpetual ping-ping-ping—for Beatty was a wise man, grown old and wise and wary in the service of collegians, and his law was, "no cash, no corsage."
Fraternity houses and clubs were in an uproar of preparation and evacuation. Rooms cleaned and set in order for feminine occupancy; certain Rabelaisian volumes pushed under mattresses; certain works of art removed from walls and put away in trunks; pictures of girls other than the prom-girl hidden discreetly; whole armfuls of garments carried off to the dormitories, where boys would room in threes and fours and sixes, and dress in squads, and sleep, if at all, in morris chairs, for the next two glamorous nights. . . . Freshmen drifted about the campus, trying hard to look as though they didn't know anything unusual was happening and fervently desiring the coming of the day when they should be sophomores and free to participate. The woman-hating element, clad defiantly in their oldest and worst, circulated in groups, jeering at immaculate contemporaries. "Hey, Bill, where'd you get the hat?" . . . "My God, look at Beany!" . . . "She sure ought to fall for those socks, old man!" . . . "Barber kinda ruined you, didn't he, Jay?" . . . Later they would hang out of windows fronting the street and from this vantage point regard the influx of beauty with a jaundiced eye. Most haughtily critical were the woman-haters. And eagle-eyed. That girl was too fat. That one was too skinny. And oh, boy, look at the bowlegs on this one!
As Jock had feared, Molly recovered with astonishing ease and celerity from the fit of pique that had marked their parting in September, and was coming to the prom in high feather. Repeatedly he cursed himself for ever having asked her in the first place, and several times he was on the point of retracting his invitation so that he might have Yvonne as his guest instead. No doubt he would have done so had it not been for Yvonne herself. She maintained that nothing on earth could induce her to attend under such conditions. "I wouldn't be as mean as that to anyone," she said.
The sense of fair play inherent in Jock approved this, even while he strove hotly to combat it. He wanted Yvonne for the prom more than he had ever wanted anything within his memory, but he secretly admitted that he would have been a shade disappointed in her if she had agreed to come at the expense of another girl. As it was, his adoration for her increased by just that much. She was perfect. . . . He had been to New York thrice to see her since that memorable afternoon in her apartment, and each time she became in his eyes more beautiful, more desirable, more beloved. Also, more mysterious, for she continued steadfastly to keep him in ignorance of herself and her life. She would say, "Oh, my dear, you will find out soon enough," and silence his questions with kisses. Love of her, tinged with curiosity, had become an obsession with him. She filled all his waking thoughts and colored all his hours, Prom without her would be cake without flavoring. . . .
Molly's train was due at three in the afternoon. Two o'clock found Jock arraying himself listlessly—a definite contrast to the manner in which he would have arrayed himself had it been Yvonne's train. Dressing to meet Yvonne was an elaborate process, one requiring much thought, much painstaking selection, and ruthless raids upon the wardrobes of his friends. He always set forth for a call on her sartorially representing the fraternity at large . . . in Pink's new suit, Bill's hat, Ken Kennedy's muffler. Somehow one's own clothes, however good, are never quite good enough for the eyes of a girl like Yvonne.
But they do very well for a Molly.
He drew a tie at random out of the bundle of them that drooped from a rack on his chiffonier, and confronted the looking-glass. With the tie around his neck and an end of it grasped ready for action in each hand he stood a moment, surveying himself. His hair lay flatly, shinily, like a skull-cap of glossy black with a straight white seam in the center. His dark eyes looked back at him with sober brooding. That oblique upward slant of his mouth, that was a smile usually, was something very like a sneer just now. He was thinking of himself not as the extremely sightly young gentleman the mirror reflected, but the unforgivable jackass who was about to be bored to the point of frenzy for two days through nobody's fault but his own."
"Humph!" he snorted.
"What's that?" queried Bones from across the room.
"It's three rousing jeers for myself. I'm the biggest—" He broke off. "Wish the damn prom was over," he finished moodily.
Bones turned a shocked face tufted with shaving lather toward this heretic. "Why?"
"I've told you why, twenty times. Because I don't like the woman I've got coming."
"Then for the luvvagawd why did you ask her?"
"I liked her once," Jock said simply. As he said it he thought, "There! There's the whole trouble with me where women are concerned, in four words—'I liked her once!' Every darn time it evolves into that. I must be fickle as hell." Then came another idea. "Wonder if I'll ever say about Yvonne, 'I liked her once'?" This seemed to him impossibly absurd, and he grinned into the mirror. "Never," he assured himself. "I'll always love Yvonne. She's the one I've been looking for all my life."
Bones was talking on. "You and Dopey Lane ought to get together. Have you heard the sob-stuff about his girl?"
"No. What's the matter with her?"
"Everything but St. Vitus dance, to hear Dopey tell it. He says she's a complete zero. Just out of the cradle, and no stuff at all. He's running around telling everybody how she's the little girl who lives next door and his family roped him into asking her down, so nobody'll make a mistake and take her for his sweetie or anything. He'll have a fine weekend," Bones predicted as an afterthought.
"Seems to me the girl will have a worse one," answered Jock.
Five minutes of three.
The railroad station houses a gathering strictly stag. The platform groans with the tramp and stamp of young masculine impatience, and is animate with trouser-legs as wide as bolster-cases. Hundreds of boys are there, collegians, recognizable anywhere by their clothes, and the tilt of their hats, and their justtubbed look, and their air of insouciance and irresponsibility and "what-the-hell-do-we-care-now." One senses light hearts and heavy hip pockets. They stand in groups, talking, or sit on baggage-trucks and swing their red-shod feet, or lean against posts and stare raptly into space, or rush about with such busy haste that their unbuttoned coats curve out on the air behind them like raccoon wigwams. They laugh, and whistle, and bawl forth jibes and aphorisms. The only thing they do not do is the thing they unanimously want to do—walk out on the tracks and peer for the train. They do not do this because they deem it "kid stuff," the natural trick of a youngster about to be taken on the choo-choo to see Grandma. He who succumbed, and did it, would "get the razz." A number of them have cornered the ticket agent, a nervous individual with a taffy-candy mustache, and are telling him something in low solemn tones. He is listening sheepishly and rather suspiciously, and saying "Aw!" and "Aw, git out!" and "Aw, g'wan!"
Three o'clock.
There is a crackling electric tension in the air—then acheer, and a general surge toward the platform's edge. The locomotive blows its warm quick breath against their faces, crashes past, stops. Strings of girls begin to spill from every coach. Magazine cover girls, these. Lovely laughing girls in furry coats and bright hats and wee ridiculous slippers. Blonde girls and dark, tall girls and tiny, all shapely and delicately tinted and sweet with perfume. Each poses an instant on the train steps, to look and to be looked at . . . then becomes a part of the crowd, and jostles, and grows breathless, and cries at last, "Oh, there you are!" . . . and is hailed happily, and seized, and borne away. . . .
Prom, glittering pageant of a glittering age, has begun.
"And how's Molly?"
"Oh, fine, Jock, and so glad to be here!"
The roadster was parked at the rear of the station. Jock assisted Molly to it and into it, stowed away her luggage, then slid in himself over the side and slouched down beside her. "We'll have to wait a minute," he remarked. "I promised Bones we'd take him and his girl up with us."
They smiled at one another, Molly meaningly and personally, Jock in a casual sort of way. "She's all right for a prom," he told himself. "Clothes, and looks, and an awfully good dancer. If only she doesn't start talking like an idiot—Oh Lord, she's going to!" he finished. He knew that preliminary flicker of the lashes.
"Jock," said Molly softly, "there were a million girls on that train, and I felt so superior to all of them, you can't imagine, because they were coming to the prom with just any old boy and I was coming with you. Oh, Jock, I'm so glad to be here—say you're a little glad to have me"
The timely reappearance of Bones at this instant spared the necessity of a reply. He wore a fatuous grin, and by one arm he guided a slender, graceful girl with greenish eyes and commas of yellow hair sweeping out onto her cheeks below a green hat. Jock identified her as the original of the favorite photograph in Bones' collection.
"Norma, this is the roommate, Jock Hamill—don't believe anything he tells you about me. Miss Norma Knight, Jock. You know—the one I talk in my sleep about"
Jock completed the mutual introductions, and observed that the two girls met with an instant hostility, only thinly veiled. "All prom-girls hate all other prom-girls," he made a mental note.
The ride up the hill to the fraternity house was accomplished in short order, and the girls escorted inside. There was a momentary pause in the lower hall while they squealed admiringly, in chorus, "Oh, isn't this darling!"—as was expected of them. Then Jock and Bones showed the way upstairs and to their room.
"Don't take long, you two," Bones commanded when they had set down numerous suitcases and were preparing to withdraw. "There's an inter-fraternity tea dance at the Union at four o'clock, and you have to meet everybody and lap up a couple of cocktails apiece between now and then."
"We'll be down in ten minutes," promised Norma Knight.
"I'll be ready in five," added Molly, not to be outdone.
Jock and Bones descended the stairs again and encountered Dopey Lane and his girl just entering. Dopey presented them mournfully.
"Jock Hamill, Cecily Graves. And Bones Allen."
Jock's first thought was that she ought to put cold cream, or whatever it was they usually put, on her hands, The one that he took in greeting was rough and chapped. But it gave a firm pressure, and he liked that. Shaking hands with some girls was like gripping a listless bit of cotton batting.
"Hello, Miss Graves."
"How-do-you-do?"
Tinkling silver voice. But he saw that aside from the voice and the handclasp and a certain fundamental prettiness, Cecily Graves was all wrong. Her clothes were wrong, and the way she wore them was wrong, and even the silence that followed her "How-do-you-do" was wrong. Girls ought to say something more, immediately. When they did not they gave you an impression of timidity and stupidity—of either not knowing anything more to say, or of being too embarrassed to say it, or both. Jock decided that it was embarrassment in Cecily. Whatever else you might think of her, she didn't look stupid. Too bright a glint in the brown eyes for that.
"See you later," Dopey nodded, and conducted her past them toward the stairway.
"Gee, he did pick a quince, didn't he?" muttered Bones.
Jock looked thoughtful. "I believe I kind of like her," he said. And added, as Bones stared incredulously, "Anyway, I'm sorry for the poor little kid."
The girls who attend college proms are tabulated neatly within an hour of their arrival. In undergraduate language, they are either knockouts, or else they're dull thuds. There is no middle class, The knockouts enjoy two days of exhilarating popularity and unalloyed bliss. The dull thuds look on and wonder miserably why they had been so awfully excited about coming . . .
Everybody in the Zeta Kappa house—members of the fraternity, visiting young ladies, everybody—knew that Dopey Lane's prom-girl was a dull thud. They knew it the minute she came downstairs to join the group congregated in the living room. By the dark blue taffeta gown that bunched in the wrong places they knew it. By the heavy black stockings in a year of sheer flesh-colored ones, and by the hair that wasn't shingled, and by the face that wasn't rouged, and by the lack of self-confidence they knew it. But being ultra-modern boys and girls, unto whom "Everyone for himself" was the law, they did not care. They stared at her, hard, for a second or two. They summed her up, "No looks, no style, no pep." Then they forgot her utterly, the girls because they were not afraid of her, the boys because they were not interested.
Pep! Fuel for the speed of the generation! Sine- qua non of the ultra-moderns! The Zeta Kappa living room whizzed with it. The atmosphere was hectic with it. Every damsel strove to prove at once, then and there, that she had it—that she had more of it than any other damsel. You should have seen Norma Knight gulping straight Scotch from a bottle. You should have seen the celebrated Winky Winters, promtrotter extraordinary, seated atop the piano, beating time on its mahogany with her sharp small heels. You should have seen Gloria Martin, minister's daughter, doing an imitation of Ted Lewis with somebody's derby hat. You should have seen Molly kissing each new man as she met him, saying, "Eventually—why not now?"
Pep! Something a little different, a little conspicuous, a little rowdy, and extremely loud—pep!
Through it all, Cecily Graves sat in a great armchair pushed to one side. She seemed literally to be clinging there, as one would cling to a small safe isle in a mad and treacherous sea. She was quite alone. Even Dopey had left her, drawn to the other side of the room by the irresistible pull of something-going-on. She sat speechless and motionless—that is, motionless except for her eyes, which darted here and there and everywhere excitedly. "She isn't missing a trick," Jock told himself.
After a time, meeting her glance over the top of Molly's head, he winked at her in a friendly way. Her reaction was immediate and pathetic. She seemed to shrink even further into the depths of the great chair; and then, an instant later, she smiled. Tremulously. Gratefully. With a look in her eyes like the eyes of a dog when you pat him.
This was quite too much for Jock. He abandoned Molly in the middle of the floor and went across to her. He seized her wrists and pulled her to her feet. "You've got to dance with me, lady."
Just that. No "You look lonesome," no "why all by yourself"—none of the tactless remarks that another young man, with the best intentions in the world but without Jock's sensitive understanding, might have made. Instead, "You've got to dance with me"—as though he wanted her to tremendously, as though he could not wait.
And the brief glance he had of her face before it tucked itself out of sight against his shoulder told him unmistakably that he had made a friend, for life.
Jock contrived to be seldom alone with Molly during the next two days. He rushed her determinedly from one festivity to the next, and somehow they found no opportunity for the sweet secluded moments that are as important as the prom itself to most prom couples. The shadowy billiard-room, the little corner back of the staircase—all the places known in the fraternity (and with reason) as "necking nooks"—saw them not. No one entered a room and backed out hastily, murmuring apologies, on their account. No one had opportunity to hoot at Molly because her hair was mussed. . . .
"I don't believe you love me any more, Jock."
"What makes you think that?"
"You've only kissed me once since I've been here, and that was just a tiny peck—sort of a sense-of-duty peck"
"Well, when has there been time, for heaven's sake? Look here, Molly, be sensible: you got in yesterday afternoon at three. We met the bunch, hung around here for awhile, went over to the Union and danced till seven-thirty, dashed back to dress for the Dramatic Club show, saw that, and danced afterward till dawn. This morning we didn't get together until nearly noon, and then we had to have lunch, and after that the game, and then the tea dance here at the house, and now"
"I notice," broke in Molly, sniffing, "that other people find time. Your roommate and Norma"
"Oh, well, Bones—" Jock dismissed Bones with a flip of his hand. "He's a glutton for that stuff, of course."
"Besides," Molly continued, "you certainly don't—seem to have any trouble finding time to talk to that ash-can—that Cecily whatever-her-name-is who wears the bargain-basement clothes. What you can see in her is more than I can understand"
"I'm sorry for her."
"Well, I'm not! It's a girl's own fault if she's a"
"It isn't Cecily's fault, Molly. She'd like to be different, but she just doesn't know how to go about it."
"That's right!" flared Molly. "Stick up for her! Make a nut out of me by cutting in on her all the time, and talking to her, and kidding her—you're the only man who does, I'm sure of that! Can't you look at my side, for a change? Do you think it's flattering to me to be brought down here and then neglected for a simp with a shiny nose? Well, it isn't! It's positively insulting! People must certainly think I'm good, if I can't interest you any more than she does!"
This conversation took place in the roadster, which was bearing them from the fraternity house to the gymnasium for the final big event of the weekend—the junior promenade. A distance of two blocks only, but Molly had declined to walk because she said she must spare her feet as much as possible. She sat well over in her own seat, the personification of injured pride and self-pity.
Jock said soothingly, "Don't you think you're making a mountain out of a molehill, Molly? Nobody is going to get the idea that you don't interest me. That's absurd. You know, and everybody knows, that I'm not paying any attention to her because she's attractive. It's just that she's so—so darn pitiful, Molly! I—maybe you won't understand this—but I can put myself in her place and feel exactly what she's going through, and it's hell, that's all. Everybody ignores her; even Dopey, who asked her here himself, is taking it out on her now by acting bored to death whenever he's near her, and I think it's a doggone rotten shame!"
"Yes, but why you should consider it's up to you—" Molly's voice broke suddenly, and her little flurry of fury died away. "Oh, Jock, I'm being silly, I know, but I l-love you and I can feel you slipping away from me, and I don't know what to do about it! Last summer—why, do you think you'd have known any other girl was there, even, last summer? No matter how pitiful she was?" Molly was crying frankly now into her bare ringed hands. "It's not the girl herself—it's everything about this weekend. It's your attitude, and your not wanting to kiss me, and—oh, Jock, what have I done to you—what did I ever do to you that made you stop caring about me any m-m-more"
He had to guide the machine to the curb and halt there. He had to put his arms around the shuddering shoulders, and pat the bent head, and say, "Now Molly, don't—don't do that, please—you're just imagining things, honestly you are! Dear, listen, your eyes will be all red for the party—" (a heaven-sent inspiration, this; the tears abated instantly). He had to lend her his handkerchief, because "Mine's just l-lace," and sit waiting while she repaired the ravages of grief with powder puff and rouge. "If it wouldn't ruin the whole evening," he thought, "I'd come straight out and tell her. No use trying to keep up a pretense, and I'm not going to do it much longer."
The junior promenade was in full cry when finally they reached the gymnasium, A typical college prom it was. Typical setting of fir boughs and potted palms, of banners and bunting, of Japanese lanterns and shifting searchlights, of polished floor with an orchestra on a raised dais at each end, of booths marked with the letters of twenty fraternities where chaperones sat yawning behind their feather fans. And a typical scene. Gowns of scarlet and green and orange and turquoise and cloth-of-gold, sophisticated gowns, blasé gowns, wise, knowing, faintly wicked gowns. Swirl of rainbow colors streaked with black. Curve of white arms across dark shoulders. Faces close together. Slim girl-bodies swaying backward from the hips. Stag-line in the middle of the hall, a thick wall opening to receive, to give back, elbowing itself, craning its neck, squirming, never still. Whisper of a thousand pairs of shoes along the floor. Croon of jazz. Blended odor of flowers and whiskey and perfume and soap and cigarettes and damp powder and brilliantine—the typical odor, the twentieth century odor.
Someone cut in on Molly before she and Jock had danced half the length of the gym, and Jock, thus freed, joined the stag-line. Here bits of sentences were flying about like missiles. "One in the yellow dress" . . . "and I said" . . . "oiled to the eyes" . . . "but she's old enough to eat hay" . . . "from Milwaukee or somewhere" . . . "dance like a streak" . . . "pretty hot" . . . "try the strawberry blonde with Fat Hastings" . . . "flask empty already" . . . "fifteen minutes, by God, before anybody came to my rescue" . . .
Presently Jock saw Cecily Graves. She was dancing with Dopey, and both of them looked silently unhappy. Cecily's dress was pale blue, with tiny rosebuds here and there upon it. The sort of dress a little girl might wear to dancing school. When they passed the stag-line—quite close, so that Dopey might send an optical SOS to such of his friends as might be there—the stag-line looked around and above and beyond them, vacantly, All except Jock. He cut in.
"Dizzy go, isn't it?"
"What did you say?"
"I said," translated Jock, "it's a gay party." He beamed down at her. "You don't speak American, do you, Cecily? I've noticed that before."
"I shall by the time I leave here," Cecily said. "I'll know a lot of things by the time I leave here that I didn't know when I came."
"For instance?"
"Oh—things."
"By the way," Jock said, more to keep talking than because he wanted to know. "I meant to ask you—where do you live?"
"East Orange, New Jersey. Right next door to Ronald—Dopey, as you call him."
"And right next town to my town," Jock said. Then, as their feet collided smartly, he added, "Oh, I'm sorry."
"It must be awful to be a man and have to apologize when you know very well it wasn't your fault."
"But it was my fault."
"Oh, no it wasn't. I can't dance worth a cent, and I know it."
This was true; Cecily couldn't. She leaned too heavily, and moved too reluctantly, and grasped her partner's hand too tight. Still
"You shouldn't have told me," Jock said. "I wouldn't have guessed it. I'm such a hell of a dancer myself, I always think I'm responsible and take the blame as a matter of course."
They danced on, and on, and on. No one cut in. No one even seemed to so much as look in their direction. Jock became alarmed. Good Lord, was he going to have to dance with her all evening? She was a nice little thing and he was sorry for her, sorry as the devil, but even charity should have an end somewhere. He strove to locate Dopey and finally spied him, suspiciously red of face, whirling about with Gloria Martin in his arms. Even while Jock watched, someone else took possession of Gloria, and Dopey, without a thought of his own responsibility, cut in promptly on another girl, The nerve of him! . . . Molly, Jock saw, was well taken care of. Men were cutting in on her with clock-like regularity.
"You're not listening!" complained Cecily's voice in his ear.
"I—pardon me! What was it you said?"
"I asked you to take me to the dressing room. I think my stocking's coming down"
He conducted her outside to the dressing room in the corridor, and left her at the door. "Don't wait, please," she said. "Please don't wait, I'll find Dopey all right when I come back in."
Jock went blithely back and sought out Molly, who scoffed at him: "I saw you! I saw you playing nursemaid for four dances straight! I was tickled to death, too—serves you right for trying to be so doggone kind to people!"
"How've you been getting along?" Jock inquired amiably.
"Oh, fine. Didn't miss you at all."
"I saw you had a bevy of customers."
"My feet," announced Molly, "are simply killing me. One more hour of this and I doubt if I'll be able to even limp. The damn new slippers"
"In one more hour," Jock assured her cheerfully, "it'll be about midnight, and the dance will be not quite one-fourth over."
Her moan floated back to him over the shoulder of Pink Davis, who had peremptorily snatched her away.
Jock cut in, successively, on Gloria Martin, on a languid brunette with earrings the size of butter plates, on Norma Knight, on a blonde who was mildly intoxicated, on a theatrical-looking girl who called him "big boy," and on Winky Winters. They all greeted him graciously, and they all said much the same things. Well, it was about time he remembered they were there! They'd been wondering all evening when he was going to look their way. But of course, he'd been so absorbed in that queer little person Dopey Lane brought! . . . Every one of them had noticed him with Cecily, and knew approximately how long he had danced with her. Jock thought this very curious. Being that rara avis, a young man almost entirely without vanity, it did not occur to him that girls would always observe and mentally register all his activities, no matter how many other male beings there might be present.
Half an hour passed before he danced with Molly again. "Jock," she declared then, "I cannot stand it, that's all there is to it! I'll have to go back to the frat house and get another pair of shoes. These are brand new, and my feet are tired anyway from dancing constantly for two days, and I'm suffering agonies."
"I'll go back and get them. Tell me where they are."
"You never could find them"
"Sure I could!" A suspicion that if Molly returned to the deserted fraternity house with him there would be another scene similar to the recent one in the roadster made Jock all the more emphatic. "Sure, Molly, find them all right. Where'd you leave them? What do they look like?"
"They're silver," Molly said. "Silver brocade, and they tie on the instep with little tassels. They're in the closet—the only silver slippers in there unless Norma has a pair, in which case you'll know mine because they'll be the smallest. But I'd better go with you"
Jock turned her over to an approaching stag, and went alone.
The room that Molly and Norma Knight were occupying was the one inhabited in more normal times by Jock and Bones. But even though it belonged to him, Jock entered it almost guiltily, like a furtive intruder. It looked so feminine! Its chairs were festooned with wispy garments in pastel colors. Its chiffoniers supported a miscellany of hairpins and sound gilt boxes and pearl beads and perfume bottles and crumpled handkerchiefs and lipsticks, and, over all, a light snowfall of powder. There were suitcases under the beds, suitcases somewhat ajar and foaming lace at the mouth. Jock opened the closet door and peeped in. Gowns hung there in a row, and below them, innumerable small shoes trod carelessly on one anether's toes.
He stooped to search for a pair of silver ones with little tasseled ties for the insteps, and as he did so he heard a sound.
He sat up, listening. He heard it again . . . a queer little muffled sound, rather like a whimper into a pillow. . . .
"Now who—?" he said aloud. But he knew. Of course. Who else, of all the Zeta Kappa guests, would be crying alone in the dark on prom night?
He went into the hall and called, "Cecily!"
No answer.
"Cecily, it's Jock Hamill. Let me talk to you a minute."
Still no answer.
Jock walked straight across to Dopey Lane's room, entered, and pressed the wall switch. Lights sprang out of the pitch blackness, revealing Cecily.
She lay face downward on the bed, in a heap, as though she had been crumpled like paper and flung there. The silk of her gown wrinkled over her like disturbed water, and her head was visible only as a mesh of thick brown hair framed in a triangle of arm. She looked tragic as she lay there, and crushed, and utterly hopeless.
"Why, Cecily!" Jock said. "Why listen—dear little kid—this won't do at all, you know!" She was the second weeping woman he had seen that night, but she did not affect him as Molly had. Instead she wrung his heart.
"Go away!" she mumbled.
"I will not! You sit up here this minute and tell me what it's all about."
Cecily shook her head so violently that tendrils of hair bounced like little springs.
"Then I'm going to wait here till you do," Jock told her firmly.
He waited in silence, and after an interval Cecily said, "Turn out the light."
When the room was in darkness again Jock could hear her stirring, sitting up—blowing her nose, even. Her voice came, still thick, but much more nearly normal. "What are you doing here, anyway?"
"I came over on an errand, and heard you'
"How did you know it was I?"
"I missed you from the dance," Jock lied. "I was sure you couldn't be in the dressing room all that time. Cecily, tell me why"
"You know why."
"No, I"
"Oh, stop!" she wailed. "Don't lie to me—not now. Of course you know why I left, and why I'm crying, and just exactly what's wrong—of course you do. That's why you've been so wonderful to me ever since I came—because you were sorry for me. Oh, I know! I understood that, even though you acted just as if I was—was—as if you really liked me"
"I do like you, Cecily."
"Do you really?"
"I really do."
"Enough to be absolutely frank with me?"
"Y-yes."
"Then tell me what to do!" cried Cecily passionately through the dark. "Tell me how to be like the rest of these girls—how to be popular! That's what I need—somebody who likes me well enough to be willing to tell me that!"
An honest appeal, straight from the heart. Jock was not the man to resist it. "Sure I'll tell you," he said, "if I can. I don't know much about it, but I'll do my best." He hesitated. "Let's go downstairs, Cecily, don't you want to? Somebody's liable to come in and find us here—not that I care, but it might not look so well for you"
They went down, Cecily with her rough little hand thrust into Jock's trustingly.
"You see, she said, "my mother has funny ideas about—about things. I'm seventeen, but she still treats me like an infant. She wants to keep me innocent and unsophisticated. Why, she even made me wear a pigtail down my back until a year ago, and the only reason she finally let me bob my hair was because she thinks it's kind of little-girl-looking this way! She keeps me with her most of the time, and won't let me associate with girls my own age, and won't let me go away to school, although I've begged and begged. Goodness knows how she happened to let me come to this prom—I 'spose it's because she likes Ronald—Dopey—so well, and he's an old friend of the family. I—I never really had much of a chance to compare myself with other girls until now. And I know I'm different, and I don't want to be—I want to be just like them"
She had flopped into a chair in the living room and sat now looking up at Jock from under swollen eyelids. Her hair was disheveled and her nose was red, and she would have been comical if she had not been so truly touching.
"That's right, inspect me!" she continued earnestly. "Just pick me to pieces and tell me every last thing that's wrong. That's what I want you to do!"
"You won't be offended? No matter what I say?"
"Offended? I should say not! I'll be grateful to you till the last day I live, if you'll only—oh," she broke off to add, "you can't, you simply cannot imagine what it's like to come to a place like this and be a—a laughing-stock! Oh, I am—I know it—I can see! Do you think it's any fun not to ever be cut in on except by one man, out of sympathy—and then to have to pretend to go to the dressing room finally so's to give that man a chance to get away from you"
"Oh, was that it?"
"Yes, that was it."
"And you ran back here to the house by yourself as soon as I left you?"
"Um-hum." Cecily's chin quivered threateningly, and she controlled it with an effort. "Go on," she urged. "Go on. Tell me everything that's wrong with me and just what I can do to change it"
Jock pulled a chair up to face hers and seated himself so close that their knees touched. He cleared his throat in a business-like manner. "Well, to begin with," he said, "there're your clothes, Cecily. A woman could tell you just what's wrong with them, but I can't—I only know something is. You'll have to find out for yourself just what. They're not like the other girls' clothes—you can see that, can't you?"
"Yes, of course I can."
"They're—well, babyish. Little puffy sleeves, and high necks. I suppose your mother picks them out. Look here, Cecily, first of all you'll have to get your mother in hand, if she's the way you say she is. You'll have to show some spunk, and be independent—tell her you're going to buy your own clothes from now on. Think you can get away with that?"
"I'll try," said Cecily. "I guess maybe."
"Don't buy any more pinks and blues. They're such—such harmless-looking colors. Wishy-washy. Get red, or something. Something that knocks 'em in the eye. And get them at a good place—" He halted diffidently. "I'm taking it for granted you have money"
"I have. Plenty. At least, my father has."
"Oh, if you've got a father—my father is dead and I somehow get in the way of thinking only in terms of mothers—if you have a father, that simplifies matters. Get him in on it. Go back and tell him what an awful weekend you've had at this prom, and why. Tell him what you've told me, and what I'm going to tell you. He'll help you out, I'll bet. Older men understand things like that better than older women do, somehow. Anyway—find yourself a good shop—I'll get the name of a good one in New York for you if you want me to—and put yourself in the hands of some saleswoman that knows her business, and let her rebuild you. That's the idea! Let her give you bright colors for evening and snappy dark things for the street—I don't know what I'm talking about, of course, but I know what looks good to me. They ought to fit like a million dollars, but not be too wild. Modus in rebus—do you know what that means, Cecily?—everything in moderation, nothing too much. For instance; you know this Molly I have here for prom? Well, her clothes are just right—I'll say that for her, But this Winky Willard, the black-eyed one—hers are wrong. They shriek. They're too much. Do you see the difference?"
"I think so," said Cecily.
"You ought to wear those light whatchacallem stockings," Jock continued, warming to his subject increasingly. "The kind that make people wonder whether you have any on at all. They seem to be the thing this season and you've got good-looking legs—you could get away with them. And do you know one of the first things they teach a chorus-girl? To keep the seams of her stockings straight up the back. That goes for the laity as well. And don't wear low-heeled shoes, will you? I know a lot of girls do—fashionable girls, too—but they're ugly. There's no romance in them. Imagine drinking champagne out of a low-heeled mannish-looking shoe—not that anybody does that nowadays except in books, but you get the idea. Besides, high heels make your feet look littler and your ankles slimmer. I heard my very beautiful mother say that once, so I'm darn sure it's true. And more men look at girls' feet than you realize."
Jock paused to consider, and Cecily waited breathlessly.
"Something's the matter with your hair," he said at last critically. "It's bobbed, but it looks different from other bobbed hair."
She helped him out. "The rest of the girls here have theirs shingled. And marcelled. Mine's just an ordinary bob, and put up on kid curlers at night."
"That's it! I knew there was something. Well, go ahead and have it fixed right. And buy some rouge and some powder and a lipstick, and use them a little, but not much. Just enough so you leave a doubt in peoples' minds as to whether it's natural or artificial. And don't let anybody see you put it on. I never could understand why these damn women insist on painting in public. I saw a cartoon about that not long ago—a man shaving on a street car. After all, that would be just about as sensible, when you think of it."
"I'll remember," promised Cecily.
"You've got to learn to dance better," Jock went on. "I wouldn't admit it when I was being polite, but I will now—you're really a burn dancer. You're so heavy, Cecily! You hang on my left thumb like—like a coat on a peg! You make a fellow feel like pounding you on the back and saying, 'Buck up, there!' all the time. Thing to do is, never lean, but support your own weight, and dance on your toes, and forget yourself and the man and the floor—just remember the music—get that in your ears and you'll dance all right. I'm not making you mad, am I?"
"No," said Cecily. "You're doing me good. Go on."
Jock obeyed. "Now, about talking. You'll simply have to sit down and think out a line for yourself. That's one thing you absolutely can't do without. And by 'a line' I don't mean a string of stereotyped remarks you're going to make to every man you meet, regardless, I mean a—a way of talking. Different words to different men, but the same spirit, if you get me. The same light touch. Try not to say the obvious thing, but say something only a little different from the obvious—if it's too different they'll brand you as brainy, and then you'll be done for for fair."
"Talk about the man you're with, Cecily. Make 'you' your word-of-all-work. And always, when you meet anyone or any group, make a remark during the first minute after you've been introduced. Let them know you're there. It doesn't matter what you say—anything'll do—but say something. For instance; remember yesterday, when Dopey introduced Bones and me to you in the hall? You said 'How-do-you-do' and let it go at that. You should have wise-cracked something or other—something like, 'Oh, now I know why I came!'—that's not a very good example but it's the best I can think of right now. It's what I heard Gloria Martin say to somebody yesterday."
"Your girl Molly," put in Cecily at this juncture, "kissed all the men when you presented them. Was that—is that a good plan? I should think"
"No!" cried Jock emphatically. "No, it's not. Don't pattern after Molly, Cecily, for heaven's sake, except perhaps in the matter of clothes. She's a trifle—well, don't pattern after her, that's all. Now, this kissing business is another thing. Don't deal 'em out broadcast, so that they're about as hard to procure as—as potatoes, and about as inspiring. Hang onto them. Remember there's a terrific wallop in unattainable things." He stopped meditating. "About pep—I'd say be peppy if you can, but don't try to be. I don't think there's anything worse than forced pep. Vivacity is spontaneous, or it's nothing. The things these girls do, for instance—things you've seen them do in the last twenty-four hours around here—are forced, to me. They're stunts, carefully thought out beforehand to attract attention. My idea of pep is always having something to say, and never appearing bored no matter who you're with, and always being ready to step out somewhere at a moment's notice—things like that. Not necessarily jumping around like a maniac, shouting and shimmying and all that exaggerated jazz-baby stuff"
Sudden commotion interrupted him. Rattle of the front door knob, footsteps and voices in the hall—then Molly and Dopey Lane came in, seemingly blown in on a great frosty sigh of November air. Jock saw in a single glance that Dopey was quite drunk—he swayed from heels to toes and back again like a balancing toy as he stood there—and that Molly was very angry.
"S'big idea?" Dopey demanded, attempting a frown but achieving only a sort of grimace. "Li'l twoshome? "Woman—" he indicated Molly with a jerk of his thumb—"in hysherics about shoes."
Molly's countenance bore out this statement, although she said nothing.
Jock rose hastily. "Wait, I'll get 'em," he said. "Cecily and I were having a little gab session, and I forgot."
He bounded up the stairs, and down again a minute later bearing the silver slippers. Dopey and Cecily were standing in the hall, he with an arm laid across her shoulders in a gesture that appeared intimate but was probably merely for the sake of equilibrium. "She's not going back," he declared to Jock. "She's going bed. She's all in, aren't you, Sheshly?" He was flagrantly gratified about it.
"I am, I'm dead," Cecily said.
She shook hands with Jock, glancing up at him shyly. "Goodnight. And oh, thank you!"
"Goodnight," Jock echoed.
He watched her cross the hall and start up the stairs. Half way she hesitated, faced about. "Now I know why I came!," she quoted softly. . . .
Jock saw Dopey depart in glee for the gymnasium again. Then he walked back into the living room.
Molly was sitting rigidly in a chair. She had removed the offending slippers, and her slippered toes were sunk for greater comfort into a sofa cushion thrown on the floor. She clenched the arms of the chair convulsively, like a person at the dentist's. Anger had drained all the natural color from her face, so that her rouge resembled circles of rosy paper pasted on.
Jock felt a little penitent. There was something about those small stockings digging into the cushion that pricked his conscience. "I'm sorry, Molly," he said humbly. "Really I am. I meant to come right back, but I found Cecily bawling her eyes out and I had to stay here until the poor little kid felt better. Come on now, Molly. Forgive me this once, and let's jump back to the gym." He stood beside her, patting her hand.
Now, Molly's feet ached throbbingly. Her head ached. Her back ached from bending at the unnatural dance-angle of the age. She had had five hours' sleep in forty-eight, and she saw herself a woman scorned in favor of a dowdy child. . . . The combination was almost more than flesh and blood could be expected to bear.
"Shut up!" she choked. "Don't speak tome! Don't you ever speak to me again!"
Then Jock felt penitent no longer; only wearied and disinterested. He shrugged his shoulders. "Just as you say."
He sat down several yards from her and, picking up a magazine, began to rustle through it. He thought, "She'll snap out of it in a minute or two. She always does." Presently a page of poetry caught his attention. He hunched forward, his elbows on his knees and his head thrust toward it as though he would dive straight into the printed words. He became absorbed. His eyes grew luminous. Now and then his lips moved, and once they twitched up in his crooked smile, murmuring, "This fellow Sandburg!" He had quite sincerely and artlessly forgotten that Molly was there.
She sat watching him.
After a long time she said, "Jock," and he looked up.
"You're pretending, aren't you?" she asked. Begged, almost.
But Jock's eyes were still luminous and faraway. "Humm?" he said.
And she knew he had not even heard her.
"Oh-h!" A queer rattle in her throat. Then swiftly she was leaning over him, striking at him like a little savage, raining small stinging blows on his face and head, on his chest. "I hate you—oh—you"
The blade of indifference, sawing away at the cord, had severed it at last.
Jock caught her wrists and held them. Her frantic words continued. "I hate you—oh how I hate you—you asked me here and then treated me like this"
A pause. Molly's face became less livid. Relaxed. She turned away. She picked up the silver slippers Jock had brought, and put them on, and tied the little tassels over the insteps. "All right," she said tonelessly. "We'll go back. A prom's a prom, and I won't let you spoil it for me. But I meant what I said. I do hate you—now. I never want to see you again."
Upstairs, in the quiet dark, Cecily Graves was whispering, "I love him! I love him so! Oh, make me the way he likes girls to be . . ."
The prom was madder now. It seemed to rush and to lurch and to romp. It was hectic, hysterical. . . . Searchlights marched over it, dyeing faces purple and ted and ghastly green, catching the beads and sequins on the dresses and making momentary diamonds of them. The music panted. The musicians writhed and gyrated and sang and put on funny hats and beamed at all the prettiest of the girls. Innumerable feet stamped the last two notes of every tune they played. Collars were wilted, coiffures a little rumpled now. The stag-line was no longer a line, but a disbanded force roaming at large, grabbing right and left. There was intoxication. And there was another, subtler undertone . . . desirous eyes, fleet touch of mouths in shadowy corners. . . . The chaperones had almost all gone home to bed, after the immemorial manner of chaperones when they begin to be needed.
For a time Jock stood by himself, staring at the dancers, thinking. Molly had danced off with someone, forgetting him. He was glad, glad. What a relief! It was all over, then. Ended as affairs of the heart should properly end, by the decree of the lady in the case. He rather reveled in her final display of what he termed "backbone." For that he liked her better than for all the tears and kisses and all the meek devotion that had preceded it. Now if only she didn't repent in the morning and spoil it all—she wouldn't, though. She was past that at last. Funny how the thing had happened! An accident, succeeding where all his calculated hints had failed. He hadn't set out deliberately to irritate her when he picked up the magazine.
Boy, what a dizzy mob this was! Half of them tight. Plenty of headaches abroad in the land tomorrow. Prohibition . . . forbidden jam for children to smear themselves with. Funny how liquor did different things to different people. Some could control their legs but not their tongues, and vice versa. Girls . . . some stupid, blinking like sun-dazed owls, some hilarious, giggling foolishly at nothing. Girls who sprang up when the music started and shook their shoulders and rolled their eyes and swayed, with their elbows bent and palms outward, to its rhythm. Unofficial performers, aping their sisters of the chorus and the cabaret. You could tell the ones who weren't drinking. Faint lines of distaste and fatigue sketched across their foreheads. . . . Winky Winters over there. With a terrific edge. Hair all ruffled, and shoulder bare where she'd broken a strap, and didn't give a hoot. All she could do to get around. . . .
Jock never acknowledged a notion so old-fashioned, but he really intensely disliked to see girls drink. Not for any ethical reason; merely because it offended his sense of the fitness of things. Raw poison down soft white throats . . . reek of stale whiskey on lips that should be sweet for kissing. . . . Even when he handed over his flask, as he was often called upon to do, and stood by while some pink-and-white maiden partook generously of its contents, a voice inside him cried, "No!" wildly, over and over. The thing seemed to him so inappropriate that it was almost sacrilege . . . like stumbling on a cuspidor in a dainty silken boudoir. . . .
Pondering this now, he felt a creeping nausea. So many girls drunk! Revolting, unlovely. Girls were put on earth for men to worship, and look up to, and adore. And you couldn't, in this generation. Idols with clay feet. Even when you shut your eyes you could still see them, moving unsteadily, mouthing the phrases of bar room loafers . . . "Set 'em up!" . . . "Awful thirst tonight" . . . "Wet my whistle." You could fancy them being hideously sick, later.
Jock shook himself. "Snap out of it!" he muttered savagely. "Don't be a doggone prude! Those ideas went out with hoopskirts. I drink, don't I? Why shouldn't they?"
He perceived Dopey Lane, teetering in a doorway, and he hastened toward him. "Got any of that gin left?"
Dopey mumbled something unintelligible but affirmative, and together they retired to the corridor. Jock drank deep. Ah-h, this was the way! This was the way not to mind what you saw—not to see anything you would mind. Conviviality and the spirit of the occasion and death to uncomfortable thoughts, in a few swallows of this sharp white fluid. . . .
He handed the bottle back.
"Keep," said Dopey thickly. "May need. I—Ivadnuf."
Jock spent the ensuing hours in a nebulous haze warm and vague and very pleasant. Afterward he could recall only three things at all clearly: that Molly refused to dance with him; that he gave the orchestra a twenty-dollar bill to play Cry Baby just once more; and that he took a girl he didn't know outdoors for air, and walked her around and around the tennis courts, and was amused rather than disgusted when she gasped, "I can't help it!"—and didn't.
Prom broke up the next morning.
Molly went home still violently enraged at Jock, and rather proud of herself for being enraged. She would even boast about it a little to her friends. "Believe me, I told him where to get off!" And in years to come she would list him among the suitors who had battered the door of her heart in vain. Women delude themselves so, for their greater conceit and peace of mind.
Cecily went home full of a strong resolve, and happy because Jock had sought her out to say good-bye at the station.
Jock forgot Molly as soon as she was away from his sight. A closed book, Molly. A book that had started well, and ended in a fashion that contented him, but proved too unbearably dull in the interim ever to be opened again. . . . Of Cecily he thought in occasional fugitive moments, during lectures, or when he was alone in his room. He wondered if his advice would be heeded, and if he had given her anything that would prove at all helpful. He very sincerely hoped that he had, but he rather doubted it now. Reminiscences of himself in the rôle of mentor struck him as humorous. He conjured up a vision of an inscription reading, "'Things a Young Girl Should Know,' by Jock Hamill," and chuckled greatly over it. "I had nerve! What do I know about it, for cat's sake? Why didn't I send her to some other girl to learn her stuff?" . . . He did not realize that no girl living could have made the impression on Cecily's mind that he had made.
After the first few days, he quite forgot her, also.
He was walking down Campus Street, feeling very merry. Yvonne had written that he might come to see her on Saturday, and all was right with the world. He whistled as he went along, and once he shied a book over the low hanging branch of a tree and caught it again . . .
A little coupé, shiny-new, passed him and stopped close to the curb with a mournful whine of brakes. He saw that Eunice Hathaway was driving it. She sat half turned about in her seat, waiting for him to catch up to her. He thought, sighing, "I've got to go through this now, have I?"
He hailed her with what cordiality he could muster and said, "Where'd you get that doggy-looking wagon?"
"Brad," answered Eunice. "It's a Christmas present, a month early. Get in, Jock, and I'll take you to ride."
"Can't," Jock said hastily. "Thanks just the same, Eunice, but I can't to-day. I've got a class in a few minutes." Her eyes made him uneasy, and to stave off if possible what was coming he broke into praise of the machine. "Gee, it's a little beaut, isn't it? Just the thing for you for around town. How's it go? Linden Avenue hill on high, I'll bet money."
But Eunice was not to be diverted by such subterfuge. She put a hand gloved in suede through the coupé's open window and laid it on Jock's coat lapel. "Jock deah, I've been wantin' to see you and talk to you. Why don't you evah come ovah any moah? Do you realize I haven't even seen you since that football game you took me to, neahly two months ago?"
An impulse to tell Eunice exactly why she had not seen him, and wouldn't, if he could help it, from now on, assailed Jock. But thought of Brad prevented him. She might tell Brad, twisting the story in some way so that Brad would be angry with him . . .
"I know it, Eunice," he said. "I'm sorry about it, too. I've tried to get over several times, but something always comes up. I'm so damned rushed these days." To strengthen this, he lied, "Once I went, and neither of you were home"
Eunice took him at his word. "Oh, that's too bad! But I'm glad you've tried, anyway. I was beginnin' to think you were mad at Eunice, and I've been lyin' awake nights tryin' to figure out why."
"Yes, I'll bet you have!"
Eunice nodded. "I have, Jock." And looked deep into his eyes until Jock shifted them.
"I'll call you up some day soon," he promised ingratiatingly. "Just as soon as I can get a spare minute."
"Oh, do," implored Eunice. "I've—we've both missed you so."
A few minutes later Jock watched the coupé wheel away from the curb and down the street. "I'll call her up, yah, the hell I will!" he told himself. And added, "I suppose the next I know they'll be saying I bought her that coupé, too."
He walked on, sober and puzzled. . . .
On Saturday he cut two classes to catch an early New York train, and spent the hiatus between his arrival and the hour when Yvonne expected him in buying things for her. Assorted small things, chosen because they reminded him of her, or seemed suitable to her, or merely because they chanced to catch his fancy. A looking-glass rimmed in old silver, with a delicately wrought figurine of a woman for its handle. A pair of jade earrings. A fan made of peacock feathers. An Egyptian carved ivory cigarette box. A pair of high-heeled silken mules trimmed with ostrich and rhinestone buckles. Two thin volumes of poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay. . . . He shopped, as men do, with elaborate boredom and carelessness, so that the salespeople should clearly understand that all this was to him a matter of the most trivial unimportance.
Thought of candy drew him at length into a gay little store where the lights were pink and the air was heavy and sugar-smelling, but he left without making a purchase. Candy was too conventional for Yvonne, too much the sort of thing one gave to girls one didn't care about. Perfume? No, perfume wouldn't do either. The fragrance that hung about Yvonne and stirred when she stirred was a thing not put up in bottles to be sold at random. It was a thing most personally Yvonne's. It told of rare sachets in bureau drawers, and costly crystals of salt in the bath, and a shining exquisite cleanliness. You couldn't buy it, Well, flowers, then. How about flowers? Conventional, too, of course, if you got roses or violets, but there were other kinds. . . . He selected finally a huge sheaf of red poppies. All his other gifts he had had sent, but the poppies he took along, carrying the box under his arm with a lordly air of having not the faintest idea how it came to be there.
Yvonne's maid answered his ring. A musical comedy maid in a black silk gown with short flipping skirts. She eyed Jock deferentially, being a servant, and approvingly, being a woman. "Miss Mountford—" she began.
"—is making herself beautiful for Mr. Hamill," finished Yvonne's voice from an open door a little down the hall. "Compose yourself and wait, my dear."
Jock thought how strange it was that when you were not in love you could say quite charming things, and then when you were in love, and needed them, they were gone, and only the most utter banalities came to your lips. He could think of nothing now except, "God has already made you beautiful," or "Why gild the lily?"—and these he would not say, and loathed while he thought them for their hackneyed insufficiency.
He sat down on the piano bench to wait; then on second thought moved across to the black velvet divan in front of the fireplace. He had a greater sense of Yvonne's nearness there. Mental associations. . . . He was excited. The moments just preceding a meeting with her were always exciting. You could never tell what her mood would be, and so you had an inward fluttering anticipation comparable to the childhood thrill of a grab-bag at a fair. You didn't know just what you might draw, but you knew that whatever it was you were sure to enjoy it. He said to himself, "In a minute now. In just a minute she'll come in that door—so wonderful—and I'll kiss her"
This thought made him feel a trifle dizzy, a bit gone inside. He had kissed Yvonne many times now, but the miracle of it seemed never to lessen. It was like holding all the things in the world that were lovely and precious and rare inside the little oval of your arms. A "world-is-mine" emotion it gave you. Her body was so softly pliant, and her lips could send a sort of lightening through the veins.
Footsteps tapped along the hall and he leaped up—then sat down again. It was only the maid. She bore a great flat package wrapped loosely in paper and bleeding strings of red. "Miss Mountford wants you to look these over," she said, laying the package in Jock's lap. "They're new pictures she's just had taken."
A dozen different Yvonnes in a paper package. There was a regal Yvonne. Hair twined like a coronet, chin lifted haughtily, standing against a dark background in a gown all pearls, with one hand at her throat, the other on her hip. There was a rakish, mischievous Yvonne, dimpling back at you over her shoulder. There was a boyish Yvonne in a starched Buster Brown collar tied with a bow. There was a pensive Yvonne whose eyes looked straight into yours and said, "I am thinking of you, Jock Hamill." Clever pictures. Triumph of the photographers' art. A dozen moods imprisoned in sepia.
Jock chose the two that especially appealed to him and set them on the mantelpiece, and, standing off with folded arms, surveyed them. And unexpectedly, tears itched at his eyelids and he said, "God." Beauty like that was a physical hurt; it was a shining sword thrust through and through him. "Why?" he thought. "Why should it make me sad?" He knew. Because it was transient. Because some day there would be little wheel-spoke wrinkles beside those eyes, and deep ugly grooves from the nose to the corners of the mouth. Because some day Yvonne would show these pictures to people and hear them say, "My, but you were pretty when you were a girl!" The thought tore him unendurably. There was something heartbreaking in knowing that loveliness like Yvonne's could not always stay the same, and be immortal.
He dismissed this melancholy with an effort. He took one of the photographs and played a little game with it. He held it out as though for an invisible someone to look at, and then to this invisible someone he announced, "Here's a picture of my wife, if you'd like to look at it . . ." A hot flush stung his face. Partly shame, because he was being ridiculous, and partly happiness because the very words were a delirium. . . .
"And do you like the pictures?"
They were sitting close together on the divan, Yvonne's head against Jock's arm. He looked down at her, marveling. Her vivid hair, her face, those long gray lazy-lidded eyes. . . . He thought, "Pictures! They're nothing. It's like trying to photograph a sunset. You get the lines, but not the glory. It's like me when I try to express her in words. Colorless and dead. A painter or a poet could do her justice, but not a camera-man nor a mute fool like me . . ."
He said, "They're beautiful phantoms of you."
"Which do you like best?"
Jock took one from the pile. "This."
Yvonne sighed, glancing at it. "Of course," she said, as though she spoke to no hearer. "The one that looks the youngest."
"Birdseed!" snorted Jock. "You talk as though you were old."
"And don't you think I am?"
"I think you're about my age."
"And how old are you, Jock Hamill?"
"Twenty-two."
She smiled dreamily. "How nice to be twenty-two!"
Jock thought, "She may be a year or two older. Perhaps twenty-four. She can't be any more than that."
He kissed her fiercely, as though through her lips he would impress her mind with the total irrelevance of comparative ages.
They talked. Or rather, Yvonne talked. Jock sat silent, looking into her eyes. You could write a book from the things in Yvonne's eyes. "Remembered loves," he speculated. "Lost twilights. Music, and wisdom, and sun and shadow, and pain." . . . He held her hands. He laid them flat against his, and folded them into fists and chuckled over their littleness, and buried his nose in their perfumed palms. . . . She had classic hands. Narrow artistic fingers, and a thumb that could be pulled backward until it formed a pinkish-white arch. . . . He stroked, her hair. Queer, about her hair. Sometimes it was bobbed, and at other times you were sure it wasn't. She fixed it in so many ways, all of them enchantingly becoming.
His mind was too full of her to concentrate on the impersonal things she was saying. But presently he heard, "—because I'm going away tomorrow"
He sat up with a start. "You're what?"
"I'm going away tomorrow."
"You're not!"
"Yes I am. I'm going to California."
"For how long," he groaned.
"Oh—I don't know exactly. Several months, I suppose."
Several months! Several—months! Jock felt joy ride out of him on those two words like a fairy princess on horseback, leaving only an ache and an emptiness. Several months. . . .
"And do you care so much, Jock Hamill?"
Yvonne was grave and troubled now, looking at him. She put her hands against his face and brought it down to hers. Bitter-sweet, that kiss, and long . . . long . . . because there would not be many more. . . .
"Yvonne, you can't go!"
"I must, my dear."
"But why? Why?"
"I have to, that's all."
"You mean you want to!" Jock accused angrily. "You're going because you want to go, and I—I—" He broke off, unable to express himself. He drew away, dug his chin into the palm of one hand, and glared ahead of him. He would have been horrified to know how like a sulky little boy he looked. "But of course," he added, "it doesn't make any difference to you how I feel."
"It makes a tremendous difference, Jock Hamill."
He glanced at her sharply. "You mean you won't go after all?"
"I mean that I rather wanted to go, before," said Yvonne, "and now I don't want to go, and I'm sorry I have to, since it hurts you."
"Then don't! Why do you have to! Don't go! Stay here with me—marry me—" He was holding her close again, crushing her. "Yvonne, why won't you marry me? Don't you care a little about me?" Suddenly he reminded himself of Molly. Those words were Molly's, once. That hurt beseeching tone was Molly's. And what a fool Molly had seemed. . . .
His arms dropped away and he put his head in his hands. "God, this world!" he muttered. "No justice. Men love women who don't love them, and are loved in turn by women they don't love"
"Dear," said Yvonne, "I do love you. Quite a great deal. I told you that the last time you were here, and it's true. But I also told you I can't marry you, and that's true too. There are reasons why I can't—many excellent reasons—but not caring enough about you isn't one of them."
"Well, what is one of them? You're not married already. You say you don't love anyone else any better. What is it? This damn vagueness is driving me crazy, Yvonne! Don't you think it's about time you told me a little about yourself?"
For the barest minute Yvonne seemed to waver, and Jock thought, "Now! Now, I'm going to know!" But when she spoke it was to say, "After I come back I'll tell you everything. But not today. I want to leave you thinking of me—sweetly."
"Nothing you could tell me would ever change the way I think of you, Yvonne. You know that."
"I—hope that." She made a noticeable distinction.
There was a silence, and then she rose and went out of the room. Jock remained, brooding. . . . Several months. It had a ghastly sound, incessant and drear, like a prison sentence. Several months without Yvonne. Without beauty, without color, without flame. A stretching nothingness. An zon of misery, to be got through heaven alone knew how. But she cared a little, and that was something. And when she returned she would tell him. . . .
Presently he became restless. His last afternoon with her, and again he was waiting here alone, squandering all too many Priceless minutes. "Yvonne!" he shouted.
"Yes?"
"Come back here!"
"I will, in a second. I'm putting a hat and coat on."
"Why, what for?"
"Because we're going to take a walk in Central Park."
And they did. Somehow people always did what Yvonne wanted. Until evening dropped down on New York and the buildings were checkerboards of light and darkness they walked, and talked lightly (because Yvonne wanted it to be lightly) and grew pink with chill, and sparkling-eyed. . . .
"Isn't it glorious?" breathed Yvonne.
"Not as glorious as being back at your apartment."
Her laugh was a chord from a gay sweet song. "Don't you like Central Park?"
"I don't like any public place, with you, on our last"
She intentionally misunderstood him. "Now there's a pretty compliment!" she mocked. "Of course there are men who don't care to be seen about with me, but I didn't think the list included you!"
Sheer nonsense, of course. But Jock wished she would not say such things.
They walked slowly, sauntering. A couple to make tired faces lift and soften as they passed, the boy so young, so good to look at, the girl perhaps not quite as young, but exotic, picturesque, in a chinchilla coat and a hat that cast flattering shadows. . . . Jock held Yvonne's arm tucked close to him, and his eyes never left her. They caressed her, did her homage.
"You mustn't look like that, Jock Hamill."
"Like what?"
"As though you were in love with me."
"Good Lord, I am"
"Yes, but why let everybody know?"
They were nearing a bench on which reposed the shapeless figure of an old ragged man. Jock halted. "Sir," he said politely, "allow me to announce that I'm in love with this woman, and please tell as many people as you can find to listen."
They went on. "Silly boy," smiled Yvonne tenderly.
Jock looked sober. "Did you get his expression?" he asked. "Surprised, and after that, wistful? It made him feel old and forlorn—the contrast—I'm sorry I did it"
Their parting took place at five-thirty, abruptly. "Do you see that taxicab, Jock Hamill?"
"I do."
"Put me into it and send me home."
Jock stopped dead in his tracks. "Send you home? I'll do nothing of the sort! Why, I thought—aren't you going to have dinner with me? Yvonne! Your last night"
"I'd rather you'd remember me in Central Park," said Yvonne, "than in an atmosphere of clattering china and planked steaks and—flappers." And to this decision she clung obstinately, though Jock tried almost with desperation to dissuade her. He felt cheated. She had tricked him into talking of inconsequential things when he thought he had hours left in which to talk, and he had said nothing of what filled his mind. Also he felt tortured, as though something inside him was dying a little. . . .
"Don't say good-bye," Yvonne commanded from the taxi. "I abominate that word. Just say something very collegiate and foolish—'See you in church,' or something like that"
But Jock, stricken, could not even say something like that.
The door slammed.
Portrait of a lady, with a big black hat, with curving red hair, with lips that smiled and eyes that strangely did not smile. . . .
Then she was gone.
The next day, in the automobile section of a New York Sunday paper, Jock chanced upon a single-column cut of a man whose features were dimly familiar. The caption line conveyed nothing to him. "Parke Demorest, president and general manager of the Demorest Motors Corporation." He looked hard at the picture again, scowling in concentration. Then it came to him. This was the man with the cold blue eyes who had entered the restaurant that first time he and Yvonne lunched together—the man whom Yvonne had joined, and with whom she had talked so long. Jock could almost hear her voice again, saying, "You have me coming epigrams, Parke," and then something about jealousy. . . . So that was who the fellow was? Parke Demorest, of Demorest Motors. Rich as Croesus. . . .
He read the paragraph below the picture, an announcement of the purchase of some other, more obscure make of motor car by Parke Demorest. And finally, at the bottom, this:
"Mr. Demorest is leaving today for a sojourn in California . . ." The first two weeks of December were busy, for which Jock was thankful, because they left him little time for thinking and remembering. He wished that he need not think at all; that he might make his mind a blank until such day as Yvonne should return from California and tell him the truth. Plenty of time then to cogitate matters. No use to try to do it now, when all one's suspicions were based on a single line of newspaper type that might possibly prove to be only coincidence, after all.
Numerous activities connived to keep him occupied. For one thing, he suddenly stared wild-eyed into the face of the fact that he had done almost no studying during the term. Midyear exams loomed, a distinct and not far-distant menace. He turned to his subjects and began to absorb them with an avidity that incited Bones to lofty scorn. He took to listening in classes where he had previously only dreamed, and the fly-leaves of his textbooks knew his idly-scrawling pencil no longer.
For another thing, there was "practice." This meant that day after day Jock with his banjo and numerous comrades with instruments of divers sorts sat in informal attitudes around a great barren platform, while before them a frenzied youth in spectacles beat time, and tore his hair, and howled, "Come on, you saxes! What's the matter with the second violin? Louder, louder! Softer! Slower! Hey, get into the spirit of this thing, will you, fellows? Quit syncopating, over there—this is one tune that's got to be played as is. Oh, rotten! Lousy. We'll get hissed off the stage—" "We" was the University Musical Club, a combination of vocalists and instrumentalists, and the occasion of the practice was a concert to be given before the élite of Boston on the first night of the Christmas vacation.
Then additionally, there was Blah-Blah. This was a slender booklet of undergraduate wit, which appeared monthly under an invariably pursed-lipped female cover. Jock belonged to its editorial staff. Among other duties, he was expected to contribute assorted items to its pages every month, and he had long since established a reputation as a source of bubbling light verse, short artful skits, and "He: She:" jokes. There was a chuckle in everything of his that appeared in the magazine. He left the sentimental poetry and the really artistic bits of writing to contributors who felt them less deeply than he, and hence could more readily laugh them off. About the campus he was deemed a budding humorist, and no one knew nor guessed the nature of the pages and pages of material he wrote and did not publish, but hid away.
During early December he conceived and executed "The Confessions of a Dormitory Cockroach," to be run in four hilarious instalments. He did three jingles, "Ode to a Wastebasket," "Peter the Petter" and "Girls Who Get None of My Time," and one playlet entitled "The Wages of Gin is Breath." These went direct to Blah-Blah. He also composed during this period, twenty-seven poems that did not go to Blah-Blah. Of each of these, Yvonne was the leitmotif. . . . He wrote her letters also, but futilely, for he knew not where to send them. His first one, mailed to her at the Park Avenue apartment, had been returned marked "Present address unknown." The only communication he had had from her was a package containing the photograph he had said he liked best. No note accompanied it, but across the back Yvonne had written lines culled from one of the volumes of poetry Jock had given her:
I shall consume, remembering in what way
Your dark hair grows about your brow and cheek
And what divine absurdities you say . . ."
He purchased a costly frame and put the photograph in it. But after a day or two he discarded the frame, so that he could read the writing on the back again and again. That was Yvonne, telling hirn she would not forget him; that was solace. Whenever he stared into her pictured face, that other face from the newspaper clipping seemed to dance like a demon before him, and laugh at him through Yvonne's eyes. . . . He found himself looking more often at the quotation than at the photograph.
He sought companionship, especially in the evenings. He joined his fraternity brothers in long talkfests around the living-room fire, where they lounged with that indolent droop of the spinal column peculiar to youth, and smoked pipes, and conversed about women. Women were the perennial topic at the University. All other matters were discussed on schedule—football in the autumn, baseball in the spring—but women held sway at all seasons. . . . One night, after an exhaustive session, Jock sat up late compiling for his own edification a list of "Contents of an Average Undergraduate's Mind." It ran somewhat as follows: "Four brunettes. Nineteen blondes. Two hundred and twenty telephone numbers. Addresses of seven bootleggers. Probable outcome of Dempsey's next fight. Probable outcome of next world series. Innumerable stories about traveling salesmen, about Pat and Mike, about honeymoons. Assorted rhymes, most of them beginning, 'Here's to the girl who—.' Babe Ruth's batting-average. Automobiles. Petting. Marilynn Miller. Gloria Swanson. The All-American. The backfield from Notre Dame. Barney Google" . . . When he had completed this he tore it up without reading it over, calling himself a supercilious ass and feeling ashamed of his disloyalty.
He went to movies and vaudeville shows with others of his ilk and sat stuffing popcorn and cheering sonorously at all unnecessary junctures. At Commons, the dining hall for underclassmen and non-fraternity students, he participated in an indignant riot staged principally by boys who, like himself, did not eat there, and hurled biscuits and butter in every direction. Adopting the two favorite fads of the year, he dispensed with garters and slit his hats at the tops of the crowns so that his hair might stick up through, a waving ebony plume. He went twice to New York to see revues, and once, in company with Bill Olmstead and "Cracker" Ferguson, he took three chorus girls to supper. He became a little intoxicated three times, and very intoxicated twice. . . .
In such ways he sought to shut out of his mind Parke Demorest of Demorest Motors.
One night, rather reluctantly, he accompanied a quorum of sensation-seeking lads to a "Black-and-Tan" dance hall some fifteen miles away from the college town.
The room was vast, low-ceilinged, and one thought not altogether clean, though the smoky shadows lay so thickly everywhere that one could not be sure. There had been a rather pathetic attempt at decoration. Loops of cheesecloth, colored crepe paper bonnets over the lights—things like that. The dance floor had a fence around it, and an orchestra of negroes wearing dinner coats played in the center. Outside the fence there were tables covered with squares of coarse stained linen, and surrounded by weirdly ill-matched couples. Black and tan. Black and white. White and tan. . . . There was something furtive about the place; a sense of wrong-doing. You breathed it in with the atmosphere. You read it in the shifting eyes. It was, in fact, what brought you there and made you stay.
They took a table close to the railing. They were quite uproarious already, and in order that they might continue to be so they ordered drinks from a dark-skinned waitress who put her arms across the shoulders of the nearest two boys as she listened. . . . Jock hoped she would hurry with the drinks. The place filled him with aversion and loathing, and he wanted liquor with which to overcome this feeling before his companions should detect it and begin to "kid" him. He was now, as always, eager to seem to enjoy the things that they enjoyed,—to be a good fellow, no matter what secret shivers of distaste it cost him.
He looked about him, glancing quickly from one table to the next . . . if you let your eyes rest long on any one spot in a place like this you acquired entangling alliances. After a moment he gave a barely perceptible jump and then almost, not quite, cried out.
Brad Hathaway! Sitting alone at a table in a distant corner. Steady old Brad, who never drank, who never dissipated, alone in this dive! . . .
Jock leaned back in his chair, feeling suddenly shaken and tired and a little old. Brad. Alone. When you came to a Black-and-Tan with a crowd, that was one thing. You were sight-seeing, then; being devilish in a different way. You meant no evil. But when you came alone, a sneak in the night, that was something else again. . . . Brad. Of all people.
The others were watching a woman dance, a fat black woman in brief striped satin knickers and red stockings. They were making jocular comments among themselves. None of them had discovered Brad as yet, and Jock became determined on the instant that none should discover him. "I'll have to let him know we're here," he told himself. "I'll have to get him out somehow—or the whole college will be talking about it in the morning"
As though this thought had traveled with incredible swiftness across the dusky air, Brad turned his head and saw them. And if Jock had had any doubts in his mind as to Brad's guilt, he lost them now. Brad rose instantly and moved along the far aisle, his head bent low, his hat on, shading his face. . . . In a moment he had vanished through the outer door.
"Pretended he didn't know me," Jock thought. "Slinking out like a criminal. Brad! If it was anyone else I wouldn't care, but Brad—why, it—it's like losing your faith in God!"
He pushed back his chair and stood up. "I'm going," he said gruffly.
Attention centered on him then, and voices pattered against his ears: "What for?" . . . "Going? Why, we just got here!" . . . "What's the big idea?" . . . "What's the matter, Jock, got cold feet or something?"[1] . . . "Yah, the boy is going to go south on us." . . .
They were kidding him, but it didn't matter now. Nothing mattered except Brad. "Got to go," he insisted. "Damn place makes me sick."
But when he was outside he thought, "Now that was dumb! Brad didn't want me to see him—why am I following him like this?" He was relieved for Brad's sake that he did not encounter him anywhere about the building nor in the yard where the cars were parked. "Probably had Eunice's coupé and dashed home in it," he decided.
He would not go back into the dance hall. He felt that he never wanted to see it again. He waited a few minutes, to give Brad a fair head-start; then he drove back to town slowly, his face a drawn white oval above the steering wheel.
When he and Brad met accidentally in a stationery store a few days later, both of them behaved as though they had not seen one another in weeks.
The Musical Club concert that initiated the holidays went off better than anyone could possibly have expected, and when it was over Jock stayed on for a little visit with Bones Allen, whose parents lived in Boston. He had not wanted particularly to do this, succumbing without enthusiasm to Bones' urgent entreaties, but he was glad afterward that he had. And this was because of Bones' sister.
Not a girl he'd ever fall in love with, he told himself, even if he were not already so much in love with Yvonne that no other girl on earth mattered. Just a person he enjoyed. Her intimate name was Peg, and her vitality was inexhaustible, and she was famous from Cape Cod to the North Shore as the girl who had once captured a live goldfish from a fountain in a hotel lobby and swallowed it whole (to mention only one of numerous astonishing escapades). She was piquant rather than pretty—"cute" was the adjective invariably applied by contemporaries of both sexes—with light clipped hair, indigo eyes, an up-tilted nose that seemed to be eternally sniffing some delicious odor, and the figure of a little boy.
The Allens dwelt in one of those houses on Beacon Street that look as though only dour-faced, desiccated maiden ladies in black taffeta should come into or go out of them. Bones himself ill-fitted this atmosphere, but Peg fitted it worse. She was to it an unpardonable anomaly, like a saxophone at a funeral. . . . Jock spent five days there, and lively days they were. They began with breakfast at noon, and proceeded thence at a spanking pace through matinees, skating parties, motoring parties, tea dances, dinner dances and roadhouse dances, back to bed again at three or four or thereabouts. To all festivities Jock escorted Peg, by mutual agreement and with wholesale disregard on her part of "dates" prearranged, and Bones and some lovely moron accompanied them.
Jock liked Peg tremendously for her diablerie and recklessness and perpetual high spirits. It was not until the third day of his visit that he discovered a serious side that made him like her all the better.
On the afternoon of that day there fell a slight lull in carnival, and she demanded that he come and talk to her in the Reprobate's Retreat.
The name was, of course, Peg's, and the room was also Peg's—so individually hers that one's clearest memory of her when one went away was with it as background. It adjoined her bedroom and looked out on Beacon Street, though Beacon Street, providentially, could not reciprocate. Its furniture was shiny black, like patent leather, and decorated with enormous scarlet birds of a genus never known on land or sea (Peg herself had painted them). The walls were scarlet, and about and over them trophies and knicknacks of every description were spilled. Here the perplexed eye beheld photographs, dance programs, pen-and-ink drawings, banners, a battered football, a small blue satin slipper, an oar carved with a thousand initials, a dollar bill in a frame, a tin dipper, the rim of a derby hat, a rubber doll, several empty champagne bottles, a ukulele without strings, a remnant of scarlet bathing suit, an Army Officer's cap—all hung willy-nilly on the wall, as though Peg had stood in the doorway and flung them and they had stuck where they hit. It was a museum of memories, each separate exhibit with its history. Peg adored it, and frequently avowed her intention of living exclusively in it, and never for an instant leaving it, from the age of fifty until she died, at which time the variety was to be stripped from place and buried with her.
In this room she reclined now in a wicker chaise longue, while Jock, who had not been admitted before, made a tour of inspection.
"Sit down!" Peg directed." I asked you up here to talk, not to stand speechless and pop-eyed."
"Can you blame me?" said Jock. "I never saw such a place." He took a chair. "Well, what'll we talk about?"
"You. Why won't you let yourself be yourself, Jock?"
"Why, I do! I am!"
"You don't, and you're not. Don't try to give me that line, young fella, because I know better. You're a poseur. You devote all your ingenuity to making everybody think you're different from what you are. Life's a masquerade to you, and you go wearing a—a clown suit."
"Say!" cried Jock, surprised and alarmed. "Say, why, you're uncanny! How did you guess that? Hardly anyone ever does, unless I tell them."
"I don't know how I guessed it," Peg said. "Call it feminine insight, or whatever you like. Anyway, I knew it as soon as I'd talked to you five minutes. I think I even got wind of it before I ever met you, from things Bones said." She lit a cigarette and added judicially, "Of course Bones doesn't realize it himself, except subconsciously. Bones never realizes anything unless you explain it to him with great care and draw a few little diagrams. He's a dumbbell."
"He's a great guy, though," said Jock.
"One of the greatest," Peg agreed. "I worship him. But he's a dumbbell none the less. I'm a dumbbell too, but not quite such a hopeless one as Bones. I never read, and seldom think, but I've got imagination, which he most decidedly hasn't. And I flatter myself I know a lot about people—boys especially. I ought to, they're the only subject I've ever really studied. Most of them are the same. Cut off the same piece of goods, with the same pattern. But you're not, Jock. You're different. And what I can't understand is, why do you work so hard to cover it up?"
She fastened him with a stern glance. "You make me feel like a beetle squirming on a pin," observed Jock, amused.
"Tell me!"
"How can I tell you? I don't know myself why I cover it up. It's instinctive. I'm afraid to let anyone see what's inside. I—I have an idea they're going to think it's a joke, or something. Inhibited, Peg. That's me all over."
"I think it's a shame," said Peg.
"Why?"
"Why? Why not?" She sat bolt upright, excitedly. "Because it isn't fair! It's not fair to you yourself, that's why! If people who don't amount to much can pretend they do and put it over successfully, more power to 'em, I say. But for a person who does amount to something to make out he doesn't is—is—" She stopped, groping for the word. Not finding it, she relapsed again on to the pillows. "You're just a natural damn fool," she finished.
Jock roared. "Good Lord, Peg, but I don't amount to anything! You're"
"And he won't even admit it to me!" sighed Peg. She sat up again, wagging a denunciatory finger. "Last night at dinner mother said, 'We have tickets for the Symphony, don't you three want to go?' I peeked over at you, and your face was all lit up like a new saloon. And then Bones said, 'Hell, no, we're going with a bunch out to Canter Inn.' Business of glim-dousing, and Mr. Hamill's countenance returns to normalcy. And what happens then? Why, you go to Canter Inn, and foxtrot till three a. m., and drink rotten booze out of a teacup, and pretend you're having the time of your life! Trouble is, Jock, you lack the courage of your convictions. Why couldn't you have come right out and said, 'I'd rather go to the Symphony'?"
"Oh, that," said Jock, "that was just silly. Music happens to be a weakness of mine, that's all." He grinned suddenly. "Say, you have got my number for sure, haven't you?"
Peg nodded approvingly. "That's right, admit it! It's about time. Take off the old clown-suit, I know you."
"It's off," announced Jock. "Now what?"
"Now," said Peg, burrowing deeper into her chair and leaning her head back, "tell me all about your girl."
Of a sudden this seemed extremely desirable—to tell Peg all about Yvonne. Jock had not known how much he had wanted to tell someone about her ever since the beginning, nor how greatly his heart had yearned for an audience sympathetic and comprehending, as Peg would be.
So he told her. Hesitantly, at first, because confession was an unaccustomed luxury with him, but waxing more loquacious as he went along. He described his meeting with Yvonne, and the hours he had spent with her since, and the things she had done and said. He essayed a description. He told of his wretchedness and the vacuity of his days, now, when she was away. . . . He talked for a long time, and he was boyishly lovable and appealing, and very, very earnest.
When he had finished he felt better than he had felt in weeks. As though a tension had snapped. Telling someone, some outsider, how wonderful Yvonne was seemed to bring back her wonderfulness anew. It was almost like seeing her. "What's been the matter with me?" he wondered, "—thinking the things I have been about her. They're not true. Why, I know they're not true!" . . . He was grateful to Peg beyond words. It seemed to him that just by sitting there motionless, watching him as he talked, she had helped him to rid his mind of presumptions that were unworthy. His eyes wandered over her now, from the expanse of symmetrical silken leg to the bright hair, and the nose. . . . He smiled inwardly at Peg's nose. It was so appropriate to Peg! Impudent, gamin . . . and alert and interested looking when she listened. . . .
"Gosh," he said suddenly, "old Bones is lucky. I'd give anything if you were my sister."
He left Boston two days later, and spent Christmas and the week following Christmas with his mother. The days at home were exact counterparts of the days at the Allens'—jazz and jubilation—except for Peg. Long after he had returned to college she remained in his mind as the one oasis in an otherwise muddled and meaningless vacation.
"Jock! Hey, Jock! Wake up there, will you?"
Jock opened his eyes and squinted into the gloom. A bulky figure in a bathrobe was standing over him. "Who're you?" he queried sleepily.
"Ken Kennedy. Somebody wants you on the telephone. Wake up, will you, Jock?"
"I'm awake. What time is it, anyway?"
"About one."
Jock leaped out of bed, instantly clear of head. One o'clock . . . somebody wanting him on the 'phone at one o'clock at night. . . . Something wrong with his mother? Or Yvonne home, perhaps?
"Is it long distance?" he asked as he and Ken traversed the upper hall.
"No, local," said Ken. "Sounds like your friend, Mrs. Hathaway. Whoever it is, she's lucky to get you. If I hadn't been boning late and decided to hop down to the kitchen for a bite to eat before I hit the hay nobody'd ever have heard that 'phone. Going back now and finish, too," he added.
They went down the stairs together, and Jock picked up the receiver he found dangling by its cord. "Hello?"
"Jock, is this you?" Eunice, frightened. . . .
"Yes, hello, Eunice."
"Listen, can you come ovah heah right away?"
"Why, what's up?"
"Brad's gone somewheah, and he said he'd be back at nine o'clock, and I don't know what to do"
"He's not there?"
"No, he's nevah come. I'm worried sick about him."
"Where did he go?"
"I don't know, he didn't say. He just said he had to go out but that he'd be back by nine sharp. He went about six-thirty. He took my cah, and he hasn't driven it much yet, and oh, Jock, I'm scahed half to death. I—I didn't know who else to call. Can't you come ovah, or do somethin'?"
Her evident panic communicated itself in a measure to Jock. That Black-and-Tan joint—supposing Brad was there again? Things were always happening in places like that. Sinister things. If Brad had promised to return at nine, wouldn't he have done so, or at least sent some message? Brad had always been that sort, a man of his word absolutely. . . . And again, if he had taken the new car, and wasn't used to it . . . slippery out, damn slippery . . . this January ice. . . .
"I'll be over, Eunice. Soon as I can jump into some clothes."
"Hurry, then!"
As Jock dashed up the stairs again he had a glimpse of Ken Kennedy standing in the dining room doorway crunching crackers. . . .
He dressed with feverish haste, his mind in chaos. Brad. Could any ill have befallen Brad? Surely not, and yet it was queer. . . . One o'clock. Said he'd be back at nine. Four hours without any word. A long time, a hell of a long time. Anything could happen in four hours. In four minutes! In four seconds, even. . . .
Jock began to wish that he had allowed himself to see more of Brad lately. He had remained away from the bungalow to avoid Eunice, of course, but he might have made an effort to meet Brad somewhere else occasionally. After that night, for instance. He should have gone straight to him and had a talk after that night at the Black-and-Tan, instead of pretending he didn't know a thing about it. There might have been some logical explanation. Perhaps he could have helped Brad in some way. He reproached himself bitterly now. "Fine friend I turned out to be! Passing by on the other side"
Bones Allen moaned in his sleep, and Jock almost leaped at the sound. That noise! Noise that a man might make if he were hurt, wounded . . . or if he were pinned under an automobile somewhere on a deserted road, locked into a coupé like an animal in a cage. . . . Brad. . . .
"Here!" he told himself sharply. "I've got to cut this out, or I'll only upset Eunice more. Brad's all right. Sure he's all right. He probably got drunk or something, and forgot to come home." But this failed to convince him; Brad had never, to his knowledge, had a drink in his life.
Now. Ready, now. Down the stairs and across the hall. Ken Kennedy still standing there, staring. "Probably thinks I've gone nuts but I can't stop to explain now—damn this latch, anyway"
The outside air was very cold, sharply cold, and the wind had teeth to it. Jack bent his head and hurried along, slipping with every step. He thought he had never seen a more horrible night. Black and bleak and lonely. No living thing. No light but the street-lamps, pale pools of bluish white on the dead white snow. No sound but the dirge of the wind and the rattle of ice-coated branches . . . like skeleton fingers applauding. A graveyard night, unspeakably gruesome.
Suddenly he was terrified. Terrified of the night, and of the solitude, and of the errand. He began to tun, and the quick steamy clouds of his breath were laden with fragments of little prayers. "Oh God, don't—don't let it be what I think it is—not Brad—not Brad—oh, this infernal night—God—" He fell, sprawled headlong, picked himself up only to fall again. He had a feeling of futility, a fear that he would never reach the place for which he was headed—that the elements would hold him back forever, and mock him, and make sport of him. "Oh, help me get there."
A train in the distance gave an eerie scream, and perversely, it steadied him. There were people, then, in this world. People asleep in two-tiered rows, behind high walls of swaying green curtains. Safe, and warm, and comfortable. He drew a vicarious warmth and comfort from thought of them. He lifted his head: and laughed into the whipping wind. "Why, it's all right!" he said. "Brad's all right! I'm all right!" He laughed at himself, and swore. "Damn baby!"
The bungalow's windows threw gold across the sidewalk, visible for half a block, and cheerful, as though there might be a party on. One almost expected to hear voices and the lilt of laughter coming from within. One didn't, though. Only silence. . . . He strode up the stairs and across the porch. The door feel open as his knuckles grazed it. . . .
"Oh, Jock!" cried Eunice. "Oh, Jock!"
He led her into the living room and put her down in a chair, disengaging the arms that clutched about his neck. "No word?" he said.
"No, no, nothing"
Eunice's voice was hysterical. But it would have rung a little truer if her gown had not been so becoming and if her face had not been bright with cosmetics of obviously recent application. Jock had an intuitive flash: "She fixed herself up after she called me!" This filled him with swift cold wrath. Her husband inexplicably missing, possibly in danger, or—or worse, and she could have a thought for her appearance! But that was like Eunice. Selfish. Calloused. A really inhuman woman.
"Hang on to yourself, Eunice," he ordered curtly. "You'll have to help me think what to do."
"You can't do anythin', Jock."
"If I can't do anything what did you call me for?"
"Because I was so frightened! I wanted you—somebody—to stay heah with me until he comes"
Jock stared at her. Then was this all a ruse, cunningly devised to bring him hot-foot to the bungalow? Was Brad's absence not ominous after all, but expected? "Eunice," he said, "tell me the truth. Where is Brad?"
"I don't know wheah he is, Jock," answered Eunice, and her tone was so blank that it was impossible to doubt her. "As I told you, he left heah about six-thirty in my cah. I asked him wheah he was goin' but he wouldn't tell me—just said, 'I'll be back at nine shahp, if not befoah.' I didn't think so much about it then because Brad's been actin' awfully peculiah lately anyhow, but when it got to be one o'clock and he still hadn't come I was afraid and called you."
Jock thought. "That's the truth. And I'll bet I know where he is! But why's he staying? Why did he say he'd be back at nine if he didn't intend to be? Why doesn't he telephone? Four hours—dregs of the world in those places"
Eunice was continuing. "There isn't anythin' you can do but wait heah with me, Jock. If I knew wheah he is we could take yoah cah and go theah, but I don't even know that much." The hysterical note returned, whether premeditatedly or otherwise Jock could only conjecture. "Oh, Jock, you don't know what I've been goin' through lately—you haven't been around heah to see—but Brad's not the same, I tell you! He acts so funny. He leaves me alone all the time, and when he is heah he hardly speaks to me. Just sits and gazes at nothin'. If he didn't give me so many presents I'd think he must be mad at me or somethin'—why, wheah you goin', Jock?"
Jock had started for the door. "I'm going to borrow a car," he said. "My roadster froze up solid this afternoon, but I'll borrow something and have a look around. I—maybe I can find Brad"
Eunice followed him in a little rush. "Oh, take me—take me, Jock. Don't leave me heah all alo"
She stopped, listening. They both listened. Remotely, but coming nearer, they could hear an automobile. Purr of its engine, and repeated clankety-clank of a broken tire chain against one of its mudguards. They still listened. "If it goes by—" Jock thought tensely. "If it goes by—" Afterward he recalled that they might have looked out of the window, but at the time this did not occur to either of them.
"He's turnin' in," breathed Eunice. "It must be Brad."
Then relief so poignant that it was pain ran all through Jock, and his forehead was wet with beads of sudden perspiration. He dropped into a chair, and for the first time he spoke the Thing that had moaned to him in the wind and chattered at him from the tree branches. "I thought he was dead," he said. "Christ! I thought he was dead."
Eunice stood still, and he could feel her eyes. He glanced up. She was looking at him oddly, inquisitively, as though there was something there she could not understand. "Oh, but you adoah him, don't you," she murmured.
And then Brad came in.
He wore an old brown overcoat, frayed at the cuffs, and his hat was the battered felt that Jock remembered as far back as freshman year. His hands were bare and crimson with cold, and they hung at his sides limply. His whole body seemed limp. And his face. . . . You shuddered away from the sight of it. Face of a man haunted, with eyes that saw things where there were no things. . . .
"Why, Brad—" Jock stammered.
Brad had apparently not perceived that anyone was there. At the sound of Jock's voice his chin jerked up, and for a few seconds he was the old Brad, cordial and carefree. "Hello there, Jock! Mighty good to see you." Then, quick as the closing of a door on a lighted room, the gladness went out of his face again.
"What's the trouble, Brad?" Eunice asked. "Are you sick?" Jock could have slain her for the way she asked it. Matter-of-factly, and with a trace of irritation.
"No, just tired," said Brad. He crossed to the davenport and slumped down. "Had a—bad evening," he appended, low.
Eunice echoed him. "Bad evenin'? Well, what kind of an evenin' do you think I had, sittin' all alone heah wonderin' if you'd smashed into a tree, or what? I stood it as long as I could and then I called Jock and made him come ovah. You said you'd be heah at nine, Brad! And it's almost two!"
"I know," said Brad. "I'm sorry. I was detained."
"Wheah were you?"
(Oh, that hunted, haunted look! Those inanimate hands! Those eyes. . . . )
"Just—out," Brad answered vaguely. "Out seeing a—a man"
"A man!" Eunice made a little dagger of the word, and plunged it in and twisted it, so that Brad writhed. "A man! It was some woman"
Jock got to his feet. "You—shut—up!" he commanded. Then, as Eunice turned to him, stunned, he said more calmly, "I beg your pardon. It's none of my affair, of course, but I couldn't sit here and hear you ride Brad like that. Don't you see he's ill, Eunice? He's not himself."
"I'm just tired," Brad repeated. "It's all right, Jock. Eunice doesn't mean anything."
Then Jock felt foolish, He saw himself as a third party who had butted unasked into a domestic argument. Absurd, to take up cudgels for a man against his wife! After all, Brad understood Eunice. "I'd better go," he said aloud. "I'm sorry I lost my head. You'll forgive me, won't you, Brad? I was worried as all hell about you, and then when you got here safe and sound, the reaction—I guess I didn't know what I was saying."
This apology was to Brad, not to Eunice. Brad answered it without lifting his head. "That's all right, old man. I understand. Forget it."
Jock did not look at Eunice. He neither knew nor cared what her attitude might be. He stood a moment turning his hat around and around in his hands. He wanted to say something more, something to cheer Brad up a little, but no adequate words would come. He thought, "I'll see him in the morning." He reiterated, "I'd better go." And went.
Eunice overtook him in the hall. "You were right, Jock," she said. "I was mean. But he's been behavin' so funny for weeks, and it's gettin? on my nerves so"
"I'm going to see him tomorrow," Jock stated, "and have a long talk with him. I'll find out what the matter is."
In the morning, when he descended to an eight o'clock breakfast, they told him that Brad Hathaway had put a bullet through his brain three hours before.
- ↑ Appears as "some thing" in the original text, due to a typographical error in which the hyphen between the parts "some" and "thing" was not included in the previous page. (Wikisource contributor note)