TO THE last day Jock lived he would remember that scene, even in its minutest, most trifling details. The Zeta Kappa dining room, oak paneled. Long tables gowned in white, covered with plates and silverware and bowls of shredded wheat, pitchers of milk and platters of eggs on toast. Above the tables, rectangular lines of sober faces, looking . . . looking at him . . . lifting to look at him, turning to look at him, as though they had never seen him before. Bill Olmstead with a spoonful of cereal arrested half way to his mouth. Ken Kennedy's eyes, hotly intent above the rim of his coffee cup. A panting hush over everything. . . .
"What the hell?" Jock said. And the question seemed to fall hollowly, shockingly, like a shriek in a church.
Then they told him. Carey Brown told him, dabbing at his lips nervously with a napkin. "Brad Hathaway's dead, Jock. He committed suicide at five o'clock this morning."
At first, it wasn't true. He wasn't hearing right. It was a ghastly delusion, a throwback to his terror of the night before. That terror returned now, and he became momentarily a little insane. All the intervening happenings slipped away into a mist, and he fancied that Brad needed him—that Eunice had called—that if only he could get there soon enough
He whirled about wildly. "I'll go look for him"
They caught him at the door and dragged him back and made him sit down. Someone said, "You don't understand, Jock. Brad's dead. He shot himself. You can't do anything now."
Then there came a sort of crashing, as though the words were being driven into his brain with big hammers, syllable by syllable. Brad is dead. He shot himself. Can't do anything now. Brad is dead. . . . And he knew that it was true. He could see Brad's face as he had seen it last, tormented, and he thought he must have known all along that this was what it inevitably portended. A groan tore from his lips. "Yes—I know—but why? Why?"
After a time he was calmer. He looked up and saw them all. . . . They were doing such silly things. Talking to him gently, and bringing him water to drink, and fussing about him like a bunch of old women. "Let me alone," he said. "I'm all right." Fools! Did they think to ease this agony with pats upon the back? Suddenly he could not bear them. Their faces, and their eyes glued to his face. He stood up, shrugging away the hands that sought to detain him, and moved off from them, upstairs, to his room. He locked the door and lay down on his bed and stared up at the ceiling. . . .
Why?
Afterward he went to the bungalow. A tall young man in a fur coat, walking slowly along, his hatless head bowed, his somber eyes on the ground. He did not see the glances that were trained on him as he passed, nor the people who started to speak to him but changed their minds, nor the heads that twisted to look after him curiously. Sorrow had made him alone, so that he saw no one and nothing.
When he reached the driveway that led to the rear of Brad's house he raised his eyes for the first time. The garage doors were shut. Brad's hands had shut them. And there were footprints across the snow to the house. Brad's footprints. Big oval holes, far apart, and so alive . . . so alive . . . they unnerved him, those oval holes. Just last night, a mere few hours ago, Brad had trod in them . . .
"And he knew," Jock thought. "He knew then what he was going to do." He could have wept. His face knotted into a hundred wrinkles, like the face of one who has run a long way, and between clenched teeth he muttered, "Why didn't I stay? Oh, God in heaven, why didn't I stay?"
He became aware of other things. Sunshine, garish-bright. Blue sky, and wind. Children playing on the street, and automobiles whizzing by, taking men to work and women to shop. People smiling. How could people smile? . . . so unimportant a life was. So few cared. The world went right on, no matter who lay still and cold in the house next door or the house across the street. A phrase Yvonne was fond of saying recurred to him: "Nothing matters very much." At times like this you knew nothing did. Men were born, and lived a little, and then lay still and cold . . . and people smiled and children with red sleds shouted for glee in the streets . . .
The thing on the door! A circle of flowers, and a trail of lavender gauze that danced up the wind like a sprite. It whipped his heart, that lavender gauze, with its every flutter. It looked so blithe. Horribly, incongruously blithe. It seemed to sav, "I belong to life and light and laughter, I wreathe the golden hair of pretty girls in the evening." And yet it was there, nailed to the portal, so that passersby might know that within was a man who hadn't cared to live any longer . . .
Why?
His knock was answered by a gaunt gray woman who said, "Yes?"
"I—I just came—" he stammered. The sight of this stranger confused him oddly. Somehow he had expected Eunice to meet him at the door, as she always did. He had felt all along that this was his tragedy, not Eunice's . . . idiotic of him . . .
"I'm a friend of his," he explained to the gaunt gray woman. "Jock Hamill."
She let him in then. "Oh, yes—Mrs. Hathaway said if you should come she wanted to see you."
He waited in the living room. Not sitting down. Pacing about, almost on tiptoe, so that he should make no noise. He had to keep moving. When you sat down you saw too many things that stabbed you. The place where Brad had sat the night before. His beloved pipe lying on its side in a glass ash tray. His hat, his battered brown hat, just where he had taken it off. . . . When you walked you did not see these things so clearly.
The house was very still. Footsteps and murmuring voices came from the back somewhere, but they seemed stiller than the silence. Once a solemn-faced man passed the door . . . professionally solemn, paid to look like that . . . probably thinking of something else. . . . There was Brad's radio. Jock tried not to look at it; then looked hard at it. He paused and touched the dials with his fingers. Brad had loved so to fumble with them! To cry delightedly, "Listen, people, this is good!" . . . And Eunice had always complained: "Come away from that thing, Brad. It makes me blue. I feel as though everybody in the world was dancing in some gay café except me and I had to sit home and listen out of a box" . . . Eunice. How would she be? How would she take it? He wondered if Eunice knew why. If Brad had told her, or left some message.
The gaunt woman returned and said, "Mrs. Hathaway is lying down. Will you step this way, please?"
They had shut the sun from Eunice's bedroom, and in the semi-dark Jock could distinguish her only as a wave down a silken coverlet and a pale face haloed with black hair. And hands. Hands that picked at the silk of the coverlet ceaselessly, like little white rats nibbling.
He went to the side of the bed and took one of the hands in his. "Eunice"
Her voice was a breath that hardly stirred. You had to strain your ears to catch it. "Jock—I'm—glad you came."
"Of course I came," he said, "as soon as I heard. Eunice, you know what this means to me"
"I know, Jock."
He pulled up a chair and sat down. He felt helpless, trying to think of something to say. His mind was full of questions—but not now. He must say something comforting now. Poor Eunice, oh, poor little girl! . . . All his antagonism toward her fled away now, beaten off by the sight of her suffering. "She loved Brad," he told himself, and marveled that he could ever have thought she did not.
He held her hand tight, and once he reached awkwardly and stroked her forehead . . .
She began to cry then. As though his touch had given anguish a release. Great dry sobs, like coughs, shook her from head to foot. She flung an arm across her face, and below it Jock could see her lips writhing grotesquely. They were saying things, those lips. Hoarse incoherent things. He leaned closer. "I was asleep, and—oh, my God, I can heah it yet!—and I ran in—on the floah, lyin' theah on the floah—" She sat up suddenly and faced Jock and screamed, "I was a good wife to him—I was—I was. You must say I was, Jock."
"Of course!" Jock said. "Of course you were. Don't, Eunice—you mustn't let yourself go like this"
The strange woman came hurrying in, and between them they quieted her. She lay back again, gasping, rolling her head from side to side on the pillows. The woman mixed up something in a glass and gave it to her, and she drank it, spilling some.
"I'll go," Jock mumbled. "I'll come again later."
A cry from Eunice halted him. "Wait, Jock! I have somethin' to give you"
He turned quickly. "Did he"
"He left you a lettah." She pointed. "Theah. On the bureau."
Jock picked it up, not looking at it. Cold. . . cold it was to the fingertips. . . . He crumpled it in his palm. He strove not to think of it, yet, but to fix his mind on Eunice. He bent down and brushed his lips across her cheek. "Eunice dear, try to rest, won't you? He'd want you to."
"I know. I will, Jock." She was passive now—broken. "Come back soon," she whispered.
"In an hour or two," he promised.
On his way out they let him pause in the quiet room across the hall for a little while . . .
Back at the fraternity house Bones Allen met him at the door and demanded immediately, with mingled fear and curiosity in his wide eyes, "Did you see him?"
And Jock said a queer thing, which he afterward never quite understood. He said, "No. He wasn't there."
Brad had written:
"Jock old man, I couldn't go without leaving you some word. You'll wonder why I'm doing it, and I want to try to make you see.
"I had to have money. I had to, to make Eunice happy. She was miserable married to a poor man, having to do without things. She stood it for years, but this fall she began saying she was sick of it, and that she was going to leave me. I didn't blame her for that, but I loved her so, Jock, I couldn't have stood it if she'd gone away. I had to think of something. I had to have money, and there was only one way to get a lot of it quick, and that was bootlegging. People were making fortunes at it, and nobody knew. That was the part that appealed to me. It was sure-fire, and nobody would know.
"So I started. I had another man working with me, out of town. He did all the dirty work, and I backed him and took my share of the proceeds. I had a little money, enough to start on. It doesn't take much to start in that game. I won't pretend I liked it. I didn't, I hated it. But if they didn't get it from me they'd get it somewhere else. That was what I tried to think of. Remember that night you saw me at the nigger joint, Jock? I was waiting to talk to the proprietor about a bill he owed me. I knew you wondered.
"Well, Eunice got a fur coat, and a machine, and other things she's wanted ever since she married me and never had, and she was happy—just watching how happy she was made it pretty nearly all right. Then, how it happened I don't know, but we got hold of some rotten stuff. Wood alcohol. Bought it from a boat off the coast, and thought it was o.k.—we'd gotten stuff from the same fellow before. Tonight I learned that a man we'd sold a quart of it to had died. I went out to see him. Jock, he had a wife and four little children, all under eight years old. And no money. None of them looked as though they got enough to eat. Jock, when I saw those kids—crying, and not knowing what they were crying about except that their dad was gone and wasn't ever coming back any more—well, they opened my eyes, that's all. I knew then. I'd killed their father myself, just as sure as though I'd stuck a knife into him. Do you think I could live on after that?
"I thought I'd do it on the way home, but I couldn't, I had to see Eunice just once more and say good-bye. She wouldn't know it was good-bye, of course, until afterward, but I had to see her. That's why I came back. She's asleep now. With her hair spread out over the pillow and her eyelashes curling on her cheeks. I love her so, Jock. I love her better than anything in heaven or earth. You be good to her, won't you? You're the best friend I ever had. Oh, Jock, take care of her, help her forget!"
The next few weeks were freighted with a melancholy so heavy that his whole inner being seemed to droop with the weight of it. And mingled with the melancholy there was a protest, violent and strong. Brad's going had been so futile! So unnecessary! It wasn't right that a man like that should go for a thing like that. . . . After the first chaotic hours he had reduced the situation to its fundamentals: Brad had died so that Eunice might drive a shiny new coupé and wrap about herself the skins of little animals.
In the white heat of this realization, pity for Eunice shriveled instantly, and he looked upon her with contempt and loathing. If Brad had not said, "Take care of her, be good to her," he would never voluntarily have seen her again. As it was, he paid punctual duty calls at the bungalow, and pretended to comfort a grief that seemed to him now as false as was his solicitude for it. Inwardly, he was unmoved and angry. Everything she did and said he thought smacked of the theatrical . . . a widow in a movie, weeping glycerin tears. He wanted to cry, "Hypocrite!" all the time. He wanted to snarl it into her face. "Hypocrite! Go ahead and bawl because he's gone. You sent him!"
Her mourning particularly infuriated him. It was so chic. Bereavement made enticing. She affected black gowns cut to hug the breast and hips suggestively, and little black hats with abbreviated veils that made her eyes look big and wistful and her lids transparent. Bones Allen summed her up one day in a single sentence: "She may be sad, but she's nifty about it."
Between Jock and Eunice the cause of Brad's suicide was tacitly understood but never discussed. Jock was aware that Brad had written her a letter also, and that she knew. But she never mentioned it and he, taking his cue from her, refrained also from mentioning it. Nor did he divulge it to anyone else. When they asked him—and many asked him—why Brad had killed himself, he replied only, "I don't know." Nothing could have dragged the secret from him. It was Brad's secret; to tell it would be to betray a sacred confidence and to cast shadow on Brad's blameless memory. De mortuis nil nist bonum. The papers had said, "Despondency over financial matters." That was nearly enough true. Let it go. He kept Brad's letter locked away, and now and then when he was alone he took it out and read it over . . .
In the beginning he was grateful to his fraternity brothers because they left him alone when he most wanted to be alone. Later, he became a little worried. It seemed to him that there were undertones to their attitude . . . manifest in the sharp stop of conversation when he came unannounced into a room, in eyes that dropped when he looked at them steadily. . . . This grew more marked as time went on, until finally, one day a month after Brad's funeral, he was moved to ask his roommate about it.
"What's wrong with the boys?"
"What do you mean, what's wrong with 'em?"
"Giving me the high hat"
"No, they're not!" Bones said vehemently—so vehemently that Jock's suspicions were confirmed. "They are not. Why, why the devil should they? They've simply got the idea that you feel too bad to be bothered for awhile. What do you want, anyway? You don't want them mauling you over all the time, telling you how sorry they are, do you?"
Jock smiled wearily. "Be yourself, Bones. You're talking applesauce. I know there's something up—now what is it?"
Bones, caught, changed his tone abruptly. "Don't pay any attention to them," he begged. "They're a bunch of half-wits." He got up and began to stalk about the room aimlessly as he talked. "I suppose I may as well tell you, because as soon as you felt a little less low in your mind Carey Brown was going to have a talk with you about it, anyway." Carey Brown was head of the fraternity. "The fact is, Jock—well, remember what I told you back in the fall about you and Mrs. Hathaway?"
"I sure do," said Jock, and felt queerly chilled all of a sudden.
"Well, there's an impression around college now that you're connected with Brad's death in some way—oh hell, Jock, don't look like that! Don't get me wrong. Nobody thinks you—what I mean, everybody knows he shot himself, there's no doubt about that. But they think he did it on account of jealousy, because he came in late at night and found you there with his wife. You see, Ken Kennedy answered the 'phone when she called you—he recognized her voice. And then he heard you say, 'He's not there? All right, I'll be right over'—or something like that. And he's gone blabbing it around. And nobody knew what time you came in—" Bones was painfully embarrassed, his face on fire. "Jees, I hate to tell you this, Jock! It's a stinking shame"
"Oh well," Jock said, striving for a light tone, "that's the breaks you get." His perceptions were coldly clear. Of course. Circumstantial evidence. Ken had called him to the 'phone that night. Ken had said, meaningly, 'Sounds like your friend Mrs. Hathaway.' Ken had listened while he talked to Eunice. . . . It seemed to Jock that he could see Ken yet with the eyes of his recollection, standing in the dining-room doorway, crunching crackers. . . . And naturally the fraternity resented the implication. Scandal in college was not an individual affair, it was a fraternity affair. This, a scratch on the cherished escutcheon of Zeta Kappa.
His determination to shield Brad never wavered. But a little instinct for self-preservation made him say, "As for that, you can tell Ken Kennedy—or I'll tell him myself—that Eunice telephoned me that night to tell me Brad was missing, and to ask me to try to find him. He had said he'd be back at nine, and at one he hadn't come, and she was scared. That's why I went over there. I was going out to look for him, but he came in just a few minutes after I got there."
"Where had he been?" Bones interrogated.
This required a lie. "I don't know, he didn't say. He'd had engine trouble somewhere—that was what made him so late."
"Well," Bones said drearily, "you ought to talk to the boys about it. You ought to stick up for yourself. This damn talk that's going around—there's no sense to it—and it would only take a few words from you ta set it straight, with the fraternity at least. They don't want to think the things they're thinking, Jock! If you only knew why Brad did it, some logical reason that would let you out—but you don't, do you?" His voice was pleading.
"No," said Jock, looking him straight in the eyes. "No, I haven't any idea."
Following this conversation, he considered having a talk with Ken Kennedy and some of the others, But in the end he decided against it. "I can't tell 'em the truth," he reflected, "and anything less wouldn't do any good. Hell, let 'oem think what they want to."
Still, he felt somewhat bitter. "Brothers." There was irony in that term now. The pledges they took to stand by one another, and then when something like this happened they were as quick as any outsider to lose faith! . . . He assured himself he didn't care what they thought, but in reality he cared tremendously; he cared so much that at times he was sorely tempted to tell them the truth about Brad and show them the letter. An impish voice in his ear would whisper, "Brad's dead. It couldn't hurt him. It can hurt you. It's hurting you now. You've got your life to live. Go ahead and tell them, you fool" . . .
But week succeeded dragging week, and he did not.
The Zeta Kappa staircase was so constructed that anyone descending came into sight piece by piece, like a sectional postcard opened lengthwise. At noontime of a mild spring-like day in late February Jock Hamill's feet appeared at the top of these stairs and proceeded to bring the rest of him slowly down. Handsome legs in golf stockings of a blue-and-gray diamond pattern. Knickers, voluminous and drooping low. Coat that matched the knickers, bisected by an oblong of white linen shirt. Surmounting this oblong, a soft collar with a neat bow tie. And finally, the sculptured brunette head that made all young women and some old ones catch their breaths a little.
At the foot of the stairs the head ducked forward in an attitude of listening, and Jock stood still. A medley of excited voices drifted to him from the living-room.
". . . If that's not hot I'm crazy!" . . . "Yes, and look at the bus, will you? She must be Mrs. Rolls Royce" . . . "Say, they're stopping here!" . . . "Probably got the wrong place, no luck, boys, no luck" . . . "Well, don't tell her if she has. Let's kill the fatted calf and have her in" . . .
Upon entering the room whence emanated these peculiar comments, Jock perceived a group of his mates struggling for points of vantage at the front windows. He joined them.
A monstrous limousine, painted creamy white and agleam with polished nickel, was drawn up at the curb outside. A chauffeur in uniform presided at the wheel, and in the tonneau, like a glittering jewel in a showcase, sat Yvonne. She was leaning forward, looking inquiringly at the house, and she wore garments that matched her equipage . . . a white wrap of ermine, and a white toque against which her hair flamed conspicuous as blood on snow . . .
These things Jock noted in the fraction of a second. Another second, and he was yanking the front door open, taking the porch steps in one jump, crossing the sidewalk. "Yvonne!"
For a while that was all he could say; her name, over and over again. So many words beat at his lips at once, and impeded each other, and locked each other in. "Yvonne!" . . . He took both her white-gloved hands and held them in a grip that must have hurt her. He devoured her with his eyes. "Oh, Yvonne"
She smiled at him, that remembered smile that carved a long, dreamy dimple deep in one cheek. "You didn't forget me, Jock Hamill?" And presently she laughed aloud and said, "Why don't you say something?"
"I can't," Jock told her. "I'm too crazy-happy. I just want to look at you"
Then questions came in a swift stream. When had she returned to New York? Why hadn't she let him know? How did she happen to be here? . . .
"Day before yesterday," she retorted. "And I thought, instead of letting you know, I'd drive down here and see for myself whether or not you still cared about knowing"
"You're finding out, all right!"
"Um-hum. You are glad to see me, aren't you?"
"Well—roughly speaking!" he almost shouted.
Her great gray eyes wandered past him then, to the Zeta Kappa façade. "I don't think I ever beheld quite so many heads," she observed.
Jock turned. The windows were indeed full of heads, still staring with unashamed interest. As he looked, the heads bobbed and grinned, and one youth lifted his right hand, clasped it with his left, and shook it vigorously in token of wholehearted approbation. It came to Jock that they had not shown him such friendly attention for weeks. "Look!" he said. "Right now I'm the most popular man in the fraternity, because I'm the only one who knows you." Pride swelled in him, and he tugged at Yvonne's little hand. "Come on, darling—come in a minute and let me introduce them."
"Mountain to Mohammed?" began Yvonne. But something about Jock's face made her yield. She got out of the limousine and stood, straight and slim and dazzling, on the pavement. "You just want to parade me," she accused, dimpling up at him, "—like a little trick puppy on a leash!"
"You bet your sweet life I do!" he admitted joyously. "I want to walk in there with a 'yah-see-what-I-found' look in my eye, and watch you mow 'em down like—say, what are you laughing at, woman?"
"You. You're so adorably naïve."
"You mean I'm so idiotically in love"
He had never loved her more than during the ensuing few minutes in the fraternity house. She sat enthroned on a window-seat, her gorgeous coat spread out around her like the background of a painting, her head tilted sideways—and without any visible effort whatever made a dozen blase young collegians her slaves. Her first faint lazy smile from the doorway had caught them, and the tentacles of her beauty and personality held them fast. "I knew it!" Jock gloated secretly. "She's knocking 'em cuckoo!" Every admiring glance that fastened on her, every guffaw elicited by things she said, every small compliment added its tithe to his exhilaration.
He said little. Talk effervesced around him, and he stood silent for the most part, looking and listening, and thinking, "Lovelier than ever. She caught a tan in California and it's becoming. Gosh, what a smooth get-up! That white fur. She always looks like a million dollars, anyway. And maybe she doesn't know her groceries! Poise. Says just the right things. Look at Fat Hastings, gawking. Bet he never saw such a girl in his life. Well, who has, for that matter? There never was such a girl! For God's sake, what did I do all these weeks without her? How did I stand it?" . . .
Suddenly he wanted her alone. Where he could feast his eyes upon her without fear that alien eyes would notice. Where he could take her in his arms. . . . He stood up and pulled her with him. "Come on, Yvonne," he said. "Enough of this rabble."
The worthies thus designated were reluctant to let Yvonne go. They voiced protests. Why go? Dull idea, checking out now. Stay to lunch or something. . . . But Jock, deaf to their entreaties, and full of the hauteur of enviable proprietorship, bore her in triumph away.
"Just drive, Michael. Anywhere. It doesn't matter."
The chauffeur nodded, and the limousine lunged forward, a singing, winged thing. "We'll drive till we find a good inn," Yvonne continued, "and then we'll eat a lot of things—don't you always feel like eating a lot of things, weather like this?—and then we'll drive some more. How does that sound?"
"Too good to be true!" Jock leaned back, letting his body sink into the downy upholstery. "Some boat!" he commented. "Is it new?"
"No, I've had it—about a year."
He scarcely heard her, He had drawn her arm through his, and their faces were almost on a level . . . in the intoxication of such proximity he lost interest in the limousine completely. "Now!" he sighed. "I've been waiting—how many centuries is it?—for this minute." He thought he would kiss her; he longed achingly to kiss her. But it was high noon, and the streets were thickly peopled. . . . He looked away hastily from her red parted lips. "Funny," he mused, "now that it's over, and you're back, I'm just beginning to realize how very damn miserable I've been all this time. It was most particular hell, Yvonne."
"Was it? What-all did you do with yourself?"
"Oh—thought about you, and wondered about you, and wrote you poems, and letters that I couldn't send—why didn't you let me have your address, Beautiful?"
Yvonne hesitated, her eyes straying from his. "There's a girl who's trying awfully hard to bow to you," she said, instead of an answer.
Jock followed her glance. Eunice . . . standing on the street corner, staring . . .
"Who was she?" Yvonne asked when they had passed.
"Nobody. Eunice Hathaway."
"She's very attractive."
"Yah," said Jock laconically. And dismissed Eunice forthwith. "What did you do with yourself, honey? Did you have a good time?"
"No."
"You didn't? Why not?"
"I don't believe—I'll ever have a very good time anywhere again—unless you are there."
She began this speech haltingly, and ended it in a rush. Jock could hardly credit the delicious evidence of his ears. "What?" he cried. He sat up straight, towering over her, and his brown eyes glinted. "Yvonne—sweetheart—do you mean that?"
"I'm afraid I do."
He peered at her a moment longer, to make sure. Then he emitted a mighty whoop. "You do! You mean that! Oh, gosh, Yvonne—" He would have kissed her then, regardless of onlookers, but she held him gently away.
"Not now," she said. "Not until I've told you what I came down here today to tell you. After that you may not want to kiss me—ever again."
Jock knew what she meant. Her story. She had promised, that last afternoon in New York, that when she returned she would tell him. . . . It had seemed important then, but it didn't now. Nothing was important now but her delicate softness beside him, her perfume in his nostrils, her voice saying, "—unless you are there, Jock Hamill." The face of Parke Demorest of Demorest Motors flashed across his vision and was gone, without effect. He put his arms about Yvonne, and his voice shook a little in the force of its sincerity. "Darling—the only thing you could possibly say that would matter would be that—well, that there isn't any hope for me, ever. That would rip me up into a million pieces. But nothing else in the world could make any difference. Not any thing." His arms tightened their hold. "Oh, sweet—sweet—as long as I can have you like this—" He laughed exultantly. "Bring on your German armies!"
He did not attempt to kiss her again for a while. There was an exquisite torture in postponement. They rode on, and she nestled close to him . . . so close that now and then he could feel her eyelashes against his cheek, like the fluttering wings of satin butterflies. And he talked. Rapidly and gayly, giving all the things pent up for months expression, "I missed you—Lord, how I did miss you! No matter what I did, or where I was, or who I was with, there was a walloping big emptiness inside of me all the time, because you were gone. I used to do the darnedest things, Yvonne! Walk at night and stare at the stars, because the same stars were a canopy over you. . . . There never was a beautiful sunset or a full moon that I didn't wonder if you were looking at it, too. And once when I was in New York I broke away from the gang and spent the whole afternoon tramping around through Central Park, thinking, 'Now here she said this to me, and here she looked such-and-such a way.' And then I went and gaped at your apartment house until they nearly pinched me for loitering. . . . And I used to make up lists of things you remind me of. Things like opals, and wind, and white birch trees under the moon, and castanets, and champagne in a silver goblet. 'The kind of a woman men think of with a little corner of their minds when they're kissing their wives'—that was one line I remember. Silly or not?" he finished, laughing. "A fellow all goofy with loving somebody is certainly a pitiful object."
"That's not silly," Yvonne said. "It's beautiful. It's the most beautiful thing that's been said to me in ages, because—well, because you mean it, don't you?"
"Mean it? I—" He choked, and speechless, bent to press his lips to the hollow of her throat that showed where the fur curved away in gleaming wings, "You're so wonderful," he cried brokenly. "You're meat and wine, do you know it? I love everything about you. Your eyes. They're like gray cloud, and wise. I'm afraid of you sometimes, your eyes know so many things. And your marvelous hair, and your skin—so soft, Yvonne—baby skin. And that dimple in one cheek without any in the other—lopsided, it fascinates me. And I love the way you catch your lower lip with your teeth when you're thinking hard about something. And you're just tall enough—just right, Yvonne! That's what I kept thinking the first time I saw you. So right. Everything about you is just exactly what it ought to be. And your voice—I hear it often in the night, or I think I do. I'm crazy about it, it's so different. Deep, and a little bit husky, as though you'd have to give a little cough in a minute, only that minute never quite comes. Remember the night I met you, and we went for a ride, and you sang? I could never describe how I felt. I wanted to cry and yell, and yet I didn't want to do anything but keep still and listen. And yearn. I—I just yearned for something terribly, all the while you were singing. I didn't know what it was, but I knew I wanted it so, I thought I'd go mad if I didn't get it. Now I know what it was that I wanted always, Yvonne. It was you" . . .
She said nothing; only pressed a little tighter against him in token that she heard, and was glad in hearing. Presently he spoke again:
"I like to think of you in places where you'll probably never be. In a splendid palace, on a throne carved out of jewels. Or barefooted on a tropical beach with flowers around your hair . . . that hair! If I werea painter I'd want to paint you sitting on a rock, combing it with a golden comb, like the Lorelei." He paused, speculating. "Not so bad to have the girl you loved an actress, would it be? Because then you might see her in some of the costumes and against some of the backgrounds you like to imagine for her. Do you know, Yvonne, I've thought several times you're probably an actress."
"Why? What makes you think that?"
"It's logical. Somebody'd surely capitalize on beauty like that." He chuckled, in amusement and perfect content. "Just imagine loving anybody as I love you, and not knowing one thing about them except that they're the only person in the world!"
"Shall I tell you now, then?"
"I don't give a damn if you never tell me! No, tell me something else. Tell me—" He laughed into her laughing eyes. "You little witch, you know doggone well what I want to hear"
She obeyed, soft-voiced and instantly grave. "I love you."
And his heart echoed it, and found it overwhelming. "She loves me. Me. All that loveliness, for me." . . . Before the thought he bowed his head as before a thing divine, and kissed her hands, and whispered, "Jesus." Not in blasphemy, but in gratitude. And he felt that all the days of his life had marched to this day, an army with banners; that all days thereafter would date from it, as the birthday of happiness.
They lunched in a wayside tea room, a merry little place, all sunlight, and cretonne, and yellow china, and canary birds in cages. And, because there were others at tables quite near, they talked like acquaintances rather than lovers, hiding the things that glowed in their eyes. They talked of California, and the University, and New York. . . . "I've moved," Yvonne remarked, "I'm not living on Park Avenue any more. I moved yesterday." She gave him a new address, somewhere in the East Sixties, and he jotted it down with a fountain pen on the back of a tailor's bill. "As soon as I've graduated," he told her, "you'll move again, and don't you forget it!" And he smiled his twisted adoring smile, and she smiled back . . . drawnly . . .
Later she said, "That girl we saw—Eunice something, didn't you say her name was?—tell me about her."
"Now why? I don't want to talk about her on a day like this, for heaven's sake!"
"Don't you—care about her, Jock Hamill?"
"Good God, no!"
"She cares about you."
Jock dropped his fork and leaned back, registering indignation. "She what?"
Yvonne nodded. "She does. I could tell. The way she looked at you when we passed. And the way she looked at me. . . . Women know all about one another, my dear. I understood her."
"Say!" Jock snorted. "Well, you're wrong for once, honey. Eunice Hathaway doesn't care about anything in God's world except herself and—glitter."
Yvonne repeated the word meditatively. "That's your pet word, isn't it? I've heard you use it a hundred times."
"I'm for it," Jock declared. "It's expressive. Hard and bright and cold. Glitter. Just the sound of it! Things that shine and don't give any warmth. Things that attract your eyes at first and after that tire them till you have to look away. It's the one best word for the twentieth century—this generation 'in seven letters, horizontal.'"
There was a silence, then Yvonne said slowly, "I told you once it was the one best word for me. Yvonne Mountford 'in seven letters, horizontal.'"
"Yes, and you were a sweet little liar," Jock informed her with the utmost complaisance.
When luncheon was over they drove again, and the end of a half hour brought them onto a road that ran along near the ocean. They could hear its murmurous chant from over beyond a sand dune at their right, and occasionally, when the dune dipped low, they could glimpse an atom of its bright blue-green. Presently Yvonne called a halt. "Stop, Michael! Stop right here!"
The great machine slid to tranquillity by the roadside, and Jock and Yvonne got out. "Come on," she said, taking his hand. "I want to look at this. The sea always pulls me—God knows why—I ought to hate it, really"
They mounted the sloping bank, rounded the corner of a line of bath-houses, and emerged onto the incomparable loneliness of a summer resort in mid-winter. A long crescent of pale sand, bordered by cottages, green ones, brown ones, with singular names on shingles over their worn front steps. Bide-a-Wee, Happy Days, Sans Souci—names like that. Windows boarded up, or showing yellowing newspapers behind the panes. Porch railings where, in season, bathing suits flapped perpetually and young folk sat and swung their bare tan legs—deserted now. There was something pathetic, ineffably forlorn, about those cottages squatting in the February sun. . . . "They look so broken-hearted," Yvonne said. . . And before the cottages, sea, that wallowed sluggishly as a summer sea, and whined, and crept in lace-edged scallops up the beach
The two walked along in silence, through sand that hugged their feet caressingly. And they came at length to a cottage called Paradise and there with one accord they stopped, smiling at one another. Yvonne sank down on the steps and took off and emptied her diminutive buckled slippers. Then she stood up. "I'm going to tell you now—my very dear. But kiss me once, first, before I do"
Her lips had never pressed harder against his, A sort of a desperate frenzy beat in their pressure. Jock thrilled to them, the while, curiously, he was reminded of a person about to do a difficult and dangerous thing, who drank deep for artificial courage.
She detached herself and sat down again, on the top step. And Jock, a little shaken, seated himself opposite, in the place she indicated. For a time neither of them said anything. Yvonne's glance roved out over the water, and the fingers that held her wrap about her were yellowish-white at the knuckles. Jock watched her . . . until, without warning, she brought her eyes to the line of his and began her narrative . . .
"I was born in a little manufacturing town in Ohio. I want you to try to visualize that town, Jock. Think of hills and smoke. Steep hills without any trees rearing up from the river, and smoke-colored clapboard houses tossed every which way down the sides of the hills. The only thing about it that was lovely was the river, and I could never bear to look at that much because my mother and father were drowned in it. When I was small. Out of a canoe . . .
"After that I lived with my aunt. She was good to me, according to her lights, but oh, she stifled me! She—well, there were hundreds of women in the town just like her, and when I was older I always thought of them as the boudoir-cap women. You know the type, don't you? Little women with little futile messy minds. They were always worrying about the next meal, and the dust on the mantelpiece, and talking about each other's business. Oh, how I hated those women! They used to count on their fingers when any new bride was going to have a baby. . . . I hated the men, too. All the people in the town were like their houses. Self-satisfied and drab and middle-class and little.
"Well, I lived there, and grew up, and went to high school, and had dates on the veranda on summer evenings, and did all the things small-town girls do. But inside I was seething. All the time. Wanting to get away from there, and live. I don't know how I knew enough to want to, but I did. Instinctively, I suppose, and then from reading. I read all the time. Gulped books. Novels and poetry—my aunt used to think it was the biggest joke, my reading poetry when I didn't have to
"Anyway. When I was about twenty—or maybe I was older than that, I've lived such eternities since, it's hard to remember—TI fell in love. Oh, terrifically! I can't tell you . . ."
Her eyes, distant and misty, told Jock better than any words could have. "She loved somebody the way I love her," he thought, and knew a pang that was sympathy and jealousy in one.
"His name was Paul Kirk," she continued, "and he looked—a good deal as you look, Jock Hamill. That's why you used to tear my heart a little whenever I saw you, at first, before—before I began to care about you for your own sake. No, don't, dear—don't interrupt me. Wait till I've said all I have to say.
"He had graduated from Boston Tech a couple of years before, an engineer, and he came to this town where I was living just for a few months, to do some experimental work at one of the factories. He boarded right next door. We were wild about one another from the very start. Kisses, and little notes, and all those foolish precious things. . . . My aunt didn't like it very well. She kept warning me against 'city fellows', and so did everybody else. They resent anyone from outside in towns like that. Bigoted . . .
"We planned to be married just as soon as Paul's work there was finished and he had settled in some permanent position somewhere else. He went away, and we wrote long letters full of exclamation points and words underlined—you know the kind of letters—and I began to keep a 'hope chest.' Hum. Imagine me hemming linen towels!
"Then the war.
"When I think of it now, I think of it in three stages. The first stage, when I said to myself that it was all right, the Armistice would come in just a few weeks now, I needn't worry. Then the second stage, when Paul was at training camp in Massachusetts, and I thought, 'He won't have to go. It'll be over before he can get there.' I kept telling myself that again and again—arguing with my fright.
"And then all of a sudden he wired me, and I took a train—oh, the slowest train, Jock Hamill, I can remember yet how it dragged along, all night and half the next day!—and we were married at four that afternoon in a little town near Camp Devens, where he'd been stationed." Yvonne smiled a smile without mirth, as though invisible strings were jerking her mouth up at the corners. "So funny! Just a parody of a wedding. In a shabby little house, with a shabby little minister, and the minister's wife and a fat woman who came in wiping soapsuds off her big red arms with her apron, for witnesses. The place smelled of boiling cabbage, and flies buzzed against the windowpanes. I'll never forget the commotion they made. It seemed to fill my ears and my mind, until I couldn't think of anything else. Mercifully, perhaps . . . but I'd have liked things different. I'd have liked satin, and lilies, and stained glass, and the low throb of organ music—something to treasure beautifully through all the years."
She fell silent, and her lids dropped down, shutting away from Jock the story in her eyes. After a little her lips took it on. "We had a few hours together. And that was all. He went away, to France, and I went home. And waited and waited and waited. . . . That was the third stage. Then I thought, 'It'll be all right. God will send him back safe to me.' You see I believed in God in those days, Jock Hamill. I had—the most infinite faith.
"Well—God played with me, that was all. He didn't kill Paul in the war, but He killed him later. On the boat coming home—just a day or two away from my arms. Influenza. And they buried him at sea. . . . I didn't know, of course, and I was there to meet the ship that brought his battalion back. In Boston. So happy, and all in new clothes. Almost two years I'd waited. . . . Did you ever hear of the Mothers' Boat, Jock Hamill? When the big transports got in, sometimes they'd send a little tug down the harbor to meet them, with mothers, and sweethearts, and wives, I was on one of those little tugs. Early one morning. Foggy and wet and cold—in March, it was. You coufdn't see the land, nor anything but gray fog and gray water all around. They took the tug boat out a way and then they let it drift, and everybody stood so quiet and tense, staring all in one direction. . . . I don't know how long we were there. A piece of forever. . . . And then finally we began to hear a foghorn, and bye and bye we could see the faint gray outlines of the transport through the mist. And they started our engine up again, and we went toward it. And when we got nearer there was a new color out of the gray. Brown. Khaki. Great lines of it—I could hardly see them, I was crying so. For joy.
"They brought the tug so close to the liner that there was only a narrow span of water between, and the liner stopped, and we stopped. Close enough that we could look up high and see the soldiers' faces. Thousands of soldiers. I'll never forget them. Waving and cheering and jammed in rows a dozen deep all up and down the decks. I tried to find Paul. I couldn't, but it didn't matter—I was so sure he was there, somewhere. I smiled and smiled, and threw kisses. And all the time, I was smiling at the rail they had pushed him off of two days before, wrapped in a flag—and I didn't know"
She broke off, fighting to retain the self-control that had kept her voice low and even . . . with an evenness that had somehow testified more poignantly than screams to the depth and truth of her emotion, Her dry-bright eyes looked out over the sea, and she shivered almost imperceptibly. Jock sat motionless, wracked. "God—how you did hurt her—" He would have taken her in his arms to soothe her, but something forbade him. It was as though she hid from him now, behind the ghost of the man she had so loved.
Presently he sensed a change in her, a definite hardening . . . steel doors pushed shut with a clang . . . and she was again the Yvonne he knew best, cool and possessed and faintly satirical. "Light me a cigarette, Jock. Appropriate to the rest of this autobiography.
"I won't try to tell you about those next few weeks. I couldn't tell you if I wanted to, because I can't remember anything about them except a sort of dazed, bruised agony. Just two things I knew: that there wasn't any God, and that it didn't matter in the least what happened to me, any more.
"I didn't go back to Ohio. I don't think it even occurred to me that to go back would be the logical thing, and I've never been back since, to this day. I went to New York . . . did you ever notice how people crawl there when they're down, like poisoned animals toward water? . . .
"Of course I had no money, to begin with. I lived in a little black hole of a room in a boarding house just off Broadway, and worked. Sold magazines at a stand in the Grand Central station—that was my first job. Then I was a model in a cheap wholesale house for awhile. I suppose you've never been in one of those places, have you, Jock Hamill? The models sit around in little pink silk slips, and fat greasy buyers have a perfect right to paw them over like the merchandise . . . and do it. . . . Later I got into the misses' department of one of the big stores as a dress model, but I didn't stay. That sort of thing wasn't what I wanted.
"Then I worked in a cabaret. Carrying a tray tied around my neck with a ribbon, and crying, 'Cigars! Cigarettes!' all night long, and smiling at the men so they'd tip me well. . . . Finally the manager found out I could sing, and I did a couple of solos every night. You know, going from table to table. I tooka new last name then—Mountford—the Yvonne is my own.
"There were several different jobs after that, each one of them a little step up. Cabaret singer at Huber's, and later at the Café Mandalay. And all the time, things were happening to me. Sordid things. I needn't tell you, they weren't important. Then—do you remember the Sedgewyke divorce case? The papers were full of it at the time. I was co-respondent. . . . That gave mea lot of notoriety, and got me a new place. On the stage. You guessed right about that, though I wasn't really what you could call an actress. Just sort of a glorified chorus girl in 'Pretty Baby' for a year on Broadway. I wore clothes, and walked around, and sang one song in the second act. . . . In the spring I married the leading man." She mentioned a famous footlight name. "I don't know why. I didn't even like him. But he made a huge salary. . . . Gold-digger, you see. That's all I am. Or was," she added on a quiet breath.
"We lived together seven months in an apartment on Central Park West, and kept open house. He used to pick up the queerest people—I don't know yet where he found them all. There were a lot of show people, of course, and prize-fighters, and gamblers, and Greenwich village poets, and 'ladies with no destination,' as Kipling calls them, and flotsam and jetsam. We had parties all the time, night and day. Just drunken brawls. I was forever helping people to bed. Even now, when I think about that apartment, I can only see it as it used to look every morning before the maids got to work on it. Bottles, and siphons, and cigarette butts, and broken glasses, and stale, sickening air. I suppose that's what made me hate liquor the way I do. . . . I used to have an awful time, trying to get him straightened up before the performance. You never saw anybody become so drunk so often. And then one night he struck me across the face, and that was the end. I left him, and got a divorce—oh, I had plenty of grounds, even in New York.
"There was a lot more publicity connected with that, because he was so well known, and when it was over I wrote a story for a newspaper syndicate—or rather, some man wrote it, and I signed my name and got a sizable check. The thing was called, 'Why I'm Through With Matrimony,' and it ran in four installments in Sunday supplements all over the country. It was mostly bunk, of course, and very lurid. Pictures of me splashed all over the pages. I got a lot of letters about it. Letters from men, making all sorts of proposals, and from crazy girls, and people wanting help. And one from a woman who said I ought to be locked up somewhere. . . . I've always remembered that. Sometimes, you know, I almost get myself to thinking that she was right.
"I'd put away a little money, but not much, and I had to make my living again. So I was hostess at the Twelve-to-Five Club. You've been there, haven't you?—you know the sort of place it is. Just like a hundred other supper clubs. That's where I ran on to some of the people I know—college boys, for instance. I met 'a lot of college boys. One reason I wouldn't come down to the games you asked me to last fall was because I was afraid I'd meet some of them again and they'd tell you about me. I didn't want you to know. I don't now, but I've got to tell you. Something is making me tell you. Don't think I'm enjoying this, Jock Hamill!
"Of course I had grown very hard and cynical—and mercenary—by that time. New York does that to a girl alone, and losing the only thing you really cared about does it. I wanted money. . . . See, I told you! Glitter. . . . I'd made up my mind that money was more important than anything else in the world, a lot more important than a fickle will-o'-the-wisp like happiness. Money was so tangible. So—so there. A thing you could hold in your hand. I wanted lots of it. And it didn't matter much how I got it. Do you understand, Jock Hamill? It didn't matter how I got it.
"Well, there was a man who used to come to the club often, named Parke Demorest"
"I know," said Jock unexpectedly.
The sound of his voice surprised him. He had spoken aloud without volition, for the first time since Yvonne began talking.
She stopped short now, and fixed him with her glance. "You—know? Who—who told you, my dear? You didn't know before I went away—" Her eyes filled with sudden enlightenment. "You've talked to that Toby Jennings who brought me to the dance the night I met you!"
"No I haven't," Jock said quietly. "Do you think I'd gumshoe around trying to find out things you didn't want me to know? I stumbled on it accidentally. Demorest's picture in a newspaper, and something about his having left for California. The day you did. I knew you knew him—that time in Sherry's, remember?—but even then I wasn't—I didn't believe"
"You didn't want to believe, did you?"
Jock did not reply, and his eyes fell from hers, to her white fingers that played restlessly at her throat. He felt numb. A sort of mental paralysis, that enabled him to hear and see but not to think, seemed to have settled on him. "It's been just a lot of words," he told himself, "and they're true, yet they don't mean anything. I don't feel anything. Good Lord, what's the matter with me? I ought to feel something—one way or the other"
Yvonne's voice began again, rather breathlessly. "I'm sorry. But you'll have to believe it now, because it's so. I've been his mistress for over a year. He gave me that limousine, and these rings, and the clothes I have on, and he paid for my apartment. . . . I thought I had what I wanted. Money; and everything money buys. But you see, I didn't leave room in my calculations for one thing, Jock Hamill. I didn't know I'd ever meet you, and love you, and wish—oh, wish so!—that I'd kept myself for you. I'm realizing, a long while too late, that money doesn't really amount to much—that love is the only thing that matters."
She stood up, and Jock from his seat on the steps raised his eyes blankly to her white set face. "Just one more thing I want to tell you," she said. "I've left him, I left him in California, to come here and tell this to you, and I've moved from his apartment, and tomorrow I'm going to get rid of his car. I—I'd just like to have you know that I'll never belong to him again, even if—even if you don't want me"
Jock gave a harsh, unintelligible cry then, and got to his feet. But she would not let him speak. "No, don't. I want you to think, before you say anything. I'm going to leave you for a little while, so you can. And bye and bye, when you've made up your mind—come and tell me—I'll be waiting"
A minute later he was alone on the porch of the cottage called Paradise.
"First," he thought, "I've got to make myself realize."
He sat down again, with his back against a post, and crossed his arms on his up-propped knees and looked straight ahead. He gave his imagination full play. He goaded it deliberately, and made it, unwilling, listen at doors and peep through keyholes. . . . And suddenly anguish smote him like a bolt, searing his every nerve. He shut his eyes tight, as though by this gesture he would erase the visions of his mind. He groaned, and dropped his forehead to rest on his crossed arms. And so for a time he sat still as stone, suffering unutterably . . . because a dream, a lovely priceless thing, had died. . . .
How long he remained thus he never knew; whether an interval to be measured in minutes or in hours. Or in years, It seemed to him that he lived years while he sat there. "Oh, well," he reflected grimly, "I suppose that's what 'growing up' means. Losing your faith in people and things you'd have staked your life on, once." . . . After a while this thought drew another from the whirling tumult of his brain and set it up for him to examine. Would he ever have staked his life on Yvonne's integrity? Hadn't there always been a little lurking suspicion somewhere deep within him? . . . He recalled a thousand things she had said and done, a thousand irrelevancies that had rapped at his consciousness and been stubbornly denied admittance. All so obvious now, he wondered how he could have overlooked them. "Because I tried to." That was it, of course. He had been at great pains to overlook them. "Love is blind only because it ties its own bandage over its own eyes" . . .
Well, he couldn't overlook them any more. Never any more. It was as though he had seen Yvonne only by moonlight before, and now he saw her in a cruel white calcium glare. She was older, by the calcium glare. And wiser. And wearier. But was she any less desirable? Did he love her any less? There. That was the question that had to be settled, and soon. "Do I love her any less?"
He rehearsed again all the things she had told him, carefully . . . and this time pity overrode his pain. "Rotten. Life's treated her rotten. She hasn't had a fair break, not a single one, since the beginning. Her mother and father dying, and the atmosphere of that town she lived in, and then the fellow in the war. And that second marriage—" After all, could you blame her? Could you blame her no matter what she did? He demanded it aloud of the empty air. "You can't blame her, can you?"
And then, because the near sea seemed to laugh and mock at him, he grew angry, and began to denounce himself. "Who are you to blame her, anyway? You. . . . Why, damn it to hell, you're not so almighty good yourself, remember! You've done things yourself. And without any justification, like she had. Just to be vile. Just to satisfy your lousy low-down vile curiosity!" Crashing-clear as though it were yesterday, a prep school memory came back to him. A house in a sinister street. Himself and two other stealthy, shivering youngsters, creeping there in the night . . . and the sick disillusionment, ugly, intolerable, that had followed. . . . When they left he had turned frantically, and picked up a rock, and hurled it through that leering window . . .
And there were other memories. Not many, but a few. Little dark splotches down the margins of fair pages. . . .
"damn you," he choked. "Why, you're not fit to kiss her shoes. . . . And look! She doesn't ask what you've done, She doesn't care what you've done. 'Love is the only thing that matters.' She loves you. Enough to leave everything and come to you, and tell you—she didn't have to tell you. She could have lied and lied, and you'd have believed every word. But because she wouldn't lie to you, you sit like this, like a smug saint with a halo, and dare to judge her! She was too fine to lie. She wouldn't stoop to that. And here you are . . ."
He pitched sideways and lay face downward on the porch, humbled and penitent. He whispered, barely audibly: "Oh, Yvonne—sweetheart—forgive me, you'll have to forgive me for this! It was just that I worshiped you so. Put you in a shrine, and thought you weren't human. And then—someone else's arms—it killed me to think of you in someone else's arms. . . . But that's over. You're mine now. Mine!" He chattered it fiercely. "Mine! My wife! That's what you're going to be. And nobody else will ever so much as touch your hand."
He held then a little requiem over the past. He divided the things Yvonne had said, putting the ones that had stung him away into permanent oblivion, repeating the ones that were precious over and over, so that his lips should chisel them into the enduring tablets of his memory. . . . After a long time he stood up, laboriously, like a man just out of a sick-bed. He walked down the steps to the beach.
There was a weather-beaten wharf not a great distance away, and there he caught sight of Yvonne, standing on its far edge, gazing out at the ocean. Yvonne in her white fur . . . and she had taken off her hat, so that her hair was like the torch of a slender white candle. Yvonne. So beautiful. So glittering-beautiful . . .
And there was no problem in his mind any more. Nothing but a resolution, and a desire, and a new sharp ecstasy.
He began to run toward her, stumbling a little in the sand.
"Mail," observed Bones Allen to no one in particular.
He advanced into his room and took the thin stack of letters from the desk, skimming through them hopefully. He had reason to expect a check from home; that is to say, he had written beseeching one in a manner so fervent that he assured himself it could not fail of results. He read aloud, "Mr. Jock Hamill, Mr. Jock Hamill, Mr. Laurence Allen—from Sis, that won't help the poor and needy—Mr. Jock Hamill"
He held this last missive off and surveyed it with truculence. It was unstamped, and bore no address. Just his roommate's name. The envelope was rimmed in black, and its flap had a black monogram—E B H in letters that caught hold of one another's toes like acrobats hanging from a trapeze.
"That dumb dame!" Bones grunted. "Why the devil won't she let him alone?" He brought the envelope to his nose and inhaled disgustedly. "All stink-o with perfume"
He gave his own letter the cursory perusal young men invariably accord the communications of young ladies to whom they are related. Even Peg's declaration that she was contemplating matrimony failed to win from him more than a tolerant smile. Peg was always contemplating matrimony—merely contemplating. She had been engaged so many times during the course of her kaleidoscopic career that any such announcement had become as the celebrated cry of "Wolf! Wolf!"—and was so accepted by her family. "Of course," she wrote now, "you're saying, 'What, again?' and thinking this is just another laugh. But I'm serious. I really think it's going to take, this time. You don't know the victim, but he's Johnny Havens of New York and I learned about fiancés from him" . . .
Bones tossed the scribbled sheets onto his chiffonier and began to disrobe. He wondered where Jock was. After a time he picked up the battered nickel alarm clock that leaned drunkenly against the caster of his bed and squinted at it. A relic, that alarm clock. Onelegged, and with sketches and legends pock-marking its unglassed face. Just now one hand pointed to a lady with a corncob pipe in her month. The other pointed to "Andover 1918." This meant that the hour lacked fifteen minutes to six.
Bones went to the door, his mouth opened wide to bellow his roommate's name. Encountering Pink Davis on the threshold, he closed it to the degree adapted to propinquity and said, "Seen Jock any place?"
"Not since noon," said Pink.
"Wonder where he is?"
"Still out with the streamline siren, I guess."
"The what? Who you talking about?"
"That's right, you didn't come in till afterward, did you?" Pink recollected. He sat down, hoisted his feet to a table and prepared for oratory. "Say, you should have been here! We're all downstairs waiting for chow, when what should pull up out in front but Buckingham Palace on wheels containing a red-headed baby that would knock your eye out. In the midst of the riot that follows, Jock meanders in, takes one look, and dashes through the door like a bat out of hell. Seems she's a petting acquaintance of his, or whathave—you. Pretty soon he brings her back in with him, and a lot more redskins bite the dust. No foolin', Bones, she was bottled-in-bond stuff, and I don't mean maybe! She stayed a little while, talking to us, and then she and Jock rode off together. And nobody's seen him since."
Bones, who had been listening intently, now waggled a bent-back thumb in the direction of Yvonne's photograph. "That the one?"
"That's her. Who is she, anyway? I've noticed that picture before, but I never heard Jock say anything."
"Oh, well, you know how he is—mum's his middle name. He never said anything to me either except to tell me her name—Yvonne Mountford—but he's certainly looked a bookfull." Bones' eyes fell from the picture to the desk where the note from Eunice lay, a somehow flamboyant black-and-white square on the worn green blotter. "Humph!" he sneered at it under his breath.
A few minutes later Jock came in. They heard him approaching, whistling a tune—one of those modern tunes about blisses and kisses and happiness-this-is—and they winked jovially at one another. A college boy loves to tease, and here would be a rare distinguished opportunity, They rose simultaneously as Jock entered and they shook his hand with solemn and silent gusto.
"Gentlemen, I thank you," he said, equally solemn. "I do indeed. Your greeting warms the cockles of my heart, e'en while it bewilders me." He shrugged himself out of his coat and stood regarding them quizzically. "Have I been elected Dean of the college? I knew it was only a question of time"
"Jock," interrupted Pink softly, "what kind of an afternoon did you have?"
Jock smiled, and rolled his eyes heavenward, overemphasizing the rapture he felt to the point where it seemed caricature. "Ah!" he sighed. "You should ask me!"
"Where's the momma?" Bones wanted to know.
"She's gone back to New York, worse luck."
Pink burst into song. "'That red-head gal, la-deda, la-de-da, she's got me worr-ried—'" He subsided, to add, "Ne'mind, Jock, I'm with you. You know how to pick 'em."
"Don't I, though?"
"I don't see how you do it," Pink continued. "I swear I don't. I was just saying to Bones before you came in, how does he do it, and Bones said, 'Why, it's his fatal beauty:'"
Jock bowed his head approvingly to Bones. "Truest words you ever uttered, brother!" . . . Secretly he was restless and impatient, bored with this persiflage and the necessity of returning it in kind. He longed to be by himself, alone with the new great glory that had risen in an hour from the ashes of an old ideal. He wanted to look into the mirror at the man whom Yvonne loved, and try to understand how she could. He wanted to think of the future. Of Yvonne belonging to him . . . not only saying that she would some day, but actually being his. It was a prospect to take the breath away like a keen wind in the face, to make the arms reach out suddenly and the blood leap and sing in the veins. . . . Maddening, to have to be facetious and light about it all for the sake of these two who watched eagle-eyed. Damn Pink Davis, anyway! "—that baby can use my toothbrush any time," Pink was now magnanimously declaring.
Jock sprawled in a chair and lit his pipe. "Any mail?" he inquired, to change the subject.
"Desk," said Bones succinctly.
Two letters propped against the inkwell, and a third flat on the blotter. He picked this up and glowered, much as Bones had glowered at it some minutes earlier, "Now what," he said to himself. He perceived that Bones was looking at him over his shoulder with eyes darkly round in a ruddy face. The eyes flickered meaningly toward Pink and back again. Jock, thus warned, pushed the note into his pocket, where it seemed to weigh heavily, with a weight amazing in such a flimsy thing.
Later, when Pink had departed, he took it out and slapped it thoughtfully against the palm of his hand. He could not have explained why, but he was loath to open it. "When did this come?" he asked.
"Found it when I got back from track," said Bones. He gesticulated with a hairbrush. "For criminy's sake, Jock, tell that female to lay off! How can you expect the chatter to pipe down as long as she calls up on the 'phone and sends you notes by special messenger?"
"Calls up? Did she call this afternoon?"
"Only seven times," said Bones testily. "I met Benny coming in and he told me to tell you. He said her 'Is Mis-tah Hamill theah yet' had worn bunions on his ear-drums."
Jock heard with rising irritation. Just like Eunice! That was his thought. So exactly like her to intrude herself now, and cloud the radiance of his horizon. She had a genius for ineptitude, for striking the discordant note, that girl. . . . He ripped open the envelope with the stem of his pipe and read, scowling.
"What's she want?" interrogated Bones.
"Wants to see me about something."
"Tell her to go to hell, you can't give her any time."
"She says it's very urgent"
"Yah!" jeered Bones. "Louder! And funnier! Yah, I'll bet it's urgent. You take my advice, and tell her"
Jock cut him off. "Can't," he said simply. "I'll have to drop over after dinner and see what the trouble is. Least I can do. After all, Bones, she's Brad's widow, and she's terribly alone."
"You're so all-fired conscienticus, you give me a pain!" exclaimed Bones. "If she's lonesome why doesn't she go back down South where she came from? What's she moping around here for, that's what I'd like to know. Ask her that when you get there."
"No bad idea," commented Jock. "I will. I'd like to know, myself."
He sat idle for some seconds, toying with Eunice's letter but not thinking of it longer, nor of her. "Believe I'll leave college," he announced startlingly.
"What?"
Jock nodded. "Might as well. I haven't done a lick of work since before Christmas, and I'm darn sure I won't from now on. I'm sick of the whole business, anyway. Why hang on here for four months more when I don't want to, just to get a degree that won't mean a thing when I do get it? I can't see the percentage."
"You've hung on for four years already after that degree! What's a few months, compared"
"Things are different now, though."
Bones left his dresser and came to perch on the edge of the desk, from which elevation he looked down upon his roommate with anxiety. "See here, Jock," he began. "I get it. I get it straight. You're all gloomed up over this Hathaway thing, and no wonder, what with the way the boys are taking it and Bad News down the street bombarding you with notes and all. But listen, that'll straighten itself out if you give it time, and then"
"That's not it," insisted Jock. "You're way out of bounds. I'd never let a little rumor hound me out of college if I didn't want to go, you ought to know that. No, the fact is—" He faltered, irresolute. To tell it! To hear himself say it aloud, and know that it was real! Bones' beloved worried face added the last straw to this delectable temptation. "The fact is, old man—just between you and me—I'm going to be married!"
"You are! To"
"To Yvonne, of course." Loving the very words, he said them over. "I'm going to marry Yvonne Mountford. Ha! What do you think of that, Bones?"
Bones beamed, his face clearing in a twinkling. "Great!" he cried. "Gee, yes, that's the honey!" He leaned to pump Jock's hand and to give him a stunning blow on the back. "Congratulations! Say, I'm damn glad"
"Thanks," Jock said. Rather shortly, because an unaccountable fullness was constricting his throat momentarily, militating against composure. Old Bones . . . good old boy, best pal in the world. . . .
"—sore because I wasn't here when she came," Bones was rattling on. "Wanted to see her, the worst way. They tell me she's right there, and over. Say, how's to loosen up and release a little dope? You've been silent as the Sphinx, you big bum! How long's this been simmering? And when's the great event coming off? I'll have to get me a new drinking suit, and begin hoarding hootch for a fit celebration!"
"You've got plenty of time," grinned Jock. "We aren't going to be married for a—for quite awhile." He had almost said, "For a year." That had been Yvonne's pronouncement. "We'll wait at least a year, my dear." And when he had demurred, frenziedly, she had added, "You'll know me better in a year. I want to be very, very sure that you are sure" . . . Absurd! As though he wasn't sure now . . . as though a year of seeing her could have any effect whatever except to cause his love for her to strengthen!
"At least," he amended aloud, "she says it won't be for quite awhile. But I'm going to talk her out of that, or die trying."
"Sure!" said Bones sympathetically.
"So you see, it's just a waste of time, my milling around here. I want to get out and get started in business. No wife of mine is going to live on my mother's money, that's one thing that's settled right now."
"What are you going to do, do you know?"
"Oh," Jock retorted vaguely, "sell bonds, or something, I suppose. That's what everybody does, isn't it?"
"It is," said Bones, "but you're not 'everybody.' You ought to take up something different and cagey—leave the peddling jobs to fish like me who can't do anything else."
Jock sputtered, "Now you're popping off just like your sister! There seems to be a family hallucination about my potentialities"
"By the way! That reminds me, Peg's engaged too. I just had a letter."
"She is? Fine! I'm"
"Oh, don't run a temperature over the thing," Bones advised. "Ten to one it won't pan out—you know Peg, she catches engagements like the rest of us catch colds. But she wanted me to tell you."
Later, when they went down to dinner arm in arm, Bones said with a determined levity that deceived neither of them, "Then it's all decided, is it? You're really going to sign off, and leave the rest of us flat?"
"Guess I am," replied Jock. "Don't say anything about it yet—I haven't talked it over with the mater, of course, but—well, I guess I am."
"I'll miss you."
"Same here, old man."
Both were tremendously touched, sad. And to deny the presence of so weak and feminine an emotion, they took the rest of the stairs in a series of gallops and descended, uproarious, upon the dining room.
Eunice was curled up in a great chair, reading . . . so absorbed in reading that she did not appear to have heard the clamor of the doorbell nor the entrance of Jock. He stood surveying her from across the room. Her head, bent over the book, showed dark hair marcelled in perfect concentric circles from a tiny part, and wisps of it pasted like inverted question: marks on her forehead. Her gown was black lace, so tight in the bodice that the filagree design gave an effect of having been stencilled on the skin. One leg was tucked up under her, and the other, a slyly overt leg in a sheer pinky-black chiffon stocking and a black satin slipper held across the instep with a bow of ribbon, hung toward the floor. "She got that pose," he thought dryly, "from one of the hosiery ads."
He said, "It must be a darn good book."
She glanced up quickly then, simulating astonishment. "Jock! I didn't heah you come in!"
"Didn't you," politely. "I rang three times. But maybe the bell is broken or something." He took the book from her fingers and read the title, "In Defense of Women by H. L. Mencken. Say, how do you like this?"
"All right," replied Eunice. "It's—" she paused uncertainly, and Jock waited. He thought if she would make an intelligent comment on this book, or on any book or thing, he could forgive her much. But she finished lamely, and his flash of interest died. "It's peculiah," she said.
"Yah," he agreed vacantly. He put the book down and seizing a little chair thrust it between his knees, so that he sat eyeing Eunice above the back of it. "What's on your mind? What did you want to see me about?"
"Oh—lots of things," she evaded. "Let's not talk about that right off. Let's talk about you foah awhile. Why haven't you been to see me foah almost two weeks, Jock?"
Her perennial query; but before he could give his perennial excuse of busyness, she had veered to a new tack. "I saw you today."
"Is that a fact?"
"Didn't you see me?"
"Yes, I believe I did."
"Was that the woman you were tellin' me about last fall—the one you said had 'a mouth like Cleopatra's kiss'?"
Jock remembered having said this. But he wished very much that he had not. It sounded ridiculous, puerile, when Eunice quoted it. . . . He bowed stiffly in affirmation.
"But I thought you told me she was pretty!"
"Well, my God, isn't she?"
Eunice hesitated, running the tip of her tongue over her lips. "If you want me to be perfectly frank, Jock," she said at last," she looked a little bit passé to me. She must be yeahs and yeahs oldah than you, of cohse."
Jock started; then chuckled derisively. "In Defense of Women—no wonder it had to be written by a man! Honestly, Eunice, you burn me up! You wouldn't even give the devil his due if he happened to have a skirt on, would you?"
"Now don't be horrid!" pouted Eunice. "You asked me foah an opinion and I gave it. She did look passé to me, I can't help it if I've got eyes, can I?"
"No, but you really ought to buy 'em some spectacles."
"Rose-colohed ones like yoahs, I suppose?"
Understanding perfectly the spirit that prompted these sallies, Jock was no whit affronted by them. "Say," he said, pleasantly enough, "did you invite me over here this evening just to have me listen while you hurl bouquets at another girl?"
"Anothah what? 'Girl' is a teens-and-twenties word, remembah!" So unforeseenly that it took him a moment to accustom himself to the transition, she became apologetic. "Oh, I'm sorry, Jock. Really. Don't pay any attention to me. I reckon I'm—prejudiced."
He rather liked her for that. It seemed to him one of the few genuine things he had ever heard Eunice say.
"Let's talk about somethin' else," she suggested.
He had difficulty in analyzing her subsequent remarks. She seemed to be determinedly and gradually leading up to something, but to what he could not surmise. He was aware of an increasing tension—both in himself, and in her. She talked much faster than usual, and inconsecutively, bridging wide gulfs between topics with a single word, or even not troubling to bridge them at all. And as she talked she looked into her lap, at her fidgeting fingers, out of the window . . . everywhere, in fact, but at him.
"What is this," he thought uneasily. "What's it all about?"
" . . . Brad was wild ovah you, Jock," she was saying. "I don't think you evah realized how deah you were to him. He'd have done anythin' foah you. Anythin' undah the sun. He often said so, and I knew it anyhow. Just the night befoah—befoah that night, we were talkin' about you, and he said that you were the best friend he evah had or evah would have—that he'd do anythin' foah you and he was suah you'd do the same foah him"
"I sincerely hope I would have," Jock said.
Eunice threw him a brief glance, dropping her eyes again quickly. "He loved me so," she proceeded. "I've been thinkin' a lot about that since he's gone. He wouldn't let anythin' trouble me, evah, foah a minute. He just took all the cahes and responsibilities right off my shoulders. I nevah knew what it was to worry until lately . . ."
And on, and on, in this vein. About Brad, about herself, about Jock. Presently he could not listen with forbearance any longer. He cleared his throat. "Look here, Eunice! Quit beating about the bush, will you? Something's worrying you now, and you want me to help you—that's what you're trying to tell me, isn't it? Well, of course, I'll help you, and be glad to, if I can. So come on, out with it—what seems to be the matter?"
For reply she moved from her chair over to the lounge, where she sat patting the cushion beside her. "Come sit heah by me, Jock. I can talk to you bettah when you'ah not so fah away."
He complied indifferently, stretching his superb length in the corner that was farthest from her. He shoved his hands into his trousers pockets and rested his chin on his chest, and waited. His face where the lamplight kissed it obliquely looked stern and forbidding—a sure indication that he was puzzled and wary and not a little disturbed. Eunice, unwatched, watched him with telltale eyes. Once she made a tiny half-gesture toward him . . . then drew back in haste and locked her fingers together in her lap.
"Jock," she began, "did you know theah's a lot of scandal around about—us?"
"Yes. Asinine, isn't it?" said Jock. Impelled by a second thought, he brought his chin up with a jerk and examined her. "Is that what's got you so sunk?"
Even as he asked, he read his answer. Eunice's lips were trembling. "Oh, listen!" he went on. "Don't let a thing like that smack you down!" The fact that he privately shared her distress made him only the more vociferous in refutation, and he said aloud and with emphasis all the things he had long been telling himself by way of anaesthetic. "Why, it doesn't amount to five cents' worth of birdseed! It's beneath our notice, absolutely! You ought to read Schopenhauer, Eunice. 'To lay great value on what other people say of you is to do them too much honor.'"
Eunice was pressing a ball of handkerchief against her mouth, and now she spoke through it thickly. "It's all very well to philosophize—you'ah a man, and men don't mind things like that—they don't have to mind, because nobody cahes what they do. But it's a whole lot different with a girl like me—" She raised the handkerchief to her eyes, and her concluding sentence came from her freed lips with a somehow staggering distinctness. "They won't speak to me on the street any moah"
"Who won't? Who do you mean, 'they'?"
"Some women."
"Oh, of course, women! But who?"
"Professors' wives, and—people like that."
Jock had a distracted minute in which to visualize Eunice receiving the cut direct from women who had formerly accepted her as one of them. then he bent his mind acutely on her further revelations. She had conquered the weeping that threatened, and sat tearless and wan, fumbling with her handkerchief as she talked. Her fingernail, outlining its hem around and around and around made a sound that set his teeth on edge like the screech of chalk down a blackboard.
"You don't know," she said. "Nobody knows what I've been through. Things hit me mighty hahd, Jock—I'm sensitive, I'm not like you. I can't laugh it off the way you can. In the beginnin' I didn't undahstand what was goin' on and I decided I must be imaginin' it, or somethin', But then finally one of the girls—Fifi Dane, you know her—told me. She said she thought I ought to know that people were talkin' somethin' awful! All about you and I were in love with each othah, and used to see each othah on the quiet all the time, and about how suspicious and jealous Brad was. A lot of stuff about that. And then, how he caught us togethah that night, and how you ran away—she said people said you ran away, Jock, just imagine!—and how that: was the reason Brad—did what he did. 'Turned the gun that was meant for you on himself'—that was the way Fifi put it"
"God!" A groan, wrung from Jock. He sprang up and began to stride the floor, pushing the fingers of one hand through his hair. At the opposite wall he wheeled and faced Eunice, with the hand lying quiescent at the nape of his neck. "Did you tell her?" he demanded. "Did you tell her the real reason why Brad 'turned the gun on himself'?"
"No, I—I didn't"
Eunice appeared a little frightened, as though the directness of the question had upset her. But Jock noticed nothing. He was engrossed in his own reaction to her reply . . . in despising himself because he could not deny that it was a disappointment. "You wanted her to tell!" his thoughts accused him. "You wanted her to say yes, she'd told the whole thing! Just to save your own skin, you hoped she'd done Brad a trick like that—that you wouldn't be willing to do yourself—say, what kind of a cur are you, anyway?"
Eunice's next words slapped at his ears like an added reproof. "How could I, Jock? You don't think I ought to go around tellin' people poah old Brad was a bootleggah, do you? And that he sold poison liquah to a"
"No, no, of course not!"
"It's bettah they should think I'm no good than that he wasn't," Eunice asserted piously. "He's dead now. I'm the one that's got to suffah."
Then Jock's spleen at himself shifted to her, redoubled a hundredfold. Eunice! Self-commiserating! "I'm the one that's got to suffer" . . . she could say that with a straight face, a sad face, and in that aggrieved and martyred manner! Why, it was so preposterous as to be laughable! But he did not laugh. He stood and listened with a sort of detached appreciation while the invectives that had long lain dormant awoke and poured themselves cruelly, scaldingly, from his tongue.
"And why in God's name shouldn't you suffer? What made him a bootlegger—what started all this in the first place, just answer me that? Do you imagine for one minute Brad Hathaway would ever have dirtied his hands like that of his own free will? If you hadn't kept at him and kept at him about money till he didn't know what he was doing, he'd be alive this minute"
"Oh!" gasped Eunice.
"—and you've got the colossal gall to sit there and talk about how you've got to suffer for him! And to say it's better that people should think you're no good than that he wasn't! You're damn right, it's better!—because it's truer! He was one of the best men that ever lived, and you—parasite—if he turned out to be anything else toward the end, you were responsible! No, you shouldn't tell anybody he was bootlegging. You were right about that. If he'd been anybody but Brad it wouldn't matter so much, but Brad—whom everybody loved and respected—who never did an underhanded thing in his life until you got hold of him—no, neither you nor I can ever tell on him. But don't try to make out you've got altruistic motives for keeping your mouth shut! I don't know what your motives are, I don't pretend to, but I know whatever they are they're selfish—like everything else about you"
He desisted as suddenly as though he had been grappled from behind and bound and gagged. His eyes had fallen on a photograph of Brad, framed in polychrome on a little table. He fancied that the picture was reproaching him; that it looked sorrowful, cut to the heart, and that its frozen lips were whispering, "Jock! Jock! Don't . . ." He stole a look at Eunice and saw that she cringed like a flogged child, hiding her face against her bare round arm that lay along the back of the divan and clawed blindly at threads with its fingers. He thought how Brad would hate to see her so, and a great shame took hold on him. Not because he had hurt Eunice; Eunice didn't matter, she deserved it anyway; but because he felt that in some occult way he was even now hurting Brad unbearably.
He had an uncanny impression, when he went to stand before Eunice, that the Eyes in the polychrome frame moved as he moved and stopped when he stopped—vigilant. He seemed to feel them boring into his back. "Eunice," he said with a gentleness that was for their benefit, "Eunice, look up here. Please forget what I said, will you? Can you? Please."
It was a relief to hear her say that she would. She said other things too, unconsciously remedying the deficiencies in his plea for pardon. "You didn't mean it, of cohse. You were just beside yoahself on account of the othah. I know. Don't think any moah about it, Jock." The grace and promptness with which she forgave him disquieted him. That wasn't like Eunice. It was more like Brad. It was more like Brad! Did she also, then, talk at the dictation of those dead and sightless, yet somehow seeing, living, penetrating Eyes?
He thought she did. Grotesquely he thought of a Punch-and-Judy show . . . Eunice and he, puppets, motivated and controlled by a hidden presence who spoke aloud now through their mouths.
He sat down again beside her. 'Now!' he said, making a determined attempt to throw himself beyond the shadow of this awe. "That's all over. Go on with what you were saying, Eunice. About the rotten gossip—I'm sorry it worries you so."
"It neahly kills me!"
"I know. It's a crime."
"If Brad knew," Eunice went on, slowly and stumblingly, "I—I don't know what he'd do. He wouldn't stand foah it, though, I'm suah of that. He'd nevah let me be persecuted and insulted the way I am being every day of my life. He'd do somethin'!"
She looked expectantly at Jock. He said the only thing he could think of that might be what she was waiting for. "What do you suppose that he would do?"
"Oh," cried Eunice, "what difference does it make what he'd do? He's gone—and I haven't got anybody"
"You have me," Jock reminded her quietly. "You know very well I'll do anything in my power, for Brad's sake. And—for your sake, too, of course. But what is there I can do? I don't see"
Eunice interrupted. "Wheah I come from," she said—and even the inflections of her voice on these first four words struck Jock as ominous, "wheah I come from, when a girl has been put in a compromisin' position, and theah is scandal around about her and some man, no mattah whethah it's his fault or not, the man—if he's honorable—offahs her the protection of his name"
Silence, surcharged. Then Jock heard someone who sounded like himself at long distance say incredulously, "You mean—you think I ought to marry you—on account of this thing?"
"I mean I think that's what Brad would want you to do under the circumstances," answered Eunice, low.
Her gaze was upon him, her expression a thing mixed and undecipherable. But Jock was not looking at Eunice. He was looking once more toward the picture of Brad in the polychrome frame on the table. He was questioning it silently, fearfully. And he saw the picture nod at him . . . he would have sworn all the rest of his days away on the actuality of that nod. . . .
"I see," he murmured, stiff-lipped. "I see."
(Oh, Yvonne! Yvonne!)