MRS. HAMILL was entertaining. All her guests were men, and at first glance there appeared to be hundreds of them, so wholly did they fill her house with tailored black and starched white and polished leather. As a matter of fact they numbered sixty. Bennett, the butler, had counted them, afterward sidling to his mistress to whisper the total. "Sixty tonight, Madam." And Mrs. Hamill had inclined her shingle-bobbed silver head in satisfaction. Sixty was quite as it should be.
They had arrived between the hours of ten and twelve, these guests, in a succession of motor cars sleek and correct and opulent, like themselves. They would depart again at dawn. In the meantime, rather incredible sums of money were changing hands across the little green baize tables in the card room, and above the long checkerboarded tables with clicking wheels sunk in their ends that lined the great salon. And of the rather incredible sums, a goodly portion would come to permanent rest at last in the soft small hands of Madelaine Hamill. Of course. One does not convert one's home into a casino of Chance for nothing.
Hour after hour she moved through the crowded rooms, smiling, greeting, exchanging badinage, seeing to it that highball glasses were often refilled and that matches were plentiful, noting mechanically whose chips towered high on the roulette tables and whose dwindled. Now and then she stopped to follow the progress of a hand of bridge, or to stand behind some chair in obedience to the occupant's plea that she do so "to change my luck"; then strolled on again, a nomadic dart of color against the somber background provided by sixty suits of masculine evening clothes. She was wearing an orange gown that outlined her figure abruptly as a scissored paper-doll's and lit wee dancing lanterns in her eyes. She looked arrestingly lovely and extremely youthful, did Jock's mother. She seemed every inch the charming, the popular, the distinguished hostess; and not at all did she seem what she was . . . a lady making her living, just as she had made it every night for almost twelve years. . . .
Every night, that is, except the ones when Jock was with her. And even in twelve years there had not been many of those. Two weeks at Christmas, a week at Easter, a brief hiatus between the closing of school or college and the opening of camp or summer school—no more. Jock's vacations were, and had ever been, at once the glory and the bane of Madelaine Hamill's existence. They meant precious intimacy with the son she adored and knew only too little; but they meant also a wholesale housecleaning, a hiding-away of tables and wheels and all other damaging evidence, an incessant falsehood, an incessant panic for fear in some unthought of, unimaginable way, he might discover what it was that paid his bills and bought his education. . . .
"You're ridiculous," her good friend Saunders Lincoln told her often, "to try so hard to keep it secret. My dear Madelaine, surely you don't think any twentieth century college boy is going to faint away at the sight of a roulette wheel?"
And Mrs. Hamill always retorted, "No. I don't. But a woman who conducts a gambling joint, however exclusive and dignified, is nothing more or less than—a woman who conducts a gambling joint! Jock would hate the idea, and he isn't going to find out if I can help it."
Feminine logic, and therefore irrefutable.
This night plodded on in the footsteps of countless identical nights that had preceded it . . . through a murk of smoke and a dizzying flood of blue-white lights, and a tattoo of talk, throaty, monosyllabic. Mrs. Hamill's smile became set, as though she had painted its tilt with a lipstick and said to it, "Stay that way, darn you!" She was very weary. Her orange satin slippers were little gay prisons of pain, and her head swam. She consulted a watch in a diamond nest on her wrist, and promptly felt wearier. Three o'clock only . . . and no one ever left before five. . . .
She turned, and between lanes of rigid, preoccupied backs made her way into the hall. There for an instant she stood irresolute. Her impulse to rush through the door and refresh her smoke-choked lungs with gasps of outside air was succeeded by a saner second thought; outside air would be perilous, it being February and three a. m. . . . Mrs. Hamill was careful of herself, as she was of all exquisite fragile things. She hurried upstairs, returning swathed in fur from her ankles to her ears.
She opened the huge front door and stepped out and very nearly, but not quite, collided with her son Jock.
The type of mind that had ever enabled her to meet life calmly, resourcefully, gamely in the face of defeat, served her now. She reached back without too much haste and shut the door. And she said in her normal voice, "Why, hello, dear."
"Hello, mother," said Jock, and bent to kiss her. "What goes on, anyway? Old Home Week or something? There must be a million machines parked around."
"I'm giving a little party," replied Mrs. Hamill. She laid hands on Jock's coat and pulled him so that the porch lights fell full on him. "Look at me, rascal! Have you been expelled? Don't keep your poor mother in suspense. And where's your hat? Did you—Jock, you didn't come all the way from college on a winter night without a hat?"
Her questions amused her faintly, so inconsequent they seemed. Hat. expulsion. . . . Dear God, what did it matter why he had come, or whether or not he had come bareheaded? He was here. And the veil of twelve years' tireless weaving was about to be swept from before him in one stroke, like a cobweb attacked with a broom. . . .
"No hat a-tall," she heard him say. "I 'spose you'll quinine me till I yell for mercy"
"I shall indeed."
"Well, you see," he explained, "I didn't know I was coming. I jumped in the roadster about eight o'clock after a run-in with a gir—with someone, and started to drive like hell, and the first thing I knew I was a good fifty miles on my way here. So I came along the rest of the way." He hugged her close impulsively. "I wanted to talk to you anyway. I'm all tied up in the confoundest knot you ever heard of, and it's up to you to help me unravel. Say, let's go in, shall we? Here we stand like a couple of night watchmen"
"No, wait!" cried Mrs. Hamill. And then, as Jock stared at her in evident surprise, she added as lightly as she could, "It just occurred to me—wouldn't you rather go in the back door, dearest? Then you could sneak up the back stairs to your room and you wouldn't have to see anybody. I know how you hate to have a lot of people 'glad-hand' you, as you call it. And I'll join you up there in just a few minutes for a nice quiet chat"
"Who's all in there?" Jock interrupted. "Any females?"
"N-no"
"Then come on, I don't mind."
He took her arm and led her indoors, wondering while he did so why she laughed, a little hysterically. . . .
The last car droned down the drive and away into the reddening sunrise. Jock, at a window, watched it until it disappeared; after that he watched the place where it had been. From somewhere in the room behind him he could hear small sounds, significant. . . . Chips racketing into their boxes. Glasses clinking together on a tray. Voices, his mother's, Bennett's, the croupiers', business-like but oddly far off "Over a thousand." The scrape of chairs. The tiny whimper of a wall safe swinging open on its hinges, swinging shut again. Then receding footsteps. Then silence. . . .
And then, ever so sweetly, "Jock."
He left the window and confronted his mother.
"Ooh!" she said. "Don't look so cross, lover! Do you want to scare me to death?"
His face relaxed and he grinned. This mock terror of hers was winning, and as she twinkled up at him she was very young, younger than he—an urchin eaught at mischief red-handed. "Madelaine Hamill, I've a good mind to spank you!" he said.
"Ho, you're not big enough!"
Giggling at this absurdity, they ascended the stairs together. "I hope you're not in a hurry to get to bed," Mrs. Hamill remarked en route, "because I have a lot of things I want to say."
"Hum. Just try to get me to bed till you've said 'em!"
But when they were established in Mrs. Hamill's dressing room, she stretched at full length on a wistaria taffeta sofa, Jock seated near in a wistaria chair as incongruous to him as lace would be on a football jersey, their cheerfulness dropped from them and they were grave and constrained. He spoke first, after a protracted wait. "Maybe you'd like to go to bed yourself, mother? You must be dog-tired. We can talk it over in the morning—I mean later—if you'd rather."
"I wouldn't rather," said Mrs. Hamill. "I want to talk it over now.
"Silly!" introspectively. "Twelve years—and now I don't even want to wait a minute"
Jack lunged forward in his chair, gripping its arms. "Do you mean to say you've been doing this—" The break in his sentence encompassed all the things he had witnessed since he entered the house—"for twelve years?"
Mrs. Hamill nodded. "Ever since a year or two after your father died. I—he didn't leave any money, Jock. Not a cent. I've always told you he did, but he didn't. We were pitifully poor when he was alive—you don't remember those days, do you? Do you remember anything at all about your father?"
"A little," Jock answered. "That he liked baseball—funny a detail like that should stick in my craw!—and that he was all the time writing at a desk. I have a vague idea what he looked like, too, but perhaps I got that from pictures."
"Probably. You were only eight. Well, he was a dear and splendid person, your father, but dreamy, unpractical—a poet, with everything that the, term is always supposed to mean and usually doesn't." She contemplated Jock with musing eyes. "You're his son, of course, dear; not mine. You have his temperament—most sedulously coated over with undergraduate varnish, but it's there."
Jock would have repudiated this, as he perversely did any such penetrative reference; but he saw that his mother was not really thinking of him at all, except as the twig of the tree. So he said nothing, waiting with eagerness. These facts about his father were impressing him enormously. "Keys to me," he told himself.
Mrs. Hamill continued. "It is odd, your recalling about baseball, because I think baseball was absolutely the only usual, rational, man-in-the-street thing that ever interested him. Why, he—but no matter. The point I'm getting at is, he wasn't the sort who ever made money, or ever would have. When he died he left me with you to bring up, and nothing whatever to do it on—but nerve!"
She sat upright, and rid her feet of their slippers in two quick kicks, muttering "Drat the things!" so humanly that Jock barely suppressed a shout of laughter. He sent an affectionate glance after her as she padded into the adjoining room. Such a peach! . . . pretty as a picture, and sweet, and regular. . . . He sought yet another word, and found it when he saw her reënter. Dauntless! That was it.
She had changed into a silver brocaded robe trimmed in bands of fur, and silver mules clung to her toes. She relaxed on the sofa once more, sighing happily. "Pardon the digression, Jock, but corsets at six in the morning are a very special abomination. Let's see, where was I? Oh. About Saunders Lincoln."
"You must have skipped something," Jock objected. "Where did Uncle Link come in?"
"He comes in now. I am, I'm skipping a lot, my dear, because it's late and you say you have something to tell me after I've finished, and if we expect to sleep at all today I'll have to make this a short synopsis. We've the rest of our lives to fill in the blanks. About Saunders: he was an old flame of mine"
"Sure, I always guessed that."
"Precocious infant! Well, he was, and when I married your father he told me that if he could ever do anything for me I was to call on him—the time-honored litany of the jilted lover. I think he is probably the only one in history who ever really meant it, but be that as it may. Two years after your father died, I did call on him, in my extremity; and he set me up in this business. Lent me the money to buy this house and all its fixtures, and got men he knew in New York into the habit of coming out here. We really have a quite wonderful clientele, Jock. Some of the names would astound you. Every newcomer is introduced and sponsored as though into a blueblooded club, and has to present all the credentials you can think of—with the possible exception of a letter from his clergyman! We've been extremely cautious. And I've acquired a tidy fortune. I was able to pay Saunders back in full in five years, and the rest has gone into investments, or toward your schooling—what's the matter, Jocky?"
"Nothing. Only I must be God's dumbest white creature!" . . . Yvonne, then Eunice, shadowed his mind. "Damn it, I never see anything until somebody beats it in!" he lamented.
Mrs. Hamill lay still, fondling with her eyes the line of the big frame, the symmetry of the black bent head. "Don't say you were very dumb," she suggested, "say that I was very clever. I went to the most exaggerated lengths to keep all this a secret from you. Remember the time camp closed unexpectedly on account of the measles and you wired me you'd be home about nine o'clock that night? The wire reached me at seven. I never put in such a two hours in my life! But by the time you got here every last trace was locked away down cellar, and Bennett was stationed behind a tree at the foot of the driveway to shoo off the cars, and your mother was spending a quiet evening in the home—as mothers should! And if you'd given me the slightest warning tonight"
"But you must have known I'd get hep sometime!" Jock broke in. "Balmy as I am, it was bound to come sometime. What did you expect to do after I graduated? Board me out, or something?"
"I expected to retire," said Mrs. Hamill. "Permanently. In fact I've already made preparations to shut up shop in another month or so. I can do it. I've saved enough, we'll never starve. And I was sanguine enough to hope that you'd never be any the wiser."
"What do you mean 'we'll never starve'?" cried Jock. "Do you think you're going to keep on paying my way till I'm toothless? Not any! I'm going to jump college and I'm going to work. And," he wound up, "I'm going to do it right now!"
"Now?"
"Tomorrow. Sooner the better. No part of this degree stuff—it's all a rumor anyway, doesn't amount to a hoot whether a fellow's got one or not in the long run. That's one reason I wanted to talk to you, mother. I wanted to ask you if you minded. Now—" His white teeth shone in quick gaiety, "now I'm not asking, I'm announcing! Seems to me it's just about time I took you in hand!
"I'll tell you," he said sobering, "what my reaction to this thing is. Of course at first I was knocked cold. I'd never even dreamed. . . . And I didn't like it, not a little bit. Gambling as an indoor sport is a great thing and can have my month's allowance any time, but gambling as a business—my mother's business—well, that gripes me. It's so beneath you! You know that. Like a duchess acting as barmaid"
"Thanks," interjected Mrs. Hamill weakly.
"And not only that, but—well, look what a wet smack I turned out to be! Here I am, twenty-three years old in a day or two—I ought to have been supporting you for the past six years at least, instead of loafing around like a bloated plutocrat on money you had to make—this way—" He peered at her curiously. "Say, whatever did possess you to pick this way, mother?"
"Oh—that's a long story. I've always liked men and loved cards. The combination was not without its appeal."
"Well," Jock resumed after a meditative moment, "at any rate, it's all over now. If you think I'm going to stick in college even a day longer and let you go on conducting this—this dolled-up dive that's kept me there, you're crazy, that's all. My education's finished, and so, Mrs. Hamill, is your professional career! Absolutely done with. Canceled. Blotto."
"I won't argue"
"You better not, lady!"
"I won't argue," repeated Mrs. Hamill, unheeding. "I suppose I should, but I'm too sleepy. As far as my 'professional career' is concerned, I'll be glad enough to have that over. It never was as much fun as I thought it would be—I'd rather play myself than minister to other players—besides, I was on the point of giving it up, anyway. Of course, there isn't an atom of sense in your leaving college now with only a few months to go, but on the other hand I don't know that there's any particular sense in your staying—though there's money enough in the bank to keep you there indefinitely without my lifting a finger, if that's what bothers you. I'll let you make your own decision. If you honestly think you will never miss that A.B. after your name, I'm satisfied."
"Check!" exclaimed Jock, and rising went to pump his mother's hand with vigor. "The eighth wonder of the world—a reasonable woman!"
This little ceremony was followed by a pause. Mrs. Hamill, looking up, saw that Jock's face was solemn again and that his trouble-darkened eyes were fixed on space. At length she interrogated him. "Yes, dearest?"
"Oh, I was just thinking"
He did not reveal to her all that he had been thinking. It involved herself, but more definitely it involved Yvonne and things about Yvonne that could not now nor at any time bear revelation. He said merely, "It's funny about money. The things people do to get it. Is it so important? I've never known what it was like to be without it so of course I'm not qualified to judge, but it's got me stumped sometimes. I feel like saying 'what is this money thing about?' all the time." He shook his head. "Darned if I can understand it."
"No." Mrs. Hamill's voice was silky-soft. "Of course not, dear. You couldn't. Being Peter's son."
There was no reproach in the words. But it came to Jock that his own words must have sounded harsh, ingrate, under the circumstances. He essayed amendment. "I don't mean about you, mother. You've been simply great. You did all this for me—I know that—and don't think I don't appreciate it. Gee, I should say I do appreciate it! But what I meant"
His mind put Yvonne aside, loyally, protectively, and seized upon Eunice. "For instance, this: I wrote you about Brad Hathaway, didn't I? Well, I didn't tell you what it was that made him shoot himself, and about his wife. I've never told any of this to a living soul, but I'm about to spill the whole rotten thing—it's primarily what I chased down here to tell you and to ask your advice about. You're not too sleepy, are you? Good. Then listen. And tell me what in time I'm going to do" . . .
Bones Allen, like many gentlemen of his years and proclivities, was afraid of other gentlemen's mothers. He regarded them as unnecessary and even obnoxious, and the habit they had of seeming to look straight through his skin to his soul disconcerted him to the writhing point. "Mothers" was a vituperative term in Bones' diction; it included all maternal ancestors above ground except his own, and preceded the phrase "cramp my style" as inevitably as, in gastronomic diction, "bread" precedes "and butter."
Wherefore the news that his roommate's mother, whom he had never met, was even now ensconced in his room and awaiting him, became as a light but provoking blow of misfortune. "The devil she is!" he said, and betook himself thither with sighs.
His initial thought was that there had been a mistake, This daintily shapely person standing alone in the room with her back toward him could be no mother. Why, this was a girl! . . . Then she faced about and he saw that she was not a girl but that she must have been one very recently. People often had that feeling about Mrs. Hamill.
"Hello, Bones," she said. "For of course that's who you are."
"How-d'y'-do. Awfully glad."
They shook hands. Mrs. Hamill sank down on the window-seat and opened the platinum cigarette case monogrammed in sapphires that hung from a chain on her arm, extending it invitingly. Bones accepted one. His peace of mind was returning.
"I've just been looking at her." Mrs. Hamill waved her cigarette toward the pictured Yvonne. "Isn't she simply magnificent?"
Bones said she was.
"Don't you think I'm fortunate to be acquiring such a decorative daughter-in-law?"
Bones did think so.
Mrs. Hamill blew an amazing cloud of smoke from a mouth like a scarlet letter O and asked, "Have you seen the original?"
"No, I haven't."
"That's too bad! I haven't either, yet, and I wanted you to tell me about her. All I can get out of Jock is that she has promised to marry him, that she has red hair, and that, to quote him, 'they broke the mould after they made her.' Having said which he appears to believe that I'm well enough informed."
"He sure is dippy about her," Bones contributed.
"He must be! Last night from home he talked to her on the telephone for one hour, and I"
"Is that where he's been? He's been home?"
"Why, yes. Where else?"
"I—I didn't know. He went without saying anything to anybody"
"Sit down," directed Mrs. Hamill gently. "I want to talk to you a little before Jock comes back—he's over at the Dean's office just at present. He's leaving college, you know. I drove down with him today ostensibly to pack up his things, but really I'm here for a different reason. In fact, Bones," she smiled deliciously at him, "you see in me a lioness fighting to protect her cub, because the cub, though well equipped to protect himself, declines resolutely to do so!"
She quashed out her cigarette and sat very straight, holding one crossed knee in the cup of her hands. "I need your help. Briefly, here's what's happened: Jock got home at three o'clock yesterday morning, having left that Mrs. Hathaway's house in the early evening in such a state of mind that—well, he was almost beside himself, poor lamb. To my surprise, for he's usually very reticent as you no doubt know, he was anxious to confide in me. And did. He told me the whole story of his connection with the Hathaways, of the man's death, and of the slander that has attached itself to him on account of the woman"
"It's her fault!" Bones interrupted at this point. "She's promoted it every way she can think of"
"I gathered that. I gathered a great many things Jock didn't actually say. I think I know exactly the sort of woman Mrs. Hathaway is."
"She's the goddamnedest—I'm sorry, Mrs. Hamill"
"Don't apologize. You haven't said a tenth of what I think. Now, she has informed Jock that in view of the talk that links their names, he should feel obliged to marry her. I know!" she continued hastily, as Bones seemed on the point of exploding. "I know just how it affects you. It affects me the same way. It's the most farcical thing that ever happened. But the trouble is, Jock has worked himself to the point where he actually is convinced that he should! Some misguided notion of chivalry and honor. Naturally, since he's engaged to Miss Mountford and head over heels in love with her, the prospect"
Mrs. Hamill allowed a moment's silence to imply that the prospect was too dismaying for expression. She looked at Bones, and knew a deep little warmth. "Just sick about it!" she decided mentally. "Bless his old heart!"
She leaned toward him confidentially, and Bones leaned also, so that their tête-à-tête took on the semblance of a conspiracy. "Do you know where Jock keeps his strong-box?" she queried. "You do? Well, in that strong-box, right this minute, there's a letter written him by Bradley Hathaway giving the reasons for his suicide—which, incidentally, do not involve Jock in any remotest way. Don't you think it might help matters if we took possession of that letter?"
"Say! There isn't!"
"Yes there is. Jock told me so himself."
"Why, say, gee, but—" Bones was spluttering wildly in his excitement. "But he always vowed up and down he didn't have an idea why Brad crocked off! I bet I've asked him a thousand times!"
"Jock," said Mrs. Hamill quietly and proudly, "is sometimes very nearly too fine for this world. Of course this time he's been a fool. But rather an admirable fool. I declare, when he was telling me all this, I didn't know whether to kiss him or to slap him hard!" . . . Seeing Bones cross the room and begin to burrow into a closet purposefully, she added, "Yes, get it now, before he comes. I have no conscience whatever in this matter and I rejoice to perceive that you haven't either, but if Jock catches us at it"
"Hell will pop," finished Bones concisely, emerging. He clutched the strong-box, an oblong tin receptacle bruised with dents and scratches. "Don't know where the key is, I'll have to break the lock."
"Do."
He laid the box, open, in Mrs. Hamill's lap, and she explored its contents with flying fingers. Verses, innumerable verses, scrawled in pencil on smudgy papers of divers sorts and sizes. Two little black notebooks. A snapshot of a laughing blonde in a canoe. A package of purple-inked billets-doux, eloquent of some last-year's love. A swollen envelope marked "Keep" with an elastic girdling its middle. A wedding invitation that bore the notation "Sic transit Gloria" in Jock's handwriting across the face of it. A sheaf of clippings from newspapers and magazines. A typewritten copy of a lecture on sex by Professor Somebody of Columbia University. An address book, nude of covers. A page torn from a theatre program with "Lisette LaLune, Plaza 3500" on the margin. . . .
"Isn't this disgraceful?" whispered Mrs. Hamill guiltily. "It's worse than reading his diary! But the end justifies the means. Now where do you suppose—here! This looks as though it might be it
"It is," she said upon investigation. "Read it. I don't have to, I know what it says."
Bones obeyed, bending over the letter, holding it so close to his wide eyes that Mrs. Hamill later declared she expected them to drop into it at any moment "like walnuts into a paper bag." At the end he looked up dazedly. "Well, can you tie that? Well! Can you tie"
"It seems to me," put in Mrs. Hamill smoothly, "that if that letter were abroad in the land, this Eunice person's importunities would automatically be rendered null and void. Doesn't it seem so to you? Listen, Bones: how would you like just to tuck it away in your pocket sort of absent-mindedly, and then, when you have opportunity, bring it out and show it to people? Will you do that for me—and for Jock?"
"Will I?" Bones' face was suddenly illumined. "Will I? Say, you don't know how quick I will!"
"And now," said Mrs. Hamill mischievously, "let me tell you what I'll do!"
To be warned that you will certainly rue the step you are about to take is unpleasant, even though you know better. Jock was glad to get away from the Dean. "Pedantic old pessimist!" . . . Yet in a way he was not glad. The Dean was symbolic; a sort of gateway between the University and the world. You approached him, a stripling, and you left him, a man. During that short half hour while you sat by his desk and listened to him and eyed the prophetic waggings of his head, you grew up. And there were growing-pains. . . .
He did not return to the fraternity house for awhile. Instead he chose an opposite direction, and walked aimlessly, down sidewalks grown so newly dear that objects he was wont to pass without a glance loomed up and beckoned to him. Here was the tree into which he and others had crashed in a stolen taxicab one long-ago larksome midnight. Here was the corner where he had stood and waited for a mysterious unknown "in a black hat with a big red flower, you can't miss it"—who never showed up. Here was the place where Piggy Wilde, the quarterback, had tripped on a loose brick and broken his collar bone the day before the big game. Here was the house of a professor who had tutored him, here a window he had shattered with a snowball, there a freshman dorm where he had lived. And over there, the Fence, the long wooden railing grooved with the penknives of the legions who had come . . . and romped and laughed a halcyon little while . . . and then gone on, as he was going.
A Ford lurched past him. Full of legs. Straight handsome boy-legs protruded at all angles. Voices were lifted in song, and the legs swayed in the air like batons to the beat of it. While Jock still watched, the Ford stopped. The song stopped. The legs stopped, disappeared, were replaced in a jiffy by upreared heads and torsos. Figures spilled on to the street over the sides. The Ford went forward again, propelled from the rear by half a dozen arms, beguiled from the front by a boy who danced along ahead of it, holding a tempting red apple for the radiator to sniff at.
He smiled after it mistily. "Humm," he said, "there goes college" . . . He choked, and swore under his breath, because oaths are man's poor substitute for tears.
Some time later he forced his loitering steps to take him to Eunice's bungalow. "Got to thrash this out," he told himself grimly, "one way or the other." College was finished. College lay behind him. But Eunice, who had so distorted the final precious months of it, was still ahead, an immediate stumbling-block across the new path of the future.
He fingered the doorbell; then as he heard it shrilf inside the house, he wished that he had not. "Wait a minute!" he muttered suddenly. "I haven't doped out what I'm going to say yet!" Since his last encounter with her his thoughts had been too chaotic for sane consideration, and he had formed no plan, Here he was on the threshold, blank. He had to conquer an almost overwhelming urge to turn and flee.
One of the living room windows went up, and Eunice popped her head out.
Unhappy Eunice! The hours of laborious tinting and curling with which for years she had prefaced Jock's visits—and he would always remember her only as she looked now, in this moment! With hair that hung dankly, with eyes that were narrowed to ugly slits, with face that was livid. Even her voice was not Eunice's voice—not syrup, but acid. "You can't come in, I'm busy now!" she called, and banged the window down again.
"Ouch!" said Jock aloud.
He went away very much puzzled. Eunice, snarling at him, like a tenement woman at a drunken husband! And looking like one! "What's got into her?" he wondered. "What"
On the Zeta Kappa steps he was accosted by Ken Kennedy. Ken extended his hand. "Jock, old kid, I've been waiting for you. I wanted to tell you how very blame sorry I am"
Jack merely stared at him.
Ken flushed miserably. That level gaze was disconcerting. "Darn it, why don't you knock me down? I wish you would. Honest, I'd feel a whole lot better."
"Forget it, Ken."
"No hard feelings?" Ken persisted, brightening.
"Nary a one."
"Believe me, that's white of you, Jock! If I were in your place, I'd"
"Forget it," said Jock again. Mechanically. All his answers had been mechanical. Why, this—these things meant
He made for the door, throwing back a cursory "See you later." Inside the house his progress was arrested again, thrice, by brethren who spoke feelingly, if incoherently, in like vein. He marched up the stairs in a tempest of warring emotions.
"Bones!"
"Sir?"
"Where's mother?"
"Out."
"Out where?"
Bones fixed his eyes intently on a crack in the ceiling and fell into a brown study.
"Out where?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"See here!" cried Jock, exasperated. "I want to know where she is?"
Bones raised both arms in the manner of the victim of a holdup. "Search me thoroughly!" he begged. "I haven't got her. She's been here, yes. But she's not here now. She left. And who am I to question the goings and comings of lovely ladies? She'll be back, I imagine. In the meantime, pray have a chair, and give an account of yourself. I hear you've been over getting clubby with the Dean."
"Correct."
"Has he agreed to part with you?"
"Tearfully, yes."
Jock sat down; then in one swift swoop he was up again, towering over Bones' chair, holding him by the shoulders. "You big bum, quit stalling, will you? Where's that mother of mine? And what's she up to? And how come Ken and the rest are aching around about having done me wrong? Tell me that!"
"Well, they did do you wrong, didn't they?"
"But how do they know they did?"
"They've read Brad's letter," said Bones quite matter-of-factly.
There was utter stillness after that. Jock released his hold on Bones' shoulders and backed away slowly. Bones examined the ceiling once more. "Of course," he observed finally, "they should have read it weeks ago. Everybody should have. Would have, too, if I'd known there was such a thing in captivity."
When this elicited no response, he said further, "But people who live in tin boxes shouldn't have mothers! Some of your possessions, my good fellow, were—were—well, I blushed for you, I did really. That drool by Professor Whosis, for example"
"Where's the letter now?" Jock demanded. "Have you got it?"
"No."
"Then mother has. What's she doing with it, making a house-to-house canvass?"
"Wrong both times. Your mother hasn't the letter, and she's not making a house-to-house canvass. There are ways and means more efficacious—whew, efficacious!" Beyond this word Bones seemed unable to proceed. He repeated it several times with growing enthusiasm, and looked to Jock for plaudit and praise. "How 'bout that? Ain't she a lulu? Efficacious! Say, did I make that up or did Webster? Reminds me of the game we used to play when we were kids—you know, like this: 'Mr. and Mrs. Kashus and daughter Effie Kashus"
"Ass!" bellowed Jock. He was beginning, despite him, to feel blissfully light of heart. He wanted to laugh. His chest ached with captive laughter. And so he bellowed "Ass!" in a great voice and glowered at Bones with all the ferocity he could assume. "Where is that letter?"
"The—oh, the letter. Why, Pink Davis took it to math class. You know," Bones raised his voice slightly, "how math class is. The boys have to do something to while away the time. Pink and I thought they might as well be reading the letter as"
"And where's mother?" Futile question now, for he knew, beyond any doubt.
"If you must know, she's putting the skids under Eunice," said Bones, "—but don't start after her! Because it'll be over my dead body. She told me to keep you away till she was through. Said she was going to see to it that you wouldn't be let in if you did go."
"I wasn't. I've already been there."
"No foolin'!"
"Yup. Just now. Eunice—she—oh, Lord—" His face crinkled, and he laughed at last, helplessly, convulsively, leaning against the edge of the desk. "Bones, honest—you should see Eunice—mad—with the paint job off—she looks—she looks like hell"
His hilarity passed in time. It had never been hilarity, really; just a tremendous release, a healing, in hilarity's guise. Jock sat quiet. Bye and bye he swung himself erect and walked over to a smoking stand in a corner, where he stood fumbling with pipe and tobacco. "Poor old Brad," he murmured.
But even as Bones opened his mouth to protest this indication of a contrite mood, Jock turned around again, shining-eyed. "Boy, haven't I got some mother?" he said simply.
He had firmly believed that within a day or two after he left college, or within a week at most, he would be numbered among the workers of the world. He had pictured himself going to New York early every morning, one of the army of alert, business-looking young men who spilled over daily from Jersey, and returning with them every evening, full of the fever of Commerce. In the interim, of course, the picture grew dim, for what work he would do was still problematical. But it would be something. Something in an airy big office high up in a tall building, at a mahogany desk with a telephone on it and a stenographer efficient but not too hard on the eyes sitting near. And it would be soon, without delay.
It wasn't, however. When the time came for him to bestir himself, he was bound in lassitude. "Tomorrow," said his soul. "Tomorrow you can see about a job. Today, just take it easy." And he did . . . while the todays and tomorrows strung themselves together into weeks, two weeks, three weeks, of soft idyllic idleness.
Every now and then he awoke briefly and ranted at himself. "You lazy good-for-nothing! You big hunk of cheese! Get going, will you? You left college to work, remember, not to loaf in the sun." Yet he continued to loaf in the sun. He literally had to, for awhile. He was convalescing, from mental stress and strain so acute that its snap had left him limp as a string and in need of this interlude.
The matter of Eunice was settled; his mother had attended to that thoroughly. And he had gone from the campus with apologies and retractions singing in his ears and the glow of his comrades' regard in his heart. It had hurt rather terribly, that departure; when he drove away the road had blurred before his eyes as though there were rain on the windshield. But now. . . . Ah-h, to be at home! To sleep until noon in a bed like a silky white cloud! To breakfast on unquestionable eggs, and peerless coffee, and cream that fell plopp from the pitcher! To see the hours lined up, waiting, like minions for his bidding! To be his own master, free, and to have on his mind no lingering shadow whatever! These things were sweet beyond measure, and precluded all regrets.
He became acquainted with his mother, and adored her. There were long conversations at bedtime, or in the dreamy afternoons, when they discussed things ethical, things psychological, things political, things obstetrical—any and every kind of thing. He found her mind a labyrinth for fascinating exploration, her personality endlessly beguiling. He took her to fly wild miles in the roadster, exulting in her sportsmanship, for she never cried out, never pressed the floor with an instinctive right foot, never clung frantically, frightenedly, to the side. He accompanied her to plays and gave her selected books to read, to hear what she would say of them, and was often surprised but never disappointed. She existed in his thoughts much less as a mother than as a sweetheart, a contemporary, a friend.
Two afternoons they spent apartment-hunting. The idea was Jock's. "No percentage in staying on in this house. Darn thing's too big! Why rattle around like a couple of bugs in a bucket? Let's sell it, and take an apartment in the city." It seemed feasible. A New York dwelling would be convenient to "the office" (so spake Jock, laughing at himself) and wonderfully convenient to Yvonne; and now that Mrs. Hamill's coterie had fallen in number from sixty to a nightly bridge-mad three, space was no longer requisite. So they hunted, and found what they wanted—eight livable rooms in an apartment house overlooking Central Park. They were to move the first week in April.
He had one fleeting burst of creative energy during this period, inspired by a group of his father's poems which his mother had dug from a trunk in the attic and given him to read. He bought a portable typewriter, and all through one night picked patiently at its keys. One product, a sonnet, he despatched to a magazine, and played mentally with the notion that perhaps he was destined to be a poet . . . until it came back, with admirable promptitude and a printed notice to the effect that the editors were sorry and that no reflection on the merits of the manuscript was implied. He abandoned the notion forthwith, snorting, and the typewriter gathered dust.
He read enormously, a heterogeneous, ultra-modern mixture. Michael Arlen, Booth Tarkington, Scott Fitzgerald, because each in his way was fitting to his current mood. James Branch Cabell, Aldous Huxley, Ben Hecht, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Van Vechten, out of curiosity. Fannie Hurst and Edna Ferber because everyone was reading them. Christopher Morley for sheer delight. Somerset Maugham because he had thrilled to the play, Rain. Laurence Hope's Indian Love Lyrics on Yvonne's recommendation. Prancing Nigger by Ronald Firbank because the title caught him. Dancers in the Dark because a photograph of the young writer had called to his youth. The Plastic Age, which annoyed while it entertained him. And, by way of ballast, The Mind in the Making, Emerson's Essays, and Wells' Outline of History—which last, of course, he never finished.
And there was Yvonne.
He had been shocked, the first time he had called on her in her new quarters, to note how cramped and dingy and altogether cheerless they were. Two little rooms with low ceilings, nauseous wall paper, few windows. He had recalled the Park Avenue apartment—odious comparison!—"like transplanting an orchid from a conservatory into a little brown flower pot," he had said, with his unfailing penchant for expressing everything in terms of something else.
They had quarreled bitterly that day. Beginning thus:
"Well, of course, you'll have to get right out of here! This won't do at all. I won't have you living in any such dump."
"It's the best I can afford right now, my dear."
"It's not the best I can afford! Listen, Yvonne honey, let me tell you what we're going to do. You're going to move again, right away, see? Never mind the cost, I'll fix that up—hock the roadster if necessary—main thing is, to get you into a better place. Then, in a week or two, just as soon as I've got a regular job with a pay-check attached to it, we'll be married"
"We're not going to be married for a year. I've told you that."
"Rats! That's idiotic, and you know it. We're going"
"My mind is absolutely made up, Jock Hamill. Please don't let's argue about it."
"Of course we'll argue! You don't think I'm going to say 'yes, fine,' to any such bunkum as that, do you? Look here, Yvonne; I'm out of college now. It won't be long before I'll be in a position to support you at least halfway decently. In the name of all that's crazy, why wait?"
"Because I want to. No, I don't. But because I think it wise."
"Wise, hell! Why's it wise? What do you mean by that?"
"I've told you."
"Yes, that you think in a year I may change my mind! That's the most outrageous"
"You hardly know me."
"What's that got to do with it? Why, darlin', I love you! You can't seem to understand. I love you so that waiting's an agony—don't make me have to! And when I look around and see what you've given up—on my account"
"What I'm saying now is on your account, Jock Hamill. I don't want you to be unhappy, ever. Certainly not through me."
"Well, you're making me damned unhappy now, I'll tell you that!"
"Dear, please"
"But Yvonne, listen"
There were hours of it . . . terminating at last when Jock strode from the room, slamming the door furiously behind him. In less than five minutes he was back. And Yvonne was in his arms, trembling a little. And he was crooning words, repentant words, promises that his will denied even while he said them. "It's all right, Beautiful! Just whatever you want to do, we'll do. I won't say anything more about it. Yvonne, don't—I didn't mean to make you feel like this—of course I'll wait if you want me to. I could wait a million years, if I knew in the end I'd have you! Look up here! Got a little smile for Jock? There! There now! Armistice! And we'll never fight like this again, will we? Never."
But they did, and soon. The same scene, with variations, was repeated three or four times in the ensuing days. All the paths of their affinity seemed to lead to it, When Yvonne let fall a hint that she was seeking work wherewith to replenish her ebbing funds, she met with fiery combat. When Jock sold some bonds of his own and attempted to press the money upon Yvonne, he found himself battering against a stone wall. She would not hear to an early marriage, she would not accept assistance, and she declined to leave her present place of residence. Jock alternated between prayers and profanity, between tenderness and white-hot rage. He saw no valid reason why they should not be married straightway; and certainly he could see no reason that prevented him, her fiancé, from doing for her the things that other, lesser men had done. . . . Gradually, though, he grew resigned. The new inertia, the langorous laissez-faire spirit that had taken possession of him made resignation with few misgivings possible. Yvonne was being unreasonable, of course. But she'd "come to," doubtless, given time. And meanwhile life was sweet just as it was.
Mrs. Hamill and Yvonne met duly, and appeared charmed with one another. "Although," Jock reflected, "you can't tell a thing by appearances." He had engineered the meeting as a matter of course, knowing it inevitable, but with a certain secret trepidation. One's mother and one's betrothed—well, there was a bar between, always. And when each was a woman fundamentally inimical to all other women, the bar might easily and at once become a grim and immutable thing of iron. . . . He put in a busy first hour, mulling over in his mind everything they said to one another, every glance they exchanged, until they chided him laughingly for his silence. After that he talked a great deal and very fast, and ate, according to Bennett's calculation, thirteen small pink cakes.
Late that same night, after he had driven Yvonne back to New York, dined her at a café in the Village, taken her to the Music Box Revue and afterward somewhere to sup and dance, he returned and roused his mother from a sound sleep, saying, "Well, how 'bout it?"
Mrs. Hamill, for all her pardonable drowsiness, interpreted this question correctly. "I think she's a dear," she answered heartily.
"I knew you would!" Jock exclaimed, and seating himself on the edge of the bed waited expectantly for more.
More was forthcoming. "And so beautiful she takes your breath away, doesn't she?" said Mrs. Hamill, patting back a yawn. "Her hair is the loveliest I've ever seen. I liked her clothes, too. Good taste. If you'd brought me a daughter in a chorus-girl hat I couldn't have stood it. She must have money?"
The interrogation point at the end of those words was as a hook that caught Jock by the collar and yanked him down to earth. He frowned. "Some. That is, she did have some. She hasn't much right now." Perceiving that this was too vague, he indulged in a slight fabrication, "She lost all she had in the stock market."
"Oh, what a pity! And she's quite alone in New York, didn't she say?"
"Yeah."
"Where are her people?"
"Dead. They've been dead for years. An aunt in Ohio brought her up." He got to his feet, in order to discourage further inquiry. "Well, guess I'll turn in. Sorry to have waked you, little sleepy-head, but I wanted to know what you thought of her. She thought you were a peach."
"Then," said Mrs. Hamill, snuggling into the pillows, "that makes it satisfactory all around. Goodnight, dear."
"Goodnight, mother. I'm darn glad."
Yvonne's visit had another outcome, less proximate but not less vital.
During the course of the afternoon Mrs. Hamill had conducted her upstairs "to see Jock's den, you'll love it, he planned it himself." They had stood shoulder to shoulder on the sill, looking in. . . . A small, bright room, a happy room, walled in on two sides by books, row on row, from floor to ceiling, on a third side by long casement windows with dull purple hangings, on the fourth side by a giant fireplace built of rough field stone. A desk in the center, and, before the fireplace, two chairs of inviting depth, with a reading lamp craning its neck above one of them, and a banjo leaning up against the back of the other . . .
Yvonne had moved to the chair and picked up the banjo, eyeing thoughtfully the nicknames and monograms and bon mots etched on its head. "I didn't know he played."
And Mrs. Hamill had responded, smiling, "I only wish he did everything half so well!"
Then Yvonne had taken the banjo downstairs and thrust it at Jock, and he had played it—oh, remarkably well! Exceedingly well! As Bones Allen was wont to say and would have said again had he been present, "Hot dog, like no one can!" And Yvonne had listened, pondering.
A few days after that she stipulated that he was positively not to come to see her the next day unless he brought the banjo with him. "Why won't you ever bring it, my dear? I must have asked you at least three times now. Don't you enjoy playing it, or what?"
"Sure, I like to whang away at it. But there's so much else to do when I'm with you"
"Silly! You bring it tomorrow, or I won't let you in! I have a special reason for asking."
So he took it along, and pushed it through Yvonne's door ahead of him, crying "Passport!" meekly and plaintively. And he was admitted, by a particularly bewitching Yvonne in cornflower blue.
"You'd better!" she approved.
They embraced lingeringly, as was their custom. And they ran through the catechism peculiar to sweethearts:
"Love me?"
"Um-hum."
"How much?"
"Oceans."
"More than you did yesterday?"
"Oh, infinitely more!"
"Well, whose girl are you?"
And so on, with words that were threadbare in Eden.
"Now!" said Yvonne, when this was disposed of. "Let's get down to business. I want you to play all the latest ragtime, and I'll sing, and we'll see how it goes."
An hour later they agreed that it had gone beautifully. They disagreed as to why, and had quite a dispute about it, Jock stoutly maintaining that the voice was the thing, Yvonne reiterating that those chords and that double break were sufficient to make any old voice at all sound "like Jeritza singing the blues."
She concluded, "Anyway, we're good. Plenty good enough, as soon as we've practised together a little more."
"Good enough for what?" asked Jock aimlessly. He had pulled Yvonne on to his knees, and hence had little interest in the forthcoming answer, if any.
She put her hands against his chest and scrutinized him soberly. "Jock Hamill, how would you like to go into partnership with me—no, wait, my dear! I'm serious about this. Listen to me just a minute. I have to work—keep still till I finish, for goodness' sake!—and you're going to work too, when you get your lazy old self around to it, so why shouldn't we work together, playing and singing in a"
"Salvation Army!" crowed Jock. "Just the thing!"
Yvonne disengaged herself and stood up, vastly dignified. "All right, if you refuse to be sensible"
"I will be! Word of honor. Sit down here again where you belong. Where are we going to play and sing? Tell me."
"Did you ever hear of Terrace Tavern?"
"Rum joint out toward Pelham? Yah, sure, I've heard of it."
"It's not a 'rum joint!'" remonstrated Yvonne. "It's a very nice roadhouse, one of the nicest around New York."
"Question: is there such a thing as a nice road house," grinned Jock. "Alas, I fear not, the boys and girls being as they are nowadays. But go on. This is all very interesting."
"Terrace Tavern," pursued Yvonne after a reproachful pause, "is run by a man named August Schultz, who used to be at the Café Mandalay when I was there, two—no, nearly four years ago. I went out to see him the other day, and he gave mea job. I'm to sing a couple of songs every night, beginning a week from Monday. I was going to have piano accompaniment, but this will be lots better, and I know that when he hears you play he'll"
"You're going to do nothing of the sort!"
"Yes I am, my dear. I told you I'd have to do something to earn a little money. And this is the only thing I know how to do—except drive a car, which doesn't help any."
Jock was serious enough now. "If you think I'm going to have you singing for a bunch of raucous drunks every night"
"I did it for years, remember," Yvonne reminded him. "And besides—" One velvety arm curved about his neck and her cheek was cool against his—"and besides, Jock Hamill, I'll have you there to look out for me. Won't 1? Though of course I shall do it whether you're there or not. I'm determined to take the job, and it's useless to argue with me—you ought to know that by this time. But oh, my dear, if you would come too and work with me!
"I can't understand," she observed, as Jock sat scowlingly silent, "why you aren't more enthusiastic. Dearest boy, don't you see what fun it would be? We go somewhere to dance almost every night anyway—why not get paid for doing it, while we're about it? Wouldn't you like that better than sitting poked off in some stupid office somewhere? Just for awhile. Just till we're married—naturally I wouldn't want you to be 'a cabaret entertainer all your life, with the brains you've got and the education you've had"
"It's not me I'm worrying about!" spoke up Jock with more earnestness than attention to grammar. "I wouldn't mind it, In fact I think it would be great stuff, for a few weeks—snappy way to put in the time while I'm making up my mind what I want to do with myself. But you, Yvonne—I don't care what you say, there's no reason on God's earth why you"
Yvonne interrupted this speech with a long kiss full on the lips. "That's my way of saying 'shut up, Jock Hamill,'" she explained sweetly.
"It's a great way! I could use a lot of those. But listen, about this Terrace Tavern business"
She kissed him again.
After which he continued to say "But listen—" at two-minute intervals all the rest of the afternoon. Not protestingly; gleefully, for the kiss each repetition earned him. And protest, thus neglected in the heydey of more palatable matters, withered and died away.
Often in the days that followed he wondered what had become of it. He had not intended to give in so easily; he hadn't intended to give in at all! But Yvonne now obviously considered the thing decided, and was going ahead with preparations in a manner so final that the time for discussion seemed past and irrevocable. And Jock, after his preliminary puny splashing, swam with the stream, "Can't do anything now," he assured himself comfortably. "Too late now. We're all set."
And they were. After arduous hours of practice, they had "tried out" before August Schultz and been accepted as a team. Impassively. Everything August Schultz did he did impassively, with an air of scarcely knowing and not one iota caring whether or not the thing was done. He was a porcine gentleman with a vague chin or chins, a motley assortment of teeth, some gold, some bad, some false, some missing, and little half-shut slits of eyes, like buttonholes embroidered deep in the pasty cushion of his face. After hearkening to two selections by Jock, he had said "You're hired" in such a drear, dead voice that Jock had been compelled to whisper to Yvonne, "Hired or fired?" before he could be sure just how to answer. From the very beginning, August Schultz delighted him. He always referred to him as "my Boss" with becoming, if synthetic, reverence, and was fond of giving squinty impersonations of him for the benefit of all and sundry. Also he made him the unwitting hero of several hilarious rhymes, noteworthy among them one beginning: "I prithee, August Schultz, reveal to me, Who in the hell doth do thy dentistry?" . . .
He had rather expected that his mother would prove difficult to handle in this contretemps, but, as he afterward informed Yvonne, "You can't jar that lady!" Mrs. Hamill gave vent to a few calm whys and wherefores, characterized the whole affair as "simply mad," and washed her hands of it. To Saunders Lincoln only did she confide her true attitude.
"There wasn't any use making a fuss," she said. "Though goodness knows I wanted to! Just imagine Jock, of all boys in the world, contenting himself with playing the banjo in a cheap wayside dancehall! I don't know what's come over him. Yes, I do too, it's that Yvonne, she has him wrapped around her little finger. He's so dazzled, he can't see beyond his own nose. If I were not so sure this was just a phase—but it is a phase. It's got to be!"
"What's Yvonne like?" Saunders Lincoln queried.
"Beautiful as a dream, wise as all the ages, shallow, superficial, rather notoriously immoral—I've had her looked up, of course—and at least six years older than Jock," said Mrs. Hamill all in a breath. "And, strange to say, really in love with him, unless my intuition dep ceives me as it never did before. Why she doesn't marry him is quite beyond me, for she could have him tomorrow if she whistled. He says she's trying to make him wait a year. I hope she succeeds! She won't be able to get him so easily, in a year, if she did but realize! She'd destroy him in time, you know, Saunders. In the worst way. Not by a single blow—he'd recover from that—but by a slow insidious poison."
"Did you tell Jock all this?"
Mrs. Hamill glared irritably. "My dear Saunders, don't be such a ninny! Do you think I'd help this affair along by opposing it? Indeed I did not tell him, nor shall I unless worst comes to worst. I shall sit tight, and let the thing work itself out. And continue to pretend I'm delighted with Yvonne, so that in the event they decide to get married I'll know about it in time to get busy."
"Perhaps—" began Lincoln speculatively.
Mrs. Hamill caught his meaning. "I hope so," she nodded. "I sincerely hope so. That would solve the problem quicker than anything else." . . .
Terrace Tavern is built a cautious little off the beaten track. But travelers of the beaten track, though they do not actually pass its door, are assured that it lies somewhere in the vicinity by a series of signboards pricked out with red electric bulbs. These read variously, becoming more garrulous as the distance becomes less. "Five Miles to Terrace Tavern." "Four Miles to Terrace Tavern—August Schultz, Prop." "Only Two Miles to Terrace Tavern—Chicken, Steak and Lobster Dinners." "One Mile More to Terrace Tavern—Dancing Every Evening Six to Two—Happy Hatton's Celebrated Syncopated Seven." A speedometer mile-and-three-quarters beyond this last there is a giant crimson arrow pointing into a thicket and the terse injunction, "TURN HERE FOR TERRACE TAVERN," in letters a foot high.
At night, the injunction is continually obeyed. Car after car leaves the highway and twists along a serpentine side-road, until its headlights are one with the light that blazes like noon in the clearing at the end. August Schultz has ever been a firm believer in electricity for outdoor use. It allures, it looks hospitable and happy and as an aid to motorists somewhat inebriated it is invaluable. For indoor use, of course, he doesn't think so much of it.
Terrace Tavern is long and low and sprawling, made of stucco. It has a red tile roof, innumerable windows bonneted with red-and-white striped awnings, and below the window, boxes, in which things assorted grow. A liveried negro with a flashing white grin holds the door wide for you to enter, then lets it whisk to behind you so abruptly that you feel as though you had been swept in by a broom. On the wings of this head-start you hasten down a long tunnel of hall paved with red carpet, and bring up against a triple barrier of tall painted screen, velvet rope, and dinner-coated functionary who eyes you phlegmatically. From behind the screen, sounds issue . . . the wham-wham of jazz, or the combined roar of speech and laughter and forks on china . . . orchestra and guests in alternate hubbub. The dinner-coated functionary has to incline his ear to your lips to hear you say, "A table near the floor if you have it," and you have to incline yours to his to hear him reply that he hasn't it but that he'll give you something in a corner.
The room beyond the screen is enormously large, and looks even larger because its walls are dusky-black and seem to mingle with the night in an infinitude of darkness. A ruby necklace of lights encircles these walls—ornamentally, not usefully. There is a great horseshoe packed tight with black lacquered tables bordered in red, and little black-and-red chairs, and people . . . and at the open end of the horseshoe Happy Hatton's Celebrated Syncopated Seven preside, in an elevated alcove draped in scarlet satin, like the boudoir of a courtesan. The dance floor is oval, painted black and red, and above it searchlights from opposite corners meet to play with a globe of tiny mirrors hung high in the center, and to win therefrom a thousand iridescences. Wisps of light spray down from this globe upon the dancers, and blobs of it drift over their faces like huge intangible snowflakes, making them look pretty—much prettier than they are.
Of course, there are crowds and crowds. There are ballroom crowds that smack of valets and French maids and show windows on Fifth Avenue. There are amusement-park crowds with sleazy dresses and gents' ready-to-wear suits and run-down heels and jaws in perpetual motion. There are baseball crowds, straw=hatted, shirt-sleeved, perspiring. There are football crowds, vast gay menageries of fur. There are movie crowds sticky with candy, pale with bad air; and hotel crowds, dark-clad and middle-aged and smug. But the roadhouse crowd is like no other in the world.
To begin with, it is bored. With itself, with its neighbor, with all things. It has lived hard and swiftly, the roadhouse crowd, and now it is burned out and bored; and so it cries for White Rock and cracked ice, and mixes itself illegitimate drinks, and downs them, and mixes more, and downs them . . . that it may forget how bored it is, that it may become merry and loud and hysterical . . . and a little disgusting . . .
Then it pounds the table and calls for music. And it dances, after its curious wobbly fashion, and pats its fat palms at the musicians. And after that it returns to its table, and perhaps kisses its partner for the edification of the next table, and orders a club sandwich that it doesn't want, and fishes under the chair for its bottle . . . and repeats itself and repeats itself . . . until at last the check girl helps it into the wrong coat, and the guardian of the parking space tells it to "watch out for the turn, sir, remember," and it goes wavering off to its home, wherever that is.
And if you take the roadhouse crowd apart to see what makes it tick, you come upon such curious cogs as these:
Lewd women dressed in white, like brides. Pudgy-legged women in the most abbreviated skirts of all. Girls with fresh young faces and eyes a million æons old. Drunken mothers. Bedizened grandmothers, whom you somehow know will pay their callow escorts' dinner checks. Lounging jointless boys with lifeless skin. Men with benign silver hair and Mephistophelian faces. Men with bald heads and loose, slippery mouths. Roues of twenty. Frail sisters of seventeen. Chorus girls and college boys. Boarding school girls and youths their parents have forbidden them to see. Glove-counter clerks and traveling salesmen. Young matrons enjoying an extra-nuptial thrill. Young benedicts enjoying an extra-nuptial thrill, Rouge turned purple under the lights. Thick red necks in wilting collars. Three-karat diamonds and dirty fingernails. Dandruff on dinner coats. Rolls of flabby flesh bulging over the tops of tight bodices. Silken insteps swollen fat above tight shoes. Heavy yellow powder and piercing perfume. Love words in crow voices. Laughter, high-pitched, hideous. And eyes. Greedy eyes. Weary eyes. Eyes like sucked wells. Bloodshot eyes. Roadhouse eyes, as bright and glossy and hard and cold as the marbles children play with.
The patrons of Terrace Tavern liked the new entertainers, liked them immediately and immensely, and learned to anticipate them with increasing impatience. "Wait'll you see this red-head!" the men would say, smacking their lips. The women, saying nothing, would fasten their glances on the little door at the right of the orchestra's alcove and watch for the dark tall boy with the crooked impersonal—so darned impersonal!—smile. There would be a hush of expectancy over all the room . . . a flare-up of bright lights . . . a crash of clapping as the little door opened and Yvonne and Jock appeared.
It was a simple thing they did. Perhaps its very simplicity was what made it appealing. They came out together, hand in hand, Jock immaculate and imposing in a "tux" to pattern after, Yvonne brilliant as some exotic bird in one or another of the daring gowns she had selected for this purpose. They walked to the center of the floor, nodding to the applauding throng as though to a single intimate friend. ("Some night," Jock had predicted, "they aren't going to applaud, and then that march across the floor in dead stillness will be ungodly awful." But his prediction had not come true, and seemingly never would.) Once there, he knelt on one knee and rested his banjo on the other and plucked marvelous shoulder-stirring harmony from the strings. And Yvonne stood beside him, with her hands on her hips and her body bent the least bit forward, and sang the Blues in her lovely melancholy voice that so befitted them. Because she had the art to create an illusion of reality, her songs were more than just songs; they were anecdotes set to music, tiny cross-sections of life—her life, you felt. When she sang He Used To Be Yours But I Got Him, she gave you a sense of her personal triumph over an unseen rival and asked you to gloat with her in it. When she sang Don't Think I Care What You Do, she made your own lip curl vicariously. When she sang My Man Went Off and Left Me All Alone, she broke your heart.
At the end she would bow, gracefully, prettily. And Jock would get to his feet and bow also, the jerky bow of an embarrassed small boy at dancing-school . . . and he would laugh a little, as though to say, "You're right—the joke's on me!" He never noticed that the applause swelled in volume at this point, but it always did. Public fancy is a mysterious thing. Professionals may labor years and fail to catch it, and a rank amateur like Jock, all unawares, may call it his on the strength of a bow and a deprecatory grin.
He was having, as he said himself, the time of his life. The work was holiday—not work at all, really, but fun. They appeared only twice in an evening, at nine and again at twelve; and between times, aside from Yvonne's change of costume, there was nothing to do but wait. That also was enjoyable. They waited in the mammoth red-and-black room, where they sat at a corner table, and ate, and watched the eternal Mardi Gras of Terrace Tavern. Jock always thought of a college prom grown old and ugly and gross and rather ridiculous—"The grinning cadaver of a really good time," he remarked once—but it continued to amuse him, rather than to sicken and pall upon him as Yvonne had feared that, with repetition, it might.
To be sure, there were things about it that he found annoying. The way men stared at Yvonne, for example. With eyes that fairly drooled. And the way they laid familiar hands on her arm or her shoulder in passing and praised her singing, or begged her to dance with them. These things were particularly annoying because nothing could be done about them. Jock spasmodically expressed a burning desire to "smash their mucker faces for 'em," and was forever breaking off in the midst of sentences to glower at some near-by table and to growl, sotto voce, "Pull your necks in, damn you!" But further than this he did not go, realizing that his hands were tied by the subservience of his position; and in time he became so accustomed to such trifling indignities that they ceased altogether to affect him.
And then, the women. "The fool females," to use the mildest of Jock's long list of invectives. They lavished upon the good-looking young banjo player constant and most unwelcome attentions. They broke into languishing smirks whenever he inadvertently gazed in their direction. They converted the waiters into messengers and dispatched them to his table with invitations to join their various parties. Or they sent their escorts to try to exchange dances with him, Or sometimes, if they were sufficiently intoxicated, they came themselves. . . . One night a girl, a little Jewess with startling orange lips in a chalk-white face, swayed unsteadily up to him as he and Yvonne were leaving the floor and threw her arms about his neck and called him her "sheik." She had to be pried loose and dragged back to her seat by her flustered partner and the head waiter. This incident, coming as it did soon after Jock's introduction to Terrace Tavern, very nearly nipped his new career in the bud, so great was his horror and dismay.
And once in awhile—just once in awhile, when he knelt on the oval of polished floor in the flaming spotlight, or when he took his pay envelope from August Schultz, or when he contemplated himself attentively in the looking-glass—a small faint something stirred in him. And he thought of college, books, courses. Learning . . . "good Lord, was it for this?" . . . Thought, also, of the time when he had fancied himself a man marked for glory, he, who now strummed Blues for Yvonne to sing to, and asked no greater boon of Fortune!
But these flies in the ointment were few and far between, and the ointment was rich, plentiful, anaesthetic. Time lounged on. It was April, and the Hamills moved into New York. Yvonne, ever exciting, just around the corner. . . . It was May, and he agreed to play at Terrace Tavern through the summer, at least. It was June, and he made a quick trip to college, driving through one night to watch his class receive diplomas in the morning, starting back again at noon. He thought that some of the boys in their caps and gowns were "hot sketches," that it was an unconscionable lot of pother about nothing after all, and that Eunice, whom he spied at a distance, was getting much too fat. Aside from that, he felt nothing. . . . It was July, and his mother had gone to York Harbor. And Bones Allen, from Paris, was sending him characteristic postcards. "The French women are 'way overrated," said one of them tersely. "The French women have dirty necks," said another, on the reverse side of a tinted picture of the Arc de Triomphe. . . . It was August . . . September . . . sequence of drawling, mellow days.
He lay late abed every morning, and took a combination breakfast and lunch with Yvonne, either at her apartment, where they made electric coffee and electric toast and chafing-dish scrambled eggs, or at his own apartment, where the ubiquitous Bennett served them, Then they sallied forth. Sometimes to a matinee. Sometimes to a vaudeville show, for business reasons. Sometimes to buy new ragtime selections at a little Broadway shop, and take them back and try them out together. Sometimes, if the day was hot, to scoot into the country in the roadster, or to swim at some not too populous beach. That is, Jock swam; Yvonne merely waded, or sat on the sand in a one-piece black suit with her unbound hair blazing about her face, and watched. "Swimming is not in my line," she would say, "and I never let anyone see me do anything I don't know how to do well."
And nights. Glamorous, glittering, bright-white nights. "Playboy nights," Jock termed them. They went out to Terrace Tavern every evening about seven, returned every morning about one. They laughed a great deal, and danced a great many dances together, and a few with suppliant patrons when they could not discreetly avoid it. August Schultz liked to have his entertainers appear unofficially, and mingle with his guests. "Good business," said August, which meant that it was Law. Their work improved more and more, and, in response to public demand, they performed three times every evening instead of twice, giving each time several encores.
"As nearly as I can ascertain," reported Saunders Lincoln in a letter to Mrs. Hamill at York Harbor, "he is entirely happy. Tickled with what he's doing and the way he's living. Bennett tells me he spends every waking minute with the girl . . . he seems as enthralled as ever" . . .
Which he was. Yvonne's was a lure that did not wane with proximity, a luster that the passage of months did not rub dull. And if occasionally there were incidents, perceptions, that vexed him—little things she did and said, little surprising streaks of alloy—he forgot them all in a second when she smiled. He kissed her countless times a day, hungrily . . . with a mounting hunger that tore at him. . . . He could have satisfied the hunger, and knew it, but he would not, and wished that he did not know. That was one of the things that vexed him. His love for Yvonne transcended flesh, for the time being anyway. He wanted very much to believe that hers for him did also.
They would be married in late February, when their year was over. No sooner. Jock had long since abandoned the struggle to dissuade Yvonne from her stand, for she was adamant. They agreed to stay on at Terrace Tavern until the first of the month, at which time Jock would secure for himself a position in some advertising office (he had decided that advertising was to be his ultimate vocation) and Yvonne would buy her trousseau. Regarding this last, Jock gave implicit instructions. "Not a damn stitch in it that you had—before," he commanded; the closest approach he had ever made to reference to her life with Demorest.
He talked incessantly of February, so absorbed in plans and prospects that he failed to notice how often Yvonne tried to change the subject, how wistfully, almost hopelessly, her big gray eyes caressed his face as she listened . . .
He was sitting in the lobby of the Biltmore, waiting for Bill Olmstead, who had vowed he would be there at four sharp but who at four-thirty had not arrived. Bill was now employed in a New York bank, where, according to him, he "filled inkwells," and he and Jock met now and then to lay new fuel on the embers of their campus intimacy. Today they were thoroughly to investigate an unconfirmed report that there was genuine Bacardi to be had at a drug store on Forty-fifth Street, by the simple expedient of asking for Mr. Wilson, giving Mr. Wilson certain moneys, and observing that Mr. Mercer (articulate clearly or all's lost) sent you to him.
The afternoon was Friday, the month November, and the Biltmore lobby swarmed with chattering humans who later in the day, or early the next day, would hie them down to Princeton for the gridiron classic. Spruce long-legged boys, big-eyed girls, portly dowagers, in endless panorama. Jock watched interestedly, making mental comments, "Gee, pretty! No, she isn't, not near to. Lotta girls disappoint you that way. One thing about Yvonne, she doesn't. . . . Don't see a soul I know. Funny, how soon you lose touch. . . . That lad's pretty well oiled. They'll have to wake him for the touchdowns tomorrow if he keeps that up. . . . Twenty bucks' worth of orchids and a dime's worth of woman—who went crazy there, I wonder? . . . Why do girls shriek so? 'Hello, people' at the top of her lungs. Could say 'Hello, Brooklyn' and it would carry all right. . . . Hate that type of fellow. . . . What's that on her stocking, oil or a birthmark? . . . Wonder where he got that suit. Not bad. . . . There's what's-his-name. Best punter Princeton ever had. Selling insurance now, but still walks as though he heard cheering. . . . Say, where the hell's Bill, anyway?"
He glanced up at the clock again, and was on the point of rising to leave when a voice at his ear said blithely, "You look nice, I guess I'll sit by you!"
He turned his head—
"Peg!"
"Guilty."
They shook hands with great gusto. She was, Jock perceived, the same Peg. Same laughing eyes, same infectious grin, same impudent, pert pug nose. . . . The mere sight of that nose made him feel suddenly gleeful. "It's still there!" he exclaimed, involuntarily and quite inanely.
"What's still there?"
"Your nose"
This struck them both as excruciatingly funny, and they rocked with muffled mirth, pressing their mouths tight shut and puffing out their cheeks. "You bet it's there!" Peg said, when the paroxysm had abated a little. "That's my trade-mark. Peg, Limited. The Nose With a Smile. Ask the Man Who Owns One—say, you knew I was married, didn't you? Of course you did, you were the burn who wouldn't come up to Boston for my wedding but sent me a pretty pickle dish or something. One of these days I'll write and thank you, but until then let's let it go because I'm not at all sure it was a pickle dish—sorry, but you know how weddings are—we drew five hundred and three presents, five hundred of them pickle dishes, so that I'm considering putting a notice in the paper, 'All those who sent pickle dishes to Johnny Havens and spouse'"
"Hold up," cried Jock. "Are you going to talk all night, woman? Let me get in a few questions. What are you doing in New York? Where's your husband? And all about it. Bones never writes, you know. I had a string of simple postcards from him from abroad, but I haven't had a word since he got back—except a recipe for making beer, all by itself in an envelope. What's he up to, the old son-of-a-gun?"
"He's working for dad. At least, he thinks he is—dad, of course, thinks differently. Son-of-a-gun is right, he almost broke up my wedding! He was best man, you know, and instead of attempting to cheer poor Johnny up he kept whispering 'She snores,' and little brotherly things like that, all the time I was moseying down the aisle! What else did you ask me? Oh, yes—why, we're living here. Down in Greenwich Village. Johnny's father owns the New York Log, and Johnny—here he comes now! On time, for once in his life. Act as if you're in love with me, Jock—I think that's good for husbands"
People were always conscious of a surprised sensation the first time they saw Johnny Havens. This was because his hair was extremely blonde, almost white, and his eyes and eyebrows were coal-black—a combination so startling that you required a second or two in which to accustom yourself to it. After that you discovered that he was very handsome, and big with a bigness that reminded you of things. Outdoor things. The crack of a shot in a forest. The cut of a boat through wings of spray. Camp fires, and piney air, and gray flannel shirts with corduroy trousers. . . . All of which, in view of the fact that he was suited by Brooks Brothers, worked at journalism, and seldom went out of New York if he could help it, was quite absurd.
Jock had never met a man he liked so well on sight, and as the four of them (Bill Olmstead had arrived, breathless and propitiatory, on the heels of Johnny) sat drinking tea around a table a little later, the liking grew into something deep and strong and destined to last. And mutual. Every so often the wash of the world eddies together two souls so essentially congenial that they admire each other at once, love each other thereafter, and entertain each other to the point where everything said by one, however slight, excites the risibilities of the other. Jock and Johnny were thus. Either of them had only to say "Pass the salt," and the other howled and clapped him on the back.
So they had a hilarious tea party, taking it all in all, and Jock enjoyed himself hugely. At the same time he was conscious of tiny pangs of envy. Peg and Johnny were so happy! Even though they joked about their marriage, teased one another, you could not miss the contented undertone, and it gave you a feeling of standing shivery-cold and looking through a window at firelight. Jock tried hard to shrug away this feeling. "In just a couple of months now—" he kept telling himself, and he wondered why he was not comforted.
"I'll tell you what we'll do," said Peg, who adored to arrange. "We'll lap up this tea and stuff, and then we'll all go 'round to our place and call up some people and have a bender, Tomorrow's Johnny's and my anniversary—six weeks married and no—bureaus heaved by either party—and something ought to be done about it. Jock, you get your Yvonne—I've been dying to clap eyes on that woman ever since the day you raved about her for two hours straight and never repeated yourself once"
"Can't," interrupted Jock, grinning. "I work nights. Didn't Bones tell you?"
"For the love of Pete, are you still doing that?"
"I am."
Peg sat back in her chair, looking reproachful, and brandished a teaspoon at her husband. "Listen, Johnny! Listen while I tell you the tale of another good man gone wrong. This bunny you see before you, endowed by God with all the—Ow! Quit that, Jock! Johnny, he's pinching me!"
"Just the same," she said, when peace was restored, "I'm ashamed of you, Jock."
"I'm ashamed of myself," said Jock. And, momentarily, he was. Johnny Havens was the kind of new acquaintance to whom you would have liked to be able to say that you were in a brokerage office, or with an advertising firm, or, thought Jock, "anything respectable." He listened with avidity to such intermittent mention of his own business as Johnny made, and eyed him with esteem. Newspaper work . . . something pretty fine about that . . .
They parted at six o'clock, with resolutions for a soon reunion. "I'll call you up," said Peg from the taxi. "Been meaning to, anyway, but we've only been back from our trip two weeks—we went to Cuba, naturally, so Johnny could drown his woes. We'll give you a buzz—you too, Bill Olmstead—and Jock, you bring Yvonne when you come, and I'll make fudge and fried eggs, my two chef-d'oeuvres"
"Great pair," remarked Bill, when they had pulled away.
"Yeah," Jock said. He stared after the receding rectangle of glass with the two heads . . . close together. . . . "So darn right, too," he added, almost with bitterness.
New Year's Eve at Terrace Tavern looked, as Jock put it, "like a futuristic conception of a riot in an insane asylum," and sounded like no known thing. It fairly rocked and vibrated and teemed. It was a cyclone of color, a turmoil of motion, a pandemonium and a hullabaloo. It was Terrace Tavern at its rowdiest, and by comparison with it the average roadhouse evening seemed tranquil, staid, and placid and demure.
Reservations had been made weeks in advance. Every table bore a thicket of green and brown bottles, a flotilla of glasses, a dust of crumbs, an array of women's vanity cases, ash trays full of smoked-up ends, dishes, food under plated silver beehives. Every chair had a flushed and gibbering occupant, wearing a crepe paper hat. There were fat bald heads in blue sunbonnets, and pin-heads in green helmets, and square heads in pointed caps, and flabby pink jowls tied 'round with babyish bows. And women in rather becoming hats. Women always manage that, somehow. Vain, even in wassail.
Confetti lay on the dance floor in little parti-hued puddles, and marked trails between the tables. It flecked the dark-coated shoulders of men, and glistened in women's hair, and stuck like beauty marks to their moist warm skin. Colored streamers looped from the central chandelier, bunched about the feet of the dancers and tripped them, stacked itself in corners as though a giant ticker-tape basket had upset. A Christmas tree stood near the stage where the orchestra played, stripped now of most of its ornaments and possessed of such deputy ones as a wisp of chiffon handkerchief, an ostrich feather pompom off a dress, two hats, a corkscrew, and a man's limp string of collar.
Little tin horns whined, and little cardboard horns with peppermint-candy stripes tooted and bleated, and little souvenir hammers, marked "August Schultz wishes you a Happy New Year," rat-a-tat-tatted ceaselessly. And, as though this were not noise enough, there was added to it the nasal yell of the saxophones, the deep boom of the drum, the fret of chairs pushed back suddenly . . . and the screaming talk . . . and the squawking laughter . . .
"It's incredible, isn't it," said Yvonne, "that mere flesh-and-blood ears can stand a racket like this?"
Jock smiled at her adoringly Almost any man would have smiled adoringly at Yvonne that night. Gasped first—and then adored. She was wearing a creation of pearly white velvet that covered her chest to the throat, where a tight high collar of rhinestones held it, but that had no back whatever and very little side; and the strands of her shimmering ruddy hair were wrapped smoothly around her head and held with a crescent-shaped rhinestone pin. . . . It's incredible," he retorted justifiably, "that mere flesh-and-blood eyes can look at you without blinking. You're so superb that it's"
"Sh-h! They'll hear you, my dear!"
"They" were six in number—New Year's Eve revelers at whose table Yvonne and Jock were seated. The host, Barney Blaine, owner of several cinema theaters, had known Yvonne "when she sold smokes for a living," as he was fond of saying to Jock's chagrin, and had insisted tonight that they "come on over here and be sociable." So here they were. Yvonne. Jock. Barney, with his swart, smiling face and his restless, unsmiling eyes. Barney's lady, a bosomy blonde who took whiskey straight and whose flow of tainted narrative seemed limitless. Charley Kaufman, press agent for what Barney always referred to as "my interests," lean and saturnine. Kittens Mitchell of the almondshaped eyes that flew to Jock like steel to magnet, who had but a moment since asked Yvonne how she ever "found" that unusual shade of hair, And the Kendricks, man and wife, who did a dancing act on the two-a-day and cordially hated each other.
It was eleven o'clock. At the stroke of twelve August Schultz's wee niece, clad airily in cheesecloth panties, would appear, representing the New Year. (That is to say, the management hoped she would appear; at rehearsals she had temperamentally balked, and kicked August Schultz in the shins.) She would it was hoped, plant her foot triumphantly upon the prostrate back of the trombone player, who, in a long hoary beard, would represent the Old Year now defunct. And among the spectators there would be an increase of din, if possible. And people would kiss one another, and cheer, and bawl felicitations, and whistle, and spit the confetti out of their mouths, and do all the things with which good Americans usher in another first of January.
Preparations for this great moment were even now apparent. Everybody was drinking preposterously—the American hypothesis being, of course, that the drunker one is the better one ushers. Everybody was achieving terms of the friendliest intimacy with everybody else. Convivial souls were roaming from table to table, getting in the way of the distracted waiters, pausing to introduce themselves and to exchange a pleasantry or two. Gentlemen with their ties untied and their hair in their eyes were singing sentimental ballads, heads together. Acquaintances of two minutes' standing were calling one another "ole Joe" and "my frien' Sam, here, he's from St. Louis, yup, big cloak-an'-suit man out there." Streamers were describing graceful parabolas through the air, lighting like lassos around white necks. Girls were laughing shrilly, swaying back and forth. Here you saw a sleeper, chin on chest. There an old man, clenching the arm of a pretty blase youngster so tightly that his fingers dented dimples in her skin. There a woman knobby with avoirdupois, weeping at she knew not what. There a girl trying to climb on to her table, breaking glass, upsetting dishes. There a sophomoric individual being assisted out by two companions, assuring them as he went that "S'all fun." There a whole party owlishly intent on making a spoon jump into a tumbler by means of another spoon . . .
At eleven-thirty Jock and Yvonne left Barney Blaine's table and vanished . . . to reënter a few minutes later through the little painted door and to walk to the middle of the dance floor through a storm of hammering and tooting and clapping that threatened never to subside. It did partially, however, and Jock played, kneeling on his right knee, balancing the banjo that had a pink light in it on the other, throwing back his shoulders and jiggling them a little to the time, as he always did. And Yvonne sang. Sang about mammies she was going back to, and daddies who were coming back to her, and two-time fellas, and brown-skin gals, and love, and longing. A few more women and two or three men wept, and everyone approved thunderously, and some invisible one shouted in a megaphone voice, "Nice warblin', baby!" . . . They took four encores, and sat down again at Barney Blaine's table, and pretended they didn't hear the hammering and the clapping and the tooting and the cries for "Mo-o-ore!" . . .
Then the orchestra struck up. The dancers tumbled out from the tables, pursing their lips to exhale their final hurried pulls of cigarette smoke, dragging their partners by the hand, or being dragged. The floor that but a moment since had held only Jock and Yvonne now seethed like a human ant hill, billowed and quivered and overflowed with people. The paper hats bobbed, the hectic faces simpered, the bodies collided and churned . . . collided and churned . . . collided. . . . And the music fretted and thumped:
I said Oh
Oh, you better take a train an' go where you belong
Because ain't nobody ever gonna do ME wrong
An' I mean that
So grab 'your hat
An' get along, big boy, get along" . . .
"There's a cunning child," said Yvonne.
Jock looked away from the floor and followed the line of her glance. "Where?"
"The one in red, at the table by the post."
He saw the back of a close-cropped brown head, a little column of neck with a choker necklace of pearls, a V of milky skin where the red gown was cut low. "How can you tell from the back?" he said idly.
"She looked this way a minute ago," answered Yvonne, also idly.
"Well, I don't envy her the boy-friend she's got," put in Kittens Mitchell, who had heard this, as she seemed to hear everything Jock and Yvonne said to one another. "I know him. I was out with him once myself. Once was enough, let me tell! Perry Loomis, his name is. Champion All-American tank. He's been bounced from more good schools than any seven birds in history."
"He looks it," remarked Jock. Perry Loomis did look it. He was a plump, dissipated-faced youth, plainly very tipsy at this moment. He hunched over the table toward the girl in red, lolling his head from side to side, narrowing his eyes, and wagging a limp forefinger by way of emphasis to whatever it was he was saying.
Jock summed him up in a sentence. "Natural-born wet smack." And thought no more of him. He pulled out his watch and peered at it, and showed it to Yvonne in silence. Their eyes met comprehendingly. "Let's go," he said, dropping his own eyes to hide the sudden flame of them.
"Where you going?" cried Barney Blaine. "You're not going to leave us? Why, it isn't twelve o'clock yet, even!"
"It's two minutes of," Jock announced. "We'll be back after a bit. Got a little matter to attend to backstage."
They had decided, earlier in the evening, that they would see the New Year in alone, together. "It's going to be our year," Jock had said romantically. "Don't let's be in the midst of this mob when it begins! Let's begin it right, by ourselves." This was the "little matter" to which they were now obliged to attend.
"Kiss her for me," hazarded Charley Kaufman as they rose.
"I'll just do that little thing," Jock answered lightly, hating him.
They threaded their way along the narrow aisle, walking single-file. And this happened:
As they neared the table occupied by the girl in red and the man named Perry Loomis, Jock saw Loomis get to his unsteady feet and half lean, half pitch forward, as though he would seize his vis-à-vis in his arms. The girl shrank away from him violently, so violently that she lost her balance and went, chair and all, over backward, with an instant's fetching flash of shapely little red silk legs.
"Whup!" said Jock, and halting, stooped to assist her. "Say, did you hurt yourself"
His voice died out.
An exquisite girl. Her face was delicate, pastel-pink, her mouth a coral atom, her brown hair sheeny, waved to a deep sweep over one temple, her figure soft and round to the touch of his hands. A flower of a girl, sweet, just-bloomed. . . . But Jock was not admiring so much as he was puzzling. Except for her eyes he would have said he had never seen her before. But those eyes . . . bright brown, with upcurled starry lashes. . . . They plumbed deep, to a forgotten episode. A little girl, no taller than this little girl, who had come to a prom at college ages and ages ago, and cried, and asked him to tell her how to be popular, how to be "just like the rest of these girls." And he had advised her, with all the wisdom he could muster. . . .
"It is," he said aloud, "it's little Cecily Graves!" And added under his breath, "And drunker than a monkey."
The New Year crashed in—the year they were to have greeted together because it was to be their year.
It found Jock with his arms about Cecily Graves, and Yvonne, a few steps away, watching.
"I'm a little bit 'ntox'cated," said Cecily Graves.
"I know it," said Jock.
He righted the chair and lowered her into it. Across the table Perry Loomis slumped in his seat, motionless and unseeing. His one burst of animation had been succeeded by a coma from which it would obviously be difficult to rouse him. "Just as well," Jock grunted.
He caught up with Yvonne and elucidated. "Girl I met once at a prom at college. Friend of Dopey Lane's—you've heard me speak of him. Nice little kid, good family—she hasn't any business here with a rotter like that Loomis. He's passed out now, anyway. Let's take her back to your dressing room, shall we? I feel sort of responsible"
"Of course!" agreed Yvonne.
She led the way, and Jock followed with Cecily, steering a careful course between the tablefuls of lunatic merrymakers. His face as he went was firmset and bothered. He had never spoken more truly than when he told Yvonne that he felt "sort of responsible." Cecily, in this condition, stabbed his conscience. "Oh, good Lord!" he moaned mentally. "I bet I did this! I started it, anyhow, I know that. And she's taken all my advice and then gone to the other extreme!"
Yvonne's dressing room was a cubbyhole containing a table messy with cosmetics, a huge mirror framed in electricity, two kitchen chairs, and an assortment of gowns that peeped from behind a sheet stretched across one corner. It had no windows, but after the heat and smoke of the place they had left it seemed cool, airy, delicious. And so quiet! The outer commotion was a monotone now, like city traffic distantly heard. The jazz was a purring throb:
I said Oh
An' I mean Oh" . . .
Cecily sat down, pushing her hair back from her forehead with a petulant hand. "Nice in here," she breathed relievedly.
Jock stood over her solemnly. "Are you all right, Cecily?"
"Uh-huh."
She was avoiding his eyes, and it occurred to him that she had given no slightest sign of recognition, neither in that first instant when he lifted her from the floor, nor since. "You don't know who I am, do you?" he said.
Cecily glanced up then, surprised, even scornful. "Of course I do," she said simply. "You're Jock."
The next minute her features underwent an unexpected metamorphosis. They puckered like a colicky baby's, and two tears splashed over the rim of her eyelids and traced glinting zigzags down her cheeks. "Oh, dear," she lamented, "everything's gone wrong—everything has"
Yvonne reached her in a swift rush. "Here, don't cry, honey! You mustn't cry."
"I can't h-help it! Everything's"
Yvonne knelt beside the chair and dabbed at the streaming tears with a handkerchief. "Yes, you can," she soothed. "Of course you can. There isn't a thing to cry about. We're taking care of you now. Nothing's the matter, child—is there? Tell us all about it."
The united efforts of Yvonne and Jock finally elicited from Cecily the news that she felt "awfully funnee" and a series of sobbing speculations as to what her mother would say when she went home. "And how'm I going to get home," she wound up, lifting a tragic wet face. ("Anyway," Jock told himself, "she cries a lot prettier than she used to. Why, she cries the prettiest of any girl I ever saw!")
"I'll take you home, don't worry," he said.
To his astonishment the offer provoked fresh sniffles. "Wh-what'll you think of me?" gulped Cecily. "I never was like this b-before, and of course it would have to be this night! Oh, everything's all t-terrible"
It was eventually determined that Cecily should be driven to Yvonne's apartment for the night. "It's the only logical thing to do," Yvonne said to Jock. "If her mother's like most mothers, taking her home as is would be sheer cruelty. You find August, will you, and ask him if he cares if we do our last numbers now instead of later—and bring her wrap from the chair where she was sitting"
At twelve-thirty the roadster fled away from Terrace Tavern, bearing three people.
"Lean against me, Cecily," suggested Yvonne.
"No," said Cecily drowsily. "I wanna lean the other way."
She dozed through the trip into the city nestled against Jock, with her head contentedly resting on his shoulder. He was hailed from sleep the next morning by the peal of his bedside telephone and a lilting remote announcement to the effect that "This is me."
"It's who?"
"Me. The old soak."
"Oh, hello, Cecily," he chuckled.
"Why, you're horrid!" cried Cecily instantly. "You weren't supposed to identify me by that!"
Jock thought, "Gee, she's got a cute voice! She sort of sings everything."
He propped himself on one elbow and gazed absorbedly at the telephone's mouthpiece. "How are you this morning?" he asked it. "I bet your head feels as if they were holding the Battle of the Marne inside."
"It does not!"
"It should. You ought to have a whale of a hangover."
"I have. But you didn't name a bad enough battle! Say, Jock?"
"What ho?"
"Can I call you Jock?"
"For cryin' out loud what else would you call me?"
"Well, I didn't know. Your behavior toward me is sort of Mister-Hamill-ish. Anyway: Yvonne says to tell you to take me somewhere to breakfast."
"I'll take you both, of course."
"Yvonne says she doesn't want any breakfast."
"What's the matter with her?" Jock interrogated, alarmed.
"She says she's tired. She says I kept her awake all night, talking in my sleep. About you."
"Now I know she's kidding! Tell her I'll be over there in twenty minutes, and I want to find both of you with your bonnets on, all ready for a bevy of ham and eggs"
"If you mention food," stated Cecily, "I shall die. I don't even want to see any, from now until I'm ninety. But I want to talk to you. That's the only reason I'm going."
"I want to talk to you, too! You're going to get the bawling-out of your young life, don't think you're not!"
"I don't," said Cecily.
He found her waiting for him in Yvonne's little living room, wearing a gown that he recognized as belonging to Yvonne. It hung to her insteps. "Look," she said, patting the skirt. "I'll have to tack it up with safety pins before we go out or everybody will think I'm trying to hide bowlegs or something."
"I can tell 'em different," retorted Jock. "After the back-flip you took last night, I can speak with authority."
Cecily giggled. "Wasn't that the limit?" she said in a confidential undertone. "I'm mortified to death when I think of it. It must have been awful."
"Well, not too awful. In fact, I might say—but never mind. How're you feeling this morning, Cecily, no foolin'? Have you a headache really? You're looking full of pep." His eyes roamed over her commendingly. No, he hadn't been mistaken last night; she was delightful. All pink and white and brown, like a wild rose—no, too banal—like a
He searched for a fit simile, and finding none, said, "Anybody who can look like that on the morning after"
Yvonne chose this unfortunate moment to enter the room, in a negligée of Nile green chiffon and lace that foamed behind her like a boat's wake. The negligée was very lovely and Yvonne was very lovely. But ten a. m. and a little beauty like Cecily are a combination hard on even the loveliest of women grown. For the first time in his life, Jock thought Yvonne looked old. "As the hills!" he told himself, scandalized.
She must have realized—women are always sensitive of those things—yet she went straight to Cecily and put an arm about her shoulders. The effect was pictorial in the extreme. But it was rather terribly revealing.
"Our little toper here—" Yvonne smiled at Jock, squeezing Cecily affectionately "—needs some breakfast. Take her to some not too conspicuous place, will you, Jock Hamill? My dress doesn't seem to fit her any too well, and she can't wear her own in broad daylight, of course"
"Look here, why aren't you going?" Jock wanted to know.
"Yes, come on, go with us, Yvonne," added Cecily.
"Can't," said Yvonne. "Can't possibly. I'm dead for sleep, and I'm going back to bed as soon as you two leave." She dimpled down at Cecily. "I hate to give you away, honey, but the truth will out! She chattered about you all night, Jock."
"Don't tell him what I said!" begged Cecily.
("My God," thought Jock, "a girl who can blush!")
"Oh, I won't, I'll never tell him," promised Yvonne.
After this Cecily vanished into the bedroom, muttering something about "safety pins," and Jock and Yvonne were alone. He kissed her gently, his hands framing her face. "I wish you'd come," he said.
"Honestly, my dear, I don't feel like it."
They exchanged a long look, Jock's quizzical, Yvonne's even and smiling. "What is the trouble?" she asked at last. "If a person just doesn't want any breakfast"
She let the sentence hang there, and presently Jock opened a new topic. "What did you do about Cecily's mother?"
"Oh, I telephoned her after we got here last night, in my best drawing-room voice, and told her I was Mrs. Somebody-or-other—Cecily gave me the name—and that her daughter was spending the night with my daughter and would be home this morning sometime. You'll have to drive her out there later on. And don't scold her too much, will you? She thinks you're simply going to lay her low, and she's worried to death. She explained it all to me at great length—said, 'you see I'm sort of a pupil of his'—" Yvonne broke off to laugh reminiscently. "Isn't she the cunningest?" she finished. "You know, I'm wild about her."
Then Cecily reëntered, looking down at the shortened skirt as she walked and kicking her legs forward to get the effect, somewhat in the manner of a goose-stepping soldier. "How is it?" she inquired. "I had to use plain pins in some places. And I borrowed a pair of stockings, Yvonne, and these pumps, because red ones look too ridic at breakfast time. Oh, and this hat, too. You don't mind, do you?"
Yvonne said that indeed she didn't mind, and Jock reflected that Yvonne really ought to give Cecily the hat as a present, so wonderfully it suited her. And he bundled her into her soft gray squirrel coat, and off they went, calling back good-byes to Yvonne from the hall.
"Good-bye!" echoed Yvonne gayly.
"Good-bye," she added in a whisper, and pressed clenched knuckles hard against lips suddenly contorted. "I'm going to bawl you out, as I said," began Jock, when they were face to face over two orange-juice wells sunk into two miniature icebergs. "But first I'm going to tell you that I think the transformation is—is miraculous. Duckling into swan, and all in one short year—I don't see how you did it."
"Year and two months," Cecily corrected him. "Well, you don't know how hard I've worked at it!"
"You must have."
"I've remembered every last thing you told me, Jock. Did you notice the dress I had on last night, for instance? 'Get red,' you said, 'something that knocks 'em in the eye.' Did it knock you in the eye, Jock? Say it did!"
But Jock had grown severe. "Right here," he asserted, "is where the fight starts. Did I, or did I not, tell you to run around with men like Loomis, who is one of the lower and lousier gutter-pups, as anybody can see at a glance—and did I ever tell you to go getting potted like you were last night?
"I'll tell you, Cecily," he went on, "the way I feel about it. I feel as though I'd met you up on the top of a nice little white hill, and I'd said, 'Here, here's a sled.' And you'd climbed aboard, and I'd given you a little push, and it turned out to be a big push after all and took you whizzing past where I wanted you to go. It's got me all worried, and I wish I'd left you just where you were."
Cecily sighed. "Oh, dear, I just knew you'd take it that way!"
"Well, sure! How else would I take it? When I was the egg who
"Listen, Jock. Let me explain something."
"Shoot."
Cecily put both elbows on the table and dug a determined small chin into the back of one hand. "I don't know just where to begin," she said, "but here's the way it was. This whole year and two months has been one long preparation for the time when I'd see you again. Not because it was you, particularly," she amended quickly, "but—well, you know. Like studying a lesson and then reciting. I wanted you to see how hard I'd tried and how—how well I'd got along, so you'd know that all your trouble wasn't just for nothing. You see what I mean, don't you?"
"Perfectly," said Jock. (Oh, cute . . . the little wrinkle of her forehead, the intense gravity. . . . )
"That was why I blubbered and blubbered last night," Cecily went on. "You thought it was one of those weeping jags, didn't you? Well, it wasn't. It was because, after all that waiting, I had to be intoxicated when you saw me again. Why, Jock—" Her voice rose to a sudden small wail—"I never was intoxicated in my life before! I never was! And I never was on a party with Perry Loomis, and I never would have been if he hadn't told me there were going to be ten of us or something. Jock, you—you believe me, don't you?" she pleaded.
"Of course, Cecily."
"I don't know what happened," Cecily said dismally. "I swear I don't. I've had a couple of drinks lots of evenings, and they've never affected me a bit. But we got to that Tavern place, and Perry said we'd have to wait awhile till the others came, and we waited and waited, and I had two drinks, that was all. And the first I knew everything was kind of floating in a funny way, and some man who looked exactly like you only a little fuzzy around the edges—you know how—was playing the banjo. And then, while I was trying to figure out whether it could be you and what you'd be doing playing the banjo—you see, Dopey's moved away from East Orange and I never see him now, so I didn't know—then Perry started saying that there weren't any others coming after all, and—and saying other things"
She stopped, quite out of breath, and peered anxiously into Jock's face. "You're not still angry, are you?"
"Not at you. But if I ever see that—well, but go on."
"That's all there is," said Cecily. "I just wanted you to know that I'm not a confirmed drunkard."
She said this in all seriousness, with a little air of righteous self-satisfaction, and Jock unexpectedly let forth a whoop that caused heads to turn all over the restaurant. "Oh, you're not?" he chortled. "Are you quite sure about that? You mustn't deceive me, you know, Cecily!" He leaned back in his chair and beamed down at his plate. "'Not a confirmed drunkard,'" he quoted softly. "And what was that other?—oh, 'a little fuzzy around the edges.' Now I ask you!"
Later he began a rigorous cross-examination. "I bet you've got a raft of heavy lovers. Haven't you?"
"I have a few," said Cecily calmly, nibbling a roll.
"Loomis isn't a sample, I hope?"
Cecily lowered the roll and looked pained. "Didn't I just tell you"
"All right," said Jock. "Take it all back. Signals over. Who are some of these lads, then?"
Cecily obediently enumerated a sizable list of names, all of them strange to Jock, and on each made pithy comment. "Awfully dumb but he can dance" . . . "Piggy Day, he's too fat to mean anything, of course" . . . "Mere infant, still in Lawrenceville" . . . "Bill Burnholme, precious" . . . "Henry Ernest, mother's promoting that" . . . "Norman Farrell, he's terrible, one of those smarty ones—makes jokes about baths on Saturday night and things like that" . . . "Jimmy Cruthers, he probably likes me better than any of them and I hate him the worst—that's always the way, isn't it? . . .
"Of course," she ended, "you'll have to meet one or two of them. I want you to pass judgment."
"Right. I want to. I wouldn't be surprised if you needed some more of my looking after—that's too many beaux for one little woman, anyway. Which of them is the lead-off man, by the way?"
"N-none of them."
"What? Say," Jock scoffed, "I know you eighteen-year-olds. You're always in love with somebody, or pretending you are. You've always got somebody in your minds to get maudlin about when there's moonlight. Now, which one is it, Cecily? the 'precious' Bill?"
"I guess so," Cecily said vaguely. "I'm sort of engaged to him. And then again I'm not. It just depends."
She added with dignity, "If you know us eighteen-year-olds as well as you think you do, you'd know that as a rule it's different ones at different times. It may be almost anybody. Rodolph Valentino, or Richard Barthelmess, or Red Grange of Illinois, or our best friend's husband, or the policeman on our beat—or anybody."
"I see," grinned Jock, "that I must brush up on my eighteen-year-olds! I'll make a note of that. Well, tell me this: where did you meet all these fellows? How'd it all come about? I want a complete account of your activities since I saw you last. Unexpurgated. Abandon the toying with that hapless roll, and get at it!"
So Cecily described what she called "my renascence" and its aftermath. A triumphant tale, but she told it modestly. Jock guessed rather than heard how popular she had become. "Several people were nice to me at the beach this summer," she said, and he in his mind's eye saw whole stacks of straw hats with fraternity ribands, and droves of white flannel trousers. "I took in most of the big games this fall and the dances that went with them, and had quite a different time from the one I had at that prom at your college"—and Jock visualized relay after relay of eager stags. You could not know young men, and know Cecily as she was now, and not see how inevitably she must attract them.
He listened with deep attention, and not infrequently shouted aloud over some especially ingenuous twist she gave the story. She had, he noted, a certain wit and a sure feeling for the humorous. "A flapper with brains!" he told himself. He watched her with growing appreciation. Adorable. That was the word that occurred to him oftenest. Artless, spontaneous, effervescent, were others. She twinkled with animation. Her hands—little plump stubby hands that looked as though they should be playing with dolls—gesticulated continuously. Her face was charmingly mobile. "It talks," he decided. Her eyes talked too, and the remarkable lashes swept up, dropped down, fluttered, were never still. "Laughing lashes," he called them privately.
He had one thought, undercurrent of all the thoughts that came to him that morning, which he strove so desperately not to think that he had almost a sense of warding it off with physical hands. This was the thought:
That Cecily was refreshing after Yvonne . . . like water after too much wine. . . .