LATE that afternoon Jock let himself into his mother's apartment and found her deep in conversation with Saunders Lincoln. From the door he could see the semi-circles of their heads, one iron-gray and smoothly brushed, one silver and rippling, above the backs of chairs drawn to a sociable angle. A quartette of crystal glasses on a stand, and a card table pushed to one side with cards in concise little stacks of four still lining its edge testified that there had been other guests, but there were not now, and he had an immediate distinct impression that his entrance interrupted a discussion of himself.
"Who's been taking my name in vain?" he demanded, marching over to stand before them, fists on hips, accusingly.
"Both of us," Mrs. Hamill admitted with composure. She was lying almost at full length, her slender shoulders sunk into a cushion and her feet, frivolous as a débutante's in chiffon hose and three-inch heels, thrust out-on a footstool in front of her. She twisted a finger in the long string of amber beads that touched her tea gown with color and smiled up at Jock. "Your entire future, my dear, has just been elaborately and painstakingly mapped out."
"Fine! What's it going to be?"
"God knows," said Mrs. Hamill piously. "We only decided what we'd like it to be. Having no influence in heaven, and none whatever over you, we suspect that in all probability it will be something quite different. Do sit down, darling, you make me nervous. A grin at that height is too remindful of a gargoyle on a roof."
Jock and Saunders Lincoln laughed together, and Jock bent to move the little slippered feet to the side of the footstool, seating himself by them. "Well, I," he declared, "have spent this New Year's day elaborately and painstakingly mapping out the future of a beautiful young lady!"
"Coincident with your own, of course," said his mother dryly.
"Bum guess. The beautiful young lady was not Yvonne."
Mrs. Hamill's eyes widened, and Lincoln said, "Why, I'd been led to believe that Yvonne was the only really beautiful young lady now extant!"
"She is," Jock assured them, sobering. "This one's just an infant. Cecily Graves, from East Orange. I met her once at college, and last night she showed up at the Tavern, and—well, there's quite a yarn. Want to listen?"
"Yes," cried Mrs. Hamill with enthusiasm.
Leaning forward, his arms on his knees and a forgotten cigarette consuming itself in his fingers, Jock outlined the history of Cecily as he knew it. His hearers seemed to find it extremely interesting. They neither moved nor spoke, and he, absorbed in what he said, did not realize that they were more absorbed in the way in which he said it—in the inflections of his voice and the unconscious buoyancy of his expression. He failed to note how often their glances met across the top of his head, and how once, after a descriptive passage employing countless superlatives, Mrs. Hamill's right eye disappeared for the fraction of a second under a drooping lid, while the left eye glinted meaningly . . .
"So, after we'd had breakfast," he narrated in conclusion, "I took her back to Yvonne's while she got her own clothes, and then we drove out to East Orange"
"Yvonne with you?" queried Mrs. Hamill very casually.
"No, she still wouldn't budge. Just Cecily and I. And I met her father and mother. They're wonderful people—you'd like 'em, especially the poppa. He's fat and bald and rubicund, and on the slightest provocation emits guffaws that make the welkin ring. Great guy! He and I got very clubby inside of ten minutes. Mrs. Graves isn't quite so approachable—little bit high hat and grande dame—but she's all right too. They seem to have all kinds of dough. You know that house that sits back in the trees on the right as you go into the town there, mother?—the one with an artificial lake in the lawn and a lot of turrets and things, like a fairy-story castle? Well, that's theirs. I stayed there about an hour, and then came back to Yvonne's again, and we've been talking the situation over ever since. Yvonne thinks I ought to appoint myself Cecily's guardian from now on—sort of look after her and take her around places"
"Yvonne thinks so?"
Jock, looking up, saw incredulity writ plain on his mother's face, and a faint reflection of "t traced across the features of Saunders Lincoln. 'Sure she does!" he insisted. "Why not? Did you think she'd be jealous, or something? That's absurd. Yvonne isn't that way. And besides, Cecily's only a kid, I tell you! Just a darn cute little kid who needs a bit of looking after.
"Yvonne feels," he elucidated further, "just as I do, that I'm really more or less accountable for her behavior, and that it's up to me to do what I can."
"I see," said Mrs. Hamill slowly. "Quite right, too!" she added, nodding. "You should, under the circumstances. When are you going to start?"
"I've started already. Lectured her at breakfast and all the way over to Jersey, and on the way back I stopped at Brentano's and picked out a couple of tons of books for her to read. No flies on me as a pedagogue!"
"Evidently not. Well, and when do you expect to see her again? Why don't you bring her here some day soon so I can meet her? I like what I hear of her." Mrs. Hamill spoke never more truly.
"I'll do that," answered Jock. He rose, stretching, and observed haphazardly, as though it had just occurred to him, "She's coming to the Tavern tonight again, this time with the boy she's engaged to."
Mrs. Hamill sat up with such suddenness that an ash tray she had balanced in her lap slid to the floor. "Oh, so Cecily is engaged!"
A little pause followed this impulsive and illuminating exclamation. "Why, she's sorry!" thought Jock, struck. Belated cognizance of the things that had moved in his mother's mind came to him. "She wanted to think I might fall in love with Cecily—that must mean she doesn't like Yvonne—oh, hell, it can't!"
But he knew it could not mean anything else.
He said stiffly, "I believe so. Cecily won't acknowledge it in so many words, but she seems particularly anxious to have us meet this bird and see what we think of him. What if she is engaged, for heaven's sake? I'm not trying to marry the girl—I'm engaged myself, don't forget!"
"I am not forgetting," murmured Mrs. Hamill.
There was another pause, heavy and uncomfortable. Then Jock sauntered toward the door, attempting, rather unsuccessfully, to sound natural as he said, "Well, guess I'd better step, it's after six. Ladies and gentlemen: exit the boy banjoist in the performance of his duties!"
The evening, given a bad start, went more and more awry as it proceeded.
Jock and Yvonne reached Terrace Tavern at seven o'clock, to find the red-and-black playground already filling with men and women, and smoke, and whisky and gin. The crowd seemed to be made up for the most part of people who had been celebrating New Year's for twenty-four hours without cessation, and who were now either violently disorderly or very nearly: comatose. The atmosphere was even more jaded than usual, the faces more drawn, the laughter more metallic. From their scarlet nook Happy Hatton's players sent forth a listless syncopation, and about the oval floor couples jogged drearily, doggedly, as though forced to foxtrot much against their will. The whole scene, after the night before, savored of anticlimax.
Jock and Yvonne took a table for four and there waited, saying little. Yvonne was too weary to talk, she averred, and Jock was too preoccupied. He sat idly pouring salt, watching his fingers mold it into infinitesimal hills . . . thinking many deep and troublous things.
After quite a long time he said unexpectedly, "Dear, let's not wait till February. Let's get married right away. Shall we?" His hand covered hers on the table. "Please!"
He had made the entreaty innumerable times, but never quite in this way. There was a sort of desperation in his tone, and something very like fear in his eyes. He felt Yvonne's hand tremble, and was sure that she shared this strange indecipherable new emotion which filled him . . . until she spoke. Her words were light, and tinkling-cool as little icicles. "What on earth is the matter with you tonight, Jock Hamill?"
"I don't know," he answered hopelessly. "I just—have the damnedest funny feeling"
Then through the smoke and the tired air, Cecily came toward them. She seemed to dance toward them, like a bright autumn leaf in the wind—radiantly alive, quickening the pulses. She wore a brocaded evening cloak with a vast fur collar, and above it her eyes shone and her sweet full lips smiled a smile that said, "Come on! Life's fun! Come and play with me!"
A young man walked just behind her, and as soon as he beheld this young man Jock thought, "She'll marry him. Any girl would." . . . There was a beauty-parlor look about Bill Burnholme. His crisp fair hair waved as though fresh from a marceling iron, so that you were tempted to lay your fingers along its perfect undulations. His eyebrows grew thick at the nose and thin over the temples, like a tweezered flapper's. His eyes—blue eyes, almost violet—were set in tangled dark lashes. But to counteract the effect of these too-faultless attributes, he had a great sinewy body, blunt hands with callouses below the fingers, and a careless, collegiate, thoroughly masculine manner. So men forgave him the beauty of his face, and women adored it the more.
Cecily presented him, and sank into her chair with a sigh, declaring that "introductions always befuddle me." Bill and Jock, from opposite sides, assisted her to shed her wrap, thereby revealing a tight little gown of coral velvet with a spatter of glistening beads across the bodice. "Don't tell me we're late," she implored. "What I mean is, not too late—you haven't done your act yet, have you?"
"No," said Yvonne, "not until eight."
"We had a flat tire," Cecily explained, "—of course. Bill is one of those people who always get flat tires. And then he couldn't find the jack"
Bill interpolated meekly, "I'm one of those people who never can find the jack"
"Absolutely!" nodded Cecily. "He is, really. Well, and so we stopped the next car that came along and there was a most vicious-looking man in it and I was petrified and put my rings in my shoe"
She rattled on, and Jock listened, his eyes shifting from her face to her escort's and back again. He saw that Burnholme was infatuated with Cecily. His every glance at her gave it away, despite the labored unconcern with which he sought to keep it hidden. "He's trying to hide it from her, though, not from us," Jock sensed intuitively. "He isn't sure of her." Somehow this was a gratifying reflection. "Means she's handling him cleverly," he added, by way of explaining to himself just why he should approve.
They ordered four chicken dinners, and Jock from a pocket flask mixed three highballs, for Burnholme, Yvonne and himself.
"Am I a step-child?" complained Cecily. "Where's mine?"
"You don't get one," Jock announced. "After last night"
"Say," broke in Burnholme, chuckling, "how about that? Scoop tells me she disgraced herself."
"He calls me Scoop, isn't it senseless?" Cecily said gravely to Yvonne.
"I understand," Burnholme went on with evident relish, "that the floor came up and whacked her on the back of the head."
"Don't sound so perfectly delighted!" cried Cecily. "You wouldn't have liked it if you'd seen it. I was no lady. Besides, it hurt. It made a bump. Feel the bump, Jock." She ducked her head, and Jock prodded the back of it with his forefinger. "Feel it?"
"No."
"Well, it's there! You're a punk phrenologist."
"What tickles me," said Bill, "is—well, in the first place, I positively forbade her ever even to see that mutt she was with. This proves I had God on my side. And in the second place, she's always prided herself on being the only up-to-date woman in captivity who never got lit. She" He broke off, and laughed into Cecily's eyes so intimately that Jock had a queer and cold sensation of not being present at all. "Remember the day I met you?" he asked her.
Cecily dimpled—whether in sentimental or merely humorous recollection it was impossible to determine. "Certainly do."
"It was at a picnic," Bill informed Jock and Yvonne, "and she sat there holding two paper drinking cups—gin in one, water in the other. She'd drink the water and touch the gin to her lips, pretending it was the chaser, and then dump the rest of it on the ground. She did that all afternoon, and I, guileless and honest, trying to keep pace with her, lapped up approximately three quarters of a quart of gin alone and single-handed and presently passed right out of the picture. Never did know the facts till afterward. Thought she must be the original human sponge."
"I'm full of those little tricks," observed Cecily. "You sort of have to be these days. Don't you, Yvonne? You have three alternatives—drink actually, drink ostensibly, or else be called a wet smack. I refuse to be called a wet smack."
The conversation dealt briefly with prohibition, then veered to other topics. Jock left the burden of it to the rest and relapsed into moody silence. A dread of the evening's performance had frown in him, all in the last few minutes. To walk out beside Yvonne into the spotlight, to bow and scrape to the crowd, to kneel and strum, with these two looking on. . . . There was suddenly nothing in all the world he wanted less to do. He felt placed at a definite disadvantage. This fellow Bill—budding architect, Cecily had said—what would he think? What was he thinking now? "Probably looks on me as about one degree higher than a confounded chorus man!" . . . He could imagine Bill on the way home, upbraiding Cecily, saying of himself, Jock, "What do you see in a sap like that? Why, he doesn't amount to anything!" . . . destroying with a few caustic sentences the whole structure of her esteem.
The orchestra was playing again—the last dance before eight o'clock. Jock grasped Cecily's elbow almost roughly. "Come on, let's try this."
She danced perfectly, with rhythmic effortless ease. "Do I still hang on your left thumb like a coat on a peg?" she quoted after a moment, sparkling up at him.
"You know you don't. I wish you wouldn't remind me of all those ancient dirty cracks."
"Why not? They made me what I am today"
"Look here," said Jock, "are you engaged to Burnholme or aren't you?"
"How do you like him?" evaded Cecily.
"Allright. Fine. Seems to be a good sort. Answer my question."
"What do you want to know for?"
"Why wouldn't I? You're like a little kid sister to me, you know."
"Oh," said Cecily.
Bill Burnholme and Yvonne glided past them, Yvonne's head a fiery blotch against the broad black shoulder. "She's gorgeous, isn't she?" Cecily breathed.
"Isn't she," echoed Jock absently. "Aren't you going to tell me, Cecily?"
Before she could reply the music died, with the sharp unmusical groan beloved of jazz bands, and Jock said hurriedly, "Listen here, Cecily: Yvonne and I do our stuff in just a minute. And listen, don't think—remember in a month from now I'll be doing something different—something a lot more to be proud of"
This was all he had time for. Bill and Yvonne joined them, and the foursome went back to its table, Jock with the conviction that he had sounded silly and accomplished nothing.
Ten minutes later, he and Yvonne were out on the floor alone.
The spotlight was extraordinarily bright that night. It beat upon him with a searing, intolerable lucidity. It lay in a circle around him, so that he reminded himself, ridiculously, of a valentine figurine glued upright on a white cardboard base. Beyond the spotlight there was gloom, and out of the gloom, wan faces, like enormous scattered blossoms. He saw Cecily's face and Bill's, blurry with distance, and he was full of an awful certainty that both of them were amused, supercilious, scornful.
He had never felt more awkward, nor more miserable. The embarrassment and stage fright attendant on his début at the Tavern had been as nothing compared with this. He could feel perspiration—what he fancied must be a veritable torrent of perspiration—on his forehead. He could feel slou'red in the traitorous inches between the back of his collar and the roots of his hair. And when he knelt, in the hush that followed the preliminary round of applause, his knee cracked, making what seemed to him a deafening report.
He began to play.
He believed he had never played worse, but in reality he played quite as usual, his fingers instinctive on the strings. Yvonne, beside him, sang a little wicked song. What Makes 'Em Dog Me Aroun'? . . . He was conscious of the motions of her hands, of the sway of her gold-sheathed body. Suggestive. Faintly indecent. Adapted to the tenor of her audience. "And I let her!" he thought, in a frenzy of self-condemnation. A man who let the girl he was going to marry stand in a public place and croon innuendos for the delight of the dissolute—what must right-minded people think of that? . . .
They presented three numbers, and when they had finished there occurred an incident unprecedented in their Tavern experience: somebody threw money at them.
They were bowing, hand in hand, and a disc of silver came spinning over the floor and lay at their feet . . . then another . . . and another. Jock, seeking wild-eyed the source of this generosity, located it as a ringside table around which was assembled a senile stag party of six. One of the six was lost in slumber, gripping the neck of a bottle in an oblivious fist. His companions were very much awake. They had shifted their chairs so as to face the entertainers, and they lolled back, crossing their corpulent shins, and whistled, and cat-called, and grimaced behind the films sent up by their cigars. Their hands alternately whacked approval and delved into their pockets. . . . Jock found himself noting details with a peculiar cold precision. The diamond on one man's little finger. The three wisps of hair brushed so meticulously across the naked pate of a second. The stubble of beard on the chin of a third . . .
Clink! Clinkclinkclink! Clink!
Other groups were following the example of the inspired quintet. Coins whizzed thick and fast. Fifty-cent pieces. Quarters. Dimes. A dollar, hurled by a bibulous maiden who made a great hue and cry about it, standing up and flexing her arm like a baseball pitcher.
This took place in a mere few seconds. But it seemed to Jock that it had all begun exceedingly long ago, ages ago. It seemed to him that ever since he could remember he had stood there, a target for people's small change, like a street singer, or a beggar, or an organ-grinder's monkey—while Cecily watched. The thing would have been painful in any case; under the circumstances, it was tragic. He wanted to shrink to nothingness, to become invisible, to be swallowed by a yawning floor. He wanted, in short, all the things that shame-filled sufferers want, and that no kindly deity ever vouchsafes.
"Give them another," Yvonne whispered in his ear. "We'll have to. Hypnotizin' Mama,' or anything" He looked down at her and saw that she was genuinely merry; almost laughing. "My God, she thinks this is funny!" he told himself.
Mechanically he knelt again, and struck opening chords, while the spectators settled back to listen and the shower of metal slackened, ceased altogether. Hypnotizin' Mama, verse once, chorus once, repeat verse, repeat chorus twice. This was the formula, and he followed it through force of habit . . . then rose, and clasped Yvonne's hand in his damp one, and bowed again . . .
Yvonne was giving him further sibilant directions under cover of the clapping. "Pick up that money, Jock Hamill! You've got to! Doesn't matter what you do with it, but pick it up. And for pity's sake, look pleasant!"
The moments during which he trotted about, scratching silver out of the dust and hearing it patter into the inverted hollow of his banjo were the most ghastly he had ever known, or ever wished to know. He carried with him as he moved a mental cinema of himself—a cinema photographed from Cecily's angle, wherein he appeared the sorriest possible spectacle. He had no idea, of course, that all the women in the room, Cecily included, found him appealing and very lovable in his discomfiture.
When the last dime was lifted he took Yvonne's arm, walked resolutely to the platform with the banjo held straight out before him like a church collection box, and dumped its contents at the feet of Happy Hatton.
Yvonne comprehended in some degree Jock's state of mind that night, but only by intuition, for at the time he said nothing. Not until two weeks later did she hear from him how complete a change in his attitude toward Terrace Tavern Cecily's visit had wrought.
During those two weeks, she saw less of her lover than at any time in all the year of their intimacy. His days, formerly hers exclusively, were now the joint property of herself and Cecily—with the balance of hours perhaps a little on Cecily's side. This was right. This was as it should be. She encouraged it; and in the evenings, while they waited their turn at the roadhouse, she listened to Jock's accounts of his afternoons with Cecily, and smiled and smiled . . . wanting to cry . . .
Twice she invited Cecily to her own apartment when Jock was not there, to eat chocolates and discuss clothes, plays, parties—and him. She learned many things that Cecily did not intend to tell; and Cecily learned many things that Yvonne did intend to tell. And both of them seemed very happy, and one of them was.
Jock seemed happy only at intervals. At other times, he was troubled and morose. Yvonne saw plainly that he failed to understand his own mood, that he did not analyze it—probably for the reason that, deep in his subconscious mind, he was afraid to. She was not altogether surprised, therefore, one Saturday evening in mid-January, when he burst into a sudden storm of abuse of the Tavern, which he apparently blamed for all his present discontent.
He said, without preamble, "Oh good God, but they turn my stomach! Look at them, will you, Yvonne? Just look at 'em!"
Yvonne looked, and perceived nothing but the usual diners, the usual drinkers, the usual dancers, neither better nor worse than they usually were. She looked back at Jock again. His dark glance brooded over the room and his lips were twisted to sneer.
"It's enough to make you sick!" he went on savagely. "Damn' swine! Look at the way they paw each other, and kiss each other, and leer unspeakable rottenness out of their eyes! 'Children of disobedience.' That's from the Episcopal prayer book, and I've remembered it since prep school, and lately every time I look around this hole I think of it. '. . . lust, evil concupiscence . . . for which things' sake the wrath of God falleth on the children of disobedience.' When—if I ever write a book that'll be the title, and it'll be all about people like these"
He ceased, smiling. "I'm popping off, as usual."
Yvonne was silent, running her fingers up and down the stem of her water goblet. Presently Jock resumed speaking. "To tell the truth," he said in a somewhat mollified tone, "I guess it's not so much that I'm sore at the Tavern as that I'm sore at myself. I have been ever since the night they started flinging money. That was the night I began to see just what a caricature of a real he-man I look like. First year out of college—year of laying a lifetime's cornerstone, it ought to be—and what did I do with it? And what did I allow you to do?" He indicated the surroundings with a sweep of his hand, and his scowl deepened. "Fine!" he finished witheringly. "Most laudable! Jock Hamill, the human jellyfish!"
Another lull. Yvonne lit a cigarette and eyed its slender upward twirl of bluish smoke. Jock dug his hands into his pockets, seeming by this gesture to pull his whole long body lower in the chair. His eyes focussed themselves on a bar pin fastened to the bodice of Yvonne's gown, but she knew he was not thinking of the bar pin.
"Now you take Cecily," he said. "The poor kid looks up to me as if I were her father or somebody. She does everything I tell her. And who the hell am I? That's the point. I've got a sweet nerve to be advising her what to do and what not to do, when all I rate is a rag-picking job in a low-life"
"Jock Hamill, let's leave tonight."
Jock had been so engrossed in his diatribe that he had almost forgotten Yvonne. Now, with her interruption, he appeared to bethink himself of her. His face softened. "I'm sorry, honey! I've got you all upset, haven't I?"
"No, that's not it. But I see how you feel, and since you do feel that way why should we stay on here two weeks more? You'll only hate it. Let's go find August and tell him we're quitting right now, don't you want to?"
Jock shook his head. "I've thought that all over, but it won't do. Rum trick on the old boy—he's been pretty good to us in his way. We agreed to hang on till the first of February, I suppose we'd better stick to our word.
"Don't look so worried!" he added, laughing at her. "I can stand it all right! I've stood it an awful lot of weeks already, remember, and thought it was hot stuff."
"You did, didn't you? You enjoyed it for awhile?"
"Sure I did! You know that."
Yvonne changed the subject abruptly. "Tell me about this afternoon."
(Cruel, the swift light of his face!) "We went up to mother's to lunch," he said, "and you should have seen mother and Cecily! They hit it off from the word go."
"I knew they would," said Yvonne.
"Well, they did! Chattered away, and giggled—I felt like an old man with a couple of high school daughters. Had such a time getting them apart that Cecily and I were half an hour late to the matinee. Say, the show was good, too!" He paused, regarding Yvonne. "Shame you missed it, honey."
"I'm sorry too. But I simply had to go to the hairdresser's, as I told you. I needed all sorts of things done to me."
"You look great. Well, after the show we went to the Ambassador and had tea and danced, and got to talking about the books I picked out for her. She's read them all already, though when she gets time I can't imagine because between Bill Burnholme and the rest of her string, not to mention yours truly the nurse, she's busy all the time"
"Have you found out yet whether she's really engaged to Bill?"
"Nope. Little devil won't say yes or no."
"I don't think she is," opined Yvonne. "And even if she should be, it probably won't pan out. About one girl in a hundred ever marries her first fiancé."
"She could do a lot worse, though," Jock said generously. "Bill's a good boy. I like him better every time I see him. Well, anyway, as I was saying: Cecily's comments on those books—I wish you could have heard 'em, Yvonne! Clever as they could be. If it had been any one else I'd have thought she was plagiarizing from some big critic's book reviews, but not Cecily. Everything she said was original, you could tell that, and it was great dope. She had me humping, I can tell you."
"She does sort of stimulate your mind, doesn't she?" Yvonne said, making the "your" impersonal.
"You bet it's the truth!" agreed Jock vigorously. "I have to look out or this'll be one of those pathetic cases of pupil telling teacher where to get off. She's got no mean head there, let me say, for all it looks so frivolous."
Yvonne took a little sip of water and set the goblet down carefully. "You know," she remarked, "sometimes it occurs to me that Cecily is the kind of—a girl you should have married—would have, if I hadn't come along."
As she voiced this, quite without appearing to, she watched Jock so narrowly that she felt her eyes burn in their sockets. But she could detect nothing in his face except surprise and instant repudiation.
"Don't be silly," he advised, and smiled easily, as though she had said something humorous.
Yvonne thought, "No, not that way. It's got to be more drastic than that. He isn't on to himself yet, and even if he were his conscience wouldn't let him listen to reason" . . .
"Two more weeks—isn't very long, is it?" she mused aloud, with what might have been irrelevance.
"And bring Yvonne tomorrow," commanded Peg over the telephone.
"Absolutely will."
But when the receiver was back on its hook Jock said to himself. "No, I won't. I'll take Cecily."
True to their word, Peg and Johnny Havens had summoned him to their home in Washington Square very soon after the November day when they had had tea together; and he had been there often since. He loved to go there. Peg amused him always, Johnny he was enormously fond of, and their host of friends he found exactly to his taste. There was a special brand of informality about the Havens's parties. Everyone was expected to do just what he pleased in that apartment, and did so. People came if, and when, they wanted to, entertained themselves according to the dictates of their fancies, and departed at such time as they saw fit. They danced, and sang, and stirred weird concoctions on the kitchenette range, and played stud poker on the dining room table, and made light love in the hall, and laughed. . . . Nowhere under the sun, Jock thought, was there ever quite so much laughter. Into this environment he had taken Yvonne one afternoon around Christmas time, and he was left with a distressing belief that the experiment had not been successful. Yvonne had been an onlooker, not a participant; and the crowd resented onlookers, however lovely and gracious, on the ground that they "crabbed a party." The fun had been rather subdued that day, and Jock had known why and been both grieved and disappointed. He had felt that in this small but somehow not trivial matter, Yvonne had completely failed him.
Cecily would not fail him. She was fundamentally adapted to just that sort of thing.
He reached for the 'phone again with a view to calling Peg back and announcing the substitution, but thought better of it. "No use," he reflected. "They don't care who I bring, and anyway I'm going to see Johnny at lunch"
It was the last Friday in January, and the luncheon engagement was a business one. Johnny's father was to be present, for the purpose of ascertaining whether or not he agreed with his son that Jock would prove an asset to the paper owned by him, the New York Log. A matter of form only; Jock was as good as hired, sight unseen. But he did not know this, and the meeting seemed to him crucial and precarious. He dressed for it with vast attention to detail, and, in the conviction that the first requirement of a reporter was punctuality, reached the appointed place on the stroke of one—and waited half an hour.
While he waited, he planned the dialogue to come. "Then he'll say" . . . "Then I'll say" . . . He examined his watch at minute intervals, and once he held it to his ear. As one-thirty approached he was assailed by a panicky suspicion that Mr. Havens had declined to present himself after all. In fancy he saw Mr. Havens, a sort of Johnny-grown-old with a beard and a belly, pounding his fist on a pile of newspapers and roaring, "Why should I waste my time?"
Why, indeed? Jock could think of no good reason, and it began to seem to him that his mere presence here in expectation of the Great was most presumptuous.
But Mr. Havens came, and was not ostentatiously Great at all, but quite human. You felt at once that he enjoyed cards and horse races, that he commanded a supply of excellent stories, and that he had a cellar full of bottles with cobwebs upon them. That type of man. He was of medium height, thick-set, with an abundance of graying hair, a square strong face, and at once the shrewdest and jolliest eyes Jock had ever seen. He spoke in an abbreviated way, as though before presenting each sentence he mentally blue-penciled it to the bone. "Late," he said, pumping Jock's hand. "Kept you waiting. Couldn't help it. How're you? Glad to know you."
Nor was the ensuing meal at all as Jock had thought it would be. Almost to the end of it, business remained unmentioned. He himself dared not introduce the issue, Johnny would not, and Mr. Havens appeared much more interested in the information that Jock had once played the Valleydale course in two below par than in the fact that he wanted a job. They talked golf until dessert.
"Have to have a round together," Mr. Havens remarked at last, "spring comes."
Jock said, truthfully, that he would like that very much. "But you'll probably beat me ten-up, sir," he added smiling. "I've hardly had a club in my hands since I left college, and I never was any great shakes. That Valleydale score Johnny told you about was an accident."
"Haven't been playing?"
"No, sir."
"Why not? No time?"
Jock hesitated, and Johnny supplied the answer. "No inclination. Tread softly, dad, the boy's in love."
Mr. Havens elevated an eyebrow at Jock. "Fact?"
"I'm going to be married about the last of next month."
"Good!" said Mr. Havens. "Means you'll take hold. Look at Johnny. Engaged, perfectly useless. Wrench in the wheels of Progress. Sat and mooned from morn till eve. Marriage made all the difference. Now look at him, works like a steer."
"First time you've ever admitted it," Johnny muttered.
His father ignored this. "When can you start?" he shot at Jock.
"Monday, sir."
Mr. Havens jerked his head in manifestation of approval. "Come 'round. Ten a. m. My office. What do you want, anyway? Business end? News end? What?"
"News," said Jock with emphasis.
"Ever done any writing?"
"Just at college. Of course that doesn't mean anything. But I think I can, Mr. Havens."
"Damn right he can!" put in Johnny. "I've read some of his stuff my brother-in-law sent Peg in the olden days. He's got more literary ability than any staff man ever needed. Also personality, guts, and everything else you'd want."
"This your press agent?" grinned Mr. Havens, pointing a thumb at his son.
"Seems to be," Jock said, also grinning.
"Well, we'll try you, see if he's right."
Which was all there was to it. They parted soon after; the Havens, père et fils, to return whence they had come; Jock to rush into the nearest telephone booth, demand his mother's number, and say in a voice which he vainly strove to control, "Hello! Mrs. Madelaine Hamill? A reporter from the Log speaking" . . .
There was assembled in the Washington Square apartment on the following afternoon a representative group of kindred spirits, to the number of twelve. Of these twelve, six were shooting dice in a circle on the floor. Two—a girl with straight blonde bobbed hair, like yellow paint, and a boy in a West Point uniform—were seated close together on a divan, wearing that desperately solemn expression of countenance young people wear only when they are discussing one another's probable faithlessness. Two more occupied the piano bench and played intermittent ragtime, the girl with both hands, the boy with a somewhat erratic forefinger on the upper end of the keyboard. The host, Johnny, was performing calisthenics with a cocktail shaker. And Mrs. Johnny, in a voluminous blue-checked apron and with a smudge on the tip of her extraordinary nose, was flying back and forth between kitchen and living room demanding whether or not anybody wanted her to make coffee—"If anybody says yes I'll crown them"
On one of these trips she paused by her husband's side to say, "What's happened to Jock and Yvonne, do you 'spose?"
"He's not bringing Yvonne," Johnny answered, opening a fresh bottle of gin and sniffing into it with the usual post-Volstead distrust. "He's bringing some other girl. Told me so yesterday. Forgot to tell you about it."
"He is?"
"He is."
"Why, what's that mean?" Peg marveled.
"I don't know," said Johnny, "but I know what I hope."
"Me, too. I don't like her either."
"Oh, I liked her all right enough," Johnny contradicted. "But not for old Jock. Wrong kind entirely. Listen! There he is now."
Outside in the street was heard an automobile horn braying a little refrain. "Honk—honky-honk-honk—honk honnnk!"
Peg and Johnny with one accord went to a window and threw it open, drenching their protesting guests with zero air. They hung out. Four stories below they could see Jock's roadster, and Jock assisting to alight from it a diminutive person in a fur coat and a dot of green hat.
"Ship ahoy!" boomed Johnny.
"Look out, you'll fall over backward!" warned Peg, giggling, as Jock and Cecily stretched their necks to look up.
"Wait'll you see what I've brought!" Jock shouted from the sidewalk, and the pair vanished into the doorway below.
Their arrival at the apartment proper was attended by an untoward mishap. Amy Hazelton, the girl at the piano, understanding that Jock had Yvonne with him and desiring to be apropos, struck crashing chords. . . . Jock and Cecily entered to the Bridal March by Lohengrin.
"Why, how nice!" said Cecily, quite unabashed. "Now if somebody'll lend me a lace curtain"
Amy gasped and jerked her fingers from the keys. "Oh, I'm so sorry—why, I thought of course it would be Yvonne!" she explained brightly.
Peg rushed to the rescue, and without waiting to be introduced to Cecily introduced her to the room at large. "Say hello to these tramps, my dear," she directed, hooking her arm into Cecily's. "The one now lumbering toward us is my warden, Johnny Havens. And this is Elsie Henry, and that's Dinny Purviance" She recited names rapidly, and Cecily smiled and twinkled; which was really all the current Cecily had to do to conquer.
"Jock seems to be trying to keep it a secret," she said at the end with just the proper touch of diffidence, "but my name's Cecily"
And inside of a minute they were calling her Cecily, with unanimous cordiality. They were making quite a little stir about her. Dinny dragged her coat from her shoulders, and Johnny handed her a drink, and someone else proffered cigarettes, and the crap shooters shifted to make room for her. And in a few minutes more she was down among them on the floor, leaning on one palm, shaking the dice in the other, her wavy brown hair half hiding her cheeks as she bent to see whether or not she got that "Ada from Decatur" she had cried for.
Through all this Jock stood quietly watching; and his were sensations like unto those of a parent whose offspring performs creditably, even brilliantly, at a public entertainment. "I knew it!" he crowed in secret. "Takes to 'em like a duck to water—and they to her!" He continued to watch her, entirely unconscious of himself. She lost the dice and sat up straight, a slim, supple figure in modish green, with a noteworthy ankle and calf showing beyond the hem of the green skirt. Larry Vane, who sat next her, said something to her in an aside and she laughed, throwing her head back. That line of her throat . . . entrancing . . . Larry looked as if he thought so too. . . .
"Jock," said Peg's voice plaintively, "are you going to stand around till doomsday in that overcoat?" And, as he slid out of the coat with guilty haste, there were chuckles and pointed remarks. He saw that his engrossed attention to Cecily had been misinterpreted, and he was confused and angry. "They ought to know better than that!" he told himself peevishly. "They all know about Yvonne. Do they think I'm one of the two-time boys, for heaven's sake?"
After that he took pains not to gaze too often or too long in her direction; but he contrived to miss nothing.
The crap game gave way in time to informal dancing. Rugs were rolled up, chairs sent spinning into corners, Amy Hazelton instructed to play "That thing that goes 'ta-ta-tum-te-ta,' you know, and not too fast!" Cecily, flushed and merry, her hands full of crumpled one-dollar bills, was pulled to her feet by Larry and another youth and literally fought over. Finally Dinny Purviance settled the question by carrying her off himself.
Jock danced with Peg. She had pulled her apron around so that it hung from her shoulders down her back like a court train; now she threw it over both their heads. There was an outbreak of comment: "Holy smoke, will you pipe that?" . . . "What is it?" . . . "It's the covered wagon!" . . . "It's a laundry bag with legs!" . . . "Hey, Johnny, better look into this!"
Peg, paying no attention, said in Jock's ear under the sheltering gingham, "She's a knockout! Who is she?"
"Cecily Graves. Little friend of mine—mine and Yvonne's."
"Since when?"
"Oh, I've known her a long time. Met her over a year ago, and discovered her again New Year's Eve."
"I should think you'd feel as though you'd discovered America," Peg declared briskly. "I'm sold on her. So's Johnny. So's everybody. Be sure to bring her again."
"I will," Jock promised. Even as he promised, he thought, "But I can't, very many times. I'll be married in a month, and they don't want Yvonne."
Some one lifted the apron neatly from their heads by means of an umbrella, Peg meantime complaining that it was a shame if a lady couldn't have a little privacy in her own home. Jock observed that Cecily was dancing now with the cadet, Scott Mason. She caught his eye and wiggled her fingers at him. "So nice to see you again!"
After a while he cut in on her. "Having a good time?"
"Wonderful."
"Nobody," he said positively, "ever went across any bigger. From the minute you came in the door and spoke right up the way you did"
Cecily rejoiced to quote his bygone phrases whenever applicable. She did it now. "'Always, when you're introduced to anyone or any group, make a remark within the first minute—let 'em know you're there.'"
"And believe me you are there," he retorted. "There, and 'way over. I'm all puffed up about it."
They danced without speaking for an interval, both enjoying the antics of the couples rotating about them. The cadet and the straight-haired blonde were presenting an exaggerated interpretation of a Bowery bunny-hug, and Peg and Johnny, by way of contrast, were doing an old-fashioned two-step with overwhelming gravity. Johnny, stiff as a ramrod, stepped as though he were stepping on eggs, and held Peg at arms' length. And Peg bounced and hopped and counted painfully under her breath, "One, two, one, two." The whole was a study in consummate gawkiness.
"Aren't they rich?" whispered Cecily. "Look, Jock—look at Peg's expression! Did you ever see anything funnier? Oh," she added on a little sigh, "I adore all this! It's so crazy. If I ever have a home of my own I'm going to cultivate just this sort of unconventional happy-go-lucky atmosphere."
"So'm I," said Jock without thinking. And then thought that it had been rather a senseless observation, all things considered. A home of which Yvonne was mistress would perhaps be unconventional, but it would certainly never be happy-go-lucky.
The party romped on. Peg whisked away to the kitchen and came back wheeling a tea cart laden with, as she said, "alleged rarebit." It proved edible, and everyone ate voraciously, sitting on chair arms or on pillows on the floor. Amy was replaced at the piano by Larry Vane, who struck a Paderewski pose and intolerable discords until removed by force. Cecily, finding a dilapidated ukulele, coaxed melody from it and danced alone to her own accompaniment—graceful, and beautifully un-selfconscious. Dinny Purviance, draped in a couch cover and topped by a huge parchment lamp shade, recited the classic of the Drunk and the Pig, with gestures made effective by a sandwich with a bite out of it which he flourished in his hand. Everyone became involved in a warm argument on the subject of spiritualism, which terminated, as such arguments invariably terminate, in the darkening of the room and the tipping of a table, followed immediately by fresh argument as to who tipped it: "Scott did. I felt him." . . . "Why I did not, you egg, you did it yourself!" . . .
"I hate to take you away," Jock said to Cecily at half past five, "but I've got to shove off. Ought to be at the Tavern on time if I can—this is our last night there, you know."
"I should say I do know! You've talked about nothing else for weeks!"
They made their adieux, Jock in a lazy "So long, everybody," Cecily more punctiliously and personally. They crowded about her, and she sealed twelve new friendships with a smile and a gay word or two apiece. Voices shrieking things after them followed them to the elevator, and when they were again on the street in the spangled dark the window four flights above went up again and Peg called, "Hey, Cec-i-lee! How's to have lunch with me Monday?"
In the roadster, Cecily relaxed, and the riotous vivacity that had been hers all afternoon—that was always hers—slipped suddenly away. She leaned limply in her corner of the seat.
"Tired?" queried Jock, peering sideways at her.
"Not specially."
Her face in the beam of the street lights had a queer pinched look about it. He became a little disturbed. "This is the first time I've seen you when you weren't packing the old wallop. Anything the matter, Cecily?"
"No."
The curt monosyllable disturbed him more. Good Lord, was she angry? She sounded that way—and yet what in the world
"I think you might have told me you were going to marry Yvonne, Jock," said Cecily.
"What?" he cried out.
"You heard me, didn't you?"
"I heard you, but—Cecily, you don't mean to tell me you didn't know?"
Cecily's tone neither rebuked nor deplored. It simply answered, expressionlessly. "Of course I didn't know. I didn't know until we went into that apartment and what's-her-name played the Wedding March and then said she was sorry, she'd thought it was Yvonne.
"How would I have known?" she challenged, as Jock remained speechless with surprise. "You never said a word about it, did you?"
His mind skimmed their month of association . . . and could find no actual word that he had said to her of his engagement. This was utterly inconceivable to him. Nothing, he thought, had been further from his wish than deliberately to keep Cecily in ignorance, and the discovery that he had inadvertently done so dumbfounded him. "Why," he stammered, "I—I just took it for granted you knew! I thought of course you knew, from the start! It never entered my head once that you'd need to be told—I—why, you've seen us together—you spent that one night and a couple of afternoons with Yvonne, I supposed naturally she'd tell you"
"She told me you weren't," said Cecily very distinctly.
Then Jock swerved the roadster to the right and brought it alongside the curb, and turned off the switch. He shifted in his seat so that he faced Cecily's profile, outlined against the yellow of a near shop window. Even in his abstraction, he gave a little mental salute to the cameo perfection of that profile.
"Cecily," he said, "what do you mean?"
"Exactly what I say. Yvonne told me you and she were not going to be married." The profile was lost unexpectedly, and Cecily's eyes were wide and dark on his. "I asked her," she stated. "I asked her that first morning when you brought me back to her apartment after breakfast. She came into the bedroom with me while I collected my own things to go home with, remember?—and I said, 'Are you and Jock engaged or anything?' I thought maybe you were—she's so marvelous-looking, and you seemed to know each other so well. But she just laughed, and kissed me, and said, 'No, my dear, we're just friends and business partners—and that's all we ever will be.'"
"'All we ever will be?'"
"That's what she said. She's said it since, too, several times."
"Well I'm damned!"
This remark of Jock's, delivered in a manner that testified to his absolute stupefaction, became the last made by either of them for some time. Cecily pulled her coat collar high and was hidden except for her eyes, which regarded the rear of a parked truck filled with crates. Jock sat motionless; the million mingled noises of the streets assailed his ears and aggravated him. . . . Once, in college, he had taken an examination upon which everything depended. (In those days, "everything" meant keeping on in college.) It was a mathematical examination, and the answer to one of its questions, the most important one, had eluded him. It had jumped just an infinitesimal length beyond his brain. And the feelers of his brain had reached for it—almost caught it countless times—and every time, a boy who sat in the seat behind him had coughed. Then he had had to begin all over again. . . . The street sounds now brought back the experience. They seemed to shatter his reasoning powers as that remembered cough had shattered them, so that he could not wrestle with his problem.
"Cecily," he said finally, "I give up. I just don't get it, that's all. The whole thing is a misunderstanding. I didn't mention the engagement because I simply took it for granted you knew. It's so much a part of me that I'm foolish enough to expect everyone who knows me to know it, just as they know my hair's black. As for Yvonne—well, that's what stumps me. She probably had some reason for telling you what she did—but she shouldn't have—because it isn't true. We are engaged. We have been engaged for almost a year. Why, we're going to be married within a month."
He could not even be sure that Cecily had heard him, so rigidly still she remained . . . until her voice came to him, muffled by the fur. "I hope you will be very happy, Jock," said Cecily.
With his fingers he pulled the collar down and drew her chin around so that she faced him again. "God bless your little heart! It means a lot to me to hear you say that, Cecily"
She cut him off. "Why don't we go on? It's getting late."
They went on.
"But of course," remarked Jock on the end of a long and thoughtful silence, "it doesn't make any difference"
Cecily's eyes flashed, and her reply was so quick that it had the effect of a pounce upon his sentence. "of course not!" she said. "Why should it? I—I'll be married myself before you are. I'm going to marry Bill. Right away.
"I've been meaning to tell you for days," she added.
Yvonne sat before the mirror in her dressing room. All about her were indications of a permanent leavetaking. The costumes that had hung behind a sheet in the corner were gone now, and only the sheet and a few hangers remained. Shroud and bones. . . . The dressing table was quite bare, and behind Yvonne's chair two suitcases, shut and strapped, lay waiting.
It was long after midnight. They had given their final songs, made their final bow to Terrace Tavern, and Yvonne knew that even now Jock would be fuming with impatience, wondering why she did not come. Yet she sat there, without moving. From the square of glass with the light bulbs studding its edges like tiny fires, her face stared out at her. Fixed. Tragic-eyed. Only the eyes seemed living. The rest was just a surface, whitened here, painted there, with the red-gold waves of hair to form its frame. She examined this image with a curious intensity. "Oh, my dear," she choked at last, and covered her eyes with her palms so that she might not witness her own pain . . .
For a year, she had foreseen this moment. She had known herself to be nearing it, one halt unwilling footstep every day. In endless hours of solitary argument she had sought to put herself in readiness to meet it. She had said to herself, "You can't have him. He's not for such as you. You know that. He refuses to see it, even though you've told him, but you know. Make up your mind to it. Take this little year, and thank whatever gods there be you had that much." . . . She whispered these things now, again and again, her lips stirring ever so slightly, like red petals breathed upon. But she found no solace in them.
She felt that the gods were unnecessarily brutal. Could she have made this sacrifice so that Jock would know it was a sacrifice, she might have done it valiantly, upheld by the thought that throughout his life he would look back on her with gratitude. But it could not be made in such way, lest it defeat its own end. And instead, when it was over, he would despise her with all his strong young soul . . . and never know . . .
She was shaken by a sort of spasm, that quivered the ostrich-feather trimming on her evening gown and twitched the flesh of her uncovered back and arms. Its passing left her calm. She dropped her hands. The eyes that looked out at her now were steely, inscrutable—eyes of one long schooled to derry outwardly her inward feeling. The vivid lips were steady and a shade derisive. Yvonne shrugged her shoulders. "Well,—at least I'll have done one really decent thing in my life"
A moment later Jock's querulous knock sounded, and she opened the door to him, wearing her long chinchilla wrap and the chiffon scarf with which she always protected her throat from the night air. She tried not to look at him. For the sake of composure, she knew it was better not to look at him. Yet her eyes were drawn irresistibly, and she tortured herself with his comeliness. Polished hair, brown laughing eyes, uneven mouth . . . and the splendid indolent length of frame. . . . These familiar things had never had such poignancy. She could have cried aloud, and thrown herself upon him.
She said evenly, "If you'll take this luggage"
After the cold ride in from the Tavern, Yvonne's apartment was blissfully warm. Fragrant, too, with the indescribable dim perfume of its owner, and illumined by a single lamp with a fringed shade that etched pencil lines of shadow up the walls. Yvonne allowed her wrap to slip off, and dropped on to the divan, where she sat plying a cigarette in a jade holder. Jock stood over the radiator, thawing his frost-bitten hands. "Glad you made me come up," he said. "This feels good."
"I wanted to talk to you," Yvonne told him.
Some such explanation was necessary, for usually after their evening's work he left her downstairs in the lobby and himself went immediately on home. "I want to answer that question you asked me," she supplemented.
"Well, I certainly wish you would! I've asked it twenty times tonight if I've asked it once. Why you should have lied like that to Cecily is more than I can figure out."
"It wasn't a lie," said Yvonne.
She saw him wheel like one struck from behind. She dropped her eyes, preferring not to see the set of his face. "My dear boy," she said further, lightly, ironically, "what I told Cecily was quite true. I'm not going to marry you. Not now, nor ever. You haven't enough money."
Still she did not look at him. But she knew he looked at her, and her flair for the theatrical was a help and a protection. She flicked the ashes from her cigarette, laid her head against the back of the divan, and put the holder between her lips again. The whole gesture was indolent; and her little smile gave no sign that behind it her teeth gripped vise-like on the bit of jade.
"In this newspaper job," she continued, "you'll probably begin on a salary of thirty or forty dollars a week—if you're lucky. I had an allowance of seven hundred a week when I lived with Demorest. Make your own deductions. I've made mine. I can't stand poverty, Jock Hamill. I thought I could, but I can't. I've tried it out for a year. . . . You see, you rather fascinated me. Your age fascinated me. I'm thirty-two. That surprises you, doesn't it? But it's a fact. And it pleased and flattered me that I should be able to make you—just a boy—love me. Nutriment to some women's vanity is requisite, you know. Especially at thirty-two. They'll go to any lengths to attain it. They'll even give up luxury, for a while, the way I have. But of course that can't last. The time comes when apartments on Park Avenue and motor cars and pearls look pretty good again, and collegiate devotion grows stale"
"In other words, Jock Hamill," she concluded, glancing toward him for the first time, "the game has ceased to be worth the candle."
His face lashed her, so stark-white and stricken it was. Even his lips were white.
He spoke slowly. "Then all this—has been nothing to you"
"But an interlude." Yvonne stood up, actuated by an odd notion that in repose her body could no longer bear its agony. One thought was uppermost: Jock must go, and quickly, before she faltered in this hideous rôle and lost herself . . .
"You might go now, Jock Hamill. I don't think there's anything more for either of us to say."
He did not move.
"Oh, go," she cried wildly. "Can't you understand? I don't want you"
In a stride he was standing close to her, holding her arms with fingers that bit the flesh, forcing her eyes to lift to his. "Yvonne—do you know what you're doing to me?"
"Perfectly. But you'll get over it."
His laugh was dreadful to hear. "Just like that! Throw everything in the dirt and stamp on it—tear every single goddam thing in the world to pieces in a minute—and then say, 'You'll get over it.' Ha! That's very nearly funny" His voice broke, and there was suddenly less harshness than tenderness in the clutch of his hands. He had a single instant of clear vision. "Yvonne, you don't mean these things. You can't mean them! You've just got that mad idea you used to have—that you ought not to marry me"
Yvonne pulled herself away from him and stood, cool and contemptuous, at a little distance. "'Ought not'!" she mocked. "Stupid words! I use them now and then, but never in my life have they prevented me from taking anything I really wanted." She concluded, thoughtfully, "For instance: I suppose there are people who would say that I 'ought not' to go back to Parke Demorest. Nevertheless I'm going back to him—tomorrow."
There was an age-long interval while their glances clashed, fire against frigidity. Then Jock turned . . . swooped up his coat . . . and went.
Yvonne sank to her knees and huddled there on the carpet, a little shuddering heap of silk and feathers.
For months he honestly believed that he would never be happy again.
So perverse is human nature that when something we have long possessed is taken from us, we do not try to determine whether or not, in our hearts, we still valued it. Theft is theft, even though it removes the thing with which we would have parted voluntarily in a little while. Jock regarded himself as a man who had suffered irredeemable loss; and not until much later did he come to the realization that he had ceased to require what he lost before he lost it.
In the meantime, he was very melancholy, and very sure that without Yvonne nothing under heavens could ever be the same. The first sharp throes of anguish subsided in due time, with the aid of a good deal of bad liquor. Afterward, bitterness and a sense of the futility of all dreams and all desires dwelt in him. This was his reaction. And while it ran its course he looked upon life with the eyes of a cynic, and his whole mental state was a sneer. Women? Treacherous. Love? A story-book fallacy. Ideals? As sand huts on a tidal beach, built for destruction.
But there was work. ("Thank God!" said Jock somewhat melodramatically, as young men in like plight have said since time immemorial.) Congenial work. Absorbing work. In a great dirty room full of shirt-sleeved figures, prodigious tables row on row, smooth sheets of copy paper, crumpled wads of copy paper, typewriters that chattered like a million teeth in a chill, air that was dead with smoke and must and dust and printers' ink, and alive—frantic—with breathlessness. . . . From the day of his introduction to the city room of the Log he had only to enter it to feel his spirits lighten. It was a refuge and a resort, a place where the little aches of individuals were forgotten in the mighty birth-pangs of a Thing.
They gave him, of course, only the most trifling assignments at the start. But the least of them thrilled him. He loved the voice of the city editor, rasping "Hamill"; the dash to some out-of-the-way place to get some unimportant item; the privilege of mentioning the name of the Log by way of identification. He loved to return and seat himself at one of those battered typewriters, with his shoes hooked about the legs of his chair and his body hunched over, and watch words leap out in lines from the tips of his fingers. This was fulfillment, in small degree, of his secret ambition. Writing. Putting things down on paper. Seeing them in print. . . . It meant much to be able to open an edition to a certain page, and point, and say, "That's mine," even though "that" might be nothing more vital than a string of obituary notices collected over the 'phone or a paragraph beginning, "An exhibition of useful and fancy articles made by inmates of the Hudson Home for the Blind" . . .
Unfortunately, however, work did not fill every waking hour. His evenings were miserable. He spent them at home, reading a little, brooding much, stubbornly thwarting the efforts of his friends to provide him with entertainment. "For gosh sakes, Jock, anybody'd think you were in mourning!" Peg wailed, after her tenth invitation to Washington Square had been turned down. To which Jock replied—though not aloud—"I am."
As a matter of fact his avoidance of companionship was less in mourning than in self-defense. He feared that people might try to talk to him about Yvonne, and as yet he winced whenever that spot was touched by any finger—whether curiously prodding or gently compassionate made no difference. In this respect his mother was a source of satisfaction, for she had the great good sense to behave as though nothing whatever had happened. He appreciated this the more because he suspected she was glad of his catastrophe, and because he thought, since he had given her but the barest outline of it, she must be burning with unasked questions. He could not guess that Mrs. Hamill felt no need of questions; that her understanding was far deeper than his own, and her new thought of Yvonne a mixture of gratitude, admiration, and something akin to love. "Some day," she told Saunders Lincoln, "—not for a long, long time, of course, but some day, I'm going to let Jock know what a beautiful thing it was that that girl did." He saw Peg only four or five times in as many months, and Cecily he did not see at all. Through Peg and Johnny, who had evidently adopted her as one of their intimates, he kept track of her goings and comings. She was at Palm Beach with her parents. No, she wasn't married yet, but Bill Burnholme had followed her down there. . . . She was back from Palm Beach and would sail for Europe in two weeks. (During those two weeks he telephoned twice "just to say hello," but did not find her in.) . . . She was in Europe. She was having a wonderful time. Her letters, Peg said, spoke enthusiastically of some young French count she had met at Deauville. She expected to return to the States the last of May. . . . She had returned, and was visiting friends in Cleveland. No, she wasn't married yet. No, nobody knew when she intended to be married. Yes, Bill Burnholme was still reported to be slavishly attentive. One never knew, of course . . .
In June Johnny began to talk vacation plans to Jock.
They were lunching one day, as they often did, at a little café across the alley from the Log office where the sandwiches were ready to serve and the beer as "near" as could be expected. And Johnny said thickly, through a mouthful, "When you gonna take your vacation?"
"I don't rate one. I've only worked four months and a half."
"Sure you rate one! May, be only four months and a half, but you've worked harder than any other six men do in a year! Don't think the old man doesn't know it, either. He'll see that you get a week off at least, any time you want it."
"I'm in no hurry," said Jock.
Johnny regarded him solemnly over the rim of his mug (supplied by the management to heighten the illusion). "Listen to me, boy," he ordered, setting the mug down with a thump. "My well-earned rest starts a week from Saturday. Peg and I are going to spend it down near New London, where dad has a summer place which he's agreed to turn over to us, and we're going to take a bunch along for a houseparty. And you're coming too, d'you hear?"
"I hear," Jock smiled.
"Meaning, 'but won't obey', huh? Listen, Jock"
"I know what you're going to say. It'll be a peach of a go, of course, but—thanks just the same. Ask me again sometime, Johnny. Sometime when I'm—more in the mood."
"If ever!" Johnny said despairingly. "Look here, Jock, there's no damn sense in your acting like this. It's all nonsense. Nearly five months since the thing happened—isn't it about time you staged a return to normalcy?"
There was no answer, and for some moments the pair munched and gulped in silence. Then Johnny said, "Well, if you change your mind, the latch-string's out, remember."
"Thanks. But not this time, I guess."
"Cecily's going to be there"
"Is she?" Jock queried politely.
. . . As Johnny remarked later to Peg, "What can you do with a guy like that?" . . . The return to normalcy took place suddenly and painlessly.
Madelaine Hamill, opening the door to her son at five o'clock of a blistering afternoon in early July, saw instantly that it had. A dozen little things told her. The look of his eyes. The ring of his voice. The what-care-I tilt of his hat. The long skinny paper-wrapped package under his arm, which could be nothing whatever except a new golf club. . . . When he kissed her his lips made a smack! sound on her cheek, indicative of enthusiasm.
But because she was a very wise woman, who understood Jock very well, she did not say, "Tell me about it!" Nor did she dance a jig, nor sing halleluiahs, nor give way to any of the impulses that surged in her maternal breast. Instead she went back to the chair in which she had been sitting and flopped down with a tiny moan.
"Isn't it hot!"
"Hell was never hotter," Jock agreed cheerfully.
He removed his hat and let it sail in a neat are to the divan across the room. He peeled off his coat. He planted his feet astraddle, and with the new golf club, wrapping and all, took several terrific practice swings in air, barely missing the chandelier.
Mrs. Hamill waited.
Jock leaned the brassie tenderly in a corner and approached the victrola. He selected a record with maddening deliberation. While it tinkled a glad tune he stood over it, and twice he moved the needle back to repeat a few bars which he seemed to find particularly pleasing.
Mrs. Hamill waited, and wished she could spank him.
Finally he stretched himself in a chair near hers, poked his thumbs in the pockets of his vest, dropped his head back, and said, "I saw Yvonne today."
"Yes?"
"Yes. And it didn't mean anything!" With his elbows he impelled his body forward and looked straight at his mother, and there was a sort of wonder in his eyes. "Can you beat that? After all these months of—of moping around like I have, it simply didn't—mean—anything! I didn't feel anything."
"Did you—talk to her?"
Jock shook his head. "She didn't see me. She was in a machine" . . .
Mrs. Hamill, from the sentences that followed, got this picture:
Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street at high noon. A procession of motor-cars, and, on the corner, a damp impatient host of people, waiting for them to slide by.
". . . And a fellow standing next to me said to his girl, 'There's the new Demorest Straight Eight.' Demorest is the one, you know. I looked" . . .
A magnificent two-passenger racing car, low slung, painted gray, without a top. In the deep well of it, lounging recumbent behind the massive steering wheel—Yvonne. Yvonne in a gray gown and a tight gray turban with long uncurled feathers that sprayed down on one shoulder. Yvonne, with hair that was a loop of flame on her cheek, with diamonds that glittered in the sunlight on her hands, with a Russian wolfhound in a jeweled collar sitting stiffly on his haunches beside her.
A picture almost indelicately sensational. Beauty on parade, demanding every eye.
". . . And I kept thinking. 'This ought to hurt like hell. This ought to just about kill me.' But it didn't. It just left me absolutely—at peace. Glad for her, because she's got everything money buys to make her happy. And glad for myself."
The room was quite quiet for several minutes. Then Jock lounged to his feet and stood smiling down upon his mother. "And it woke me up," he said, "to a lot of things."
Mrs. Hamill smiled back, but did not speak.
He left her, and she heard him whistling down the hall—heard his voice and Bennett's, remotely, from the kitchen. When he reappeared he bore two long glasses. "Here," he said, giving her one. "Inhale that while I tell you more tidings. Maybe this isn't a red-letter day!" He assumed an oratorical stance and with his left hand beat upon his breast so violently that the ice in the glass he held in his right clicked and jumped. "I've been promoted!
"Oh, not far, not far," he hastened to add, laughing at his mother's face. "Don't get all stewed up. I'm not managing editor yet, or anything. But—well, let me begin over."
He perched on the arm of her chair. "When I got back to the office this p. m. I began thinking the situation over, and that bid of Johnny's to the houseparty he and Peg are throwing right now down near New London began to sound very cagey. Everybody's down there, you know. Johnny and Peg, of course, and Larry, and Joe and his wife, and Dinny Purviance—" He fairly rushed over the next words "—'n'Cec'ly and the whole crowd. I sort of thought I'd like to go after all, now that things are as they are. So I braved Mr. Havens in his den, and he not only gave me a week off, starting tomorrow, but he told me that as soon as I get back they're going to let me take a shot at feature stories! Said he'd been watching me personally and thought I had the stuff. Said—get this, mother!—that Mose Blake, he's the city editor, told him I was a writer, not a reporter, and that for the sake of brevity he was having to cut out of my copy, every day, stuff that was 'so well written it's a crime to throw it away,' and that I ought to be given a chance to spread a bit.
"Of course," he added, Jock-like, "that's probably mostly applesauce. But anyway, I'm going to get the chance—and more salary."
Then he was hugged and exclaimed over and beamed upon. And the two long glasses were touched together and drained. . . .
"Fill them again," said Madelaine Hamill. "I want to drink to the houseparty, and—" she smiled impishly "—as my ingenuous offspring puts it—'n'Cec'ly'"
Peg and Johnny met him at the station the next morning, and fell upon him with cries. "Look me in the eye!" said Peg immediately. "Are you cured? You must be, or you wouldn't have come. Praise the Lord, Amen. Now we'll have a real houseparty!"
They hustled him along the platform, jabbering as they went, and interrupting one another.
"When we got your wire"
"We didn't tell a soul you were coming"
"Wanted to surprise 'em"
"And believe me they'll be surprised! Like having a visitor from the Styx, or something!"
He was ushered to an automobile of incredible antiquity. "This is Lulu," said Peg. "We think she'll take us back to the beach, but we wouldn't want to put it in writing."
"How far is the beach?"
"'Bout five miles."
Throughout the ride, Peg and Johnny reasoned gravely and often with the car, as with a refractory child. "Come on, now, Lulu. You can make this all right. Let's see you go up sailing." . . . And then, disappointedly, "Aw, Lu! Have a heart!" . . .
They sat three in the front seat, and in the intervals of Lulu's chastisement yelled conversation above the ructions of her mechanism.
"Everybody's in swimming," Peg announced. "Or at least, they were when we left, and I imagine they still will be. That's all we do. Swim, and dance, and swim, and eat, and swim. We practically live in our bathing suits."
"Who's on the party?" Jock wanted to know. "How many? Just the regular bunch?"
"Ten," said Peg, and listed them.
"Bill Burnholme not among those present?"
Peg looked blank. "Of course not. Why should he be? I've never even met the man—though of course I know all about him."
At this point Johnny shouted to Jock across Peg's lap, "Talk to Dad?"
"Yup!"
"Suppose he told you about your new job?"
"You bet he did! I don't feel very swell about it! Guess I've got you to thank for that, Johnny."
"Like crazy you have! You've got nobody to thank but yourself"
Peg planted a firm palm on her husband's chest and pushed him back into place. "Subside," she commanded sweetly. 'Devote yourself to Lulu. I have certain somethings to whisper in this gent's ear before we get home." She turned to Jock. "What made you think Bill Burnholme would be here? Of course I know. You thought, being Cecily's fiancé, we'd naturally ask him."
"That's about it."
"Listen," said Peg, and prodded his ribs with her elbow to be sure that she had his attention. "I'm going to tell you something which I haven't any business telling you and which I wouldn't tell you if I didn't feel sure you'd be—well, call it interested. I know all about Cecily's affairs. I know how she met you, and what happened, and everything about it. And listen: as long as you are alive, and single, she'll never marry Bill Burnholme or anybody else. There! Bite down hard on that one!"
"Did she say that?"
"Words to that effect. And if putting you wise was a burn hunch I hope somebody shoots me!"
Jock, his face radiant and his heart doing strange alarming things within him, wrung her hand wordlessly, in token that it was not.
"Axiom One for Young Men," chanted Peg, "established by Jock Hamill of New York City, after intensive personal research work: 'The way to find your ideal girl is, bring her up yourself!'"
They came upon their destination unexpectedly, over the crest of a little hill. Below them lay a green incline bisected by the road; at the foot of the incline a great house of white clapboard, with spacious porches at its sides and front and green-and-white awnings astir at its windows; and, on beyond the house, the stretching blue of water into sky. . . .
"Whew!" sighed Jock ecstatically.
"See that float anchored out a way?" Peg said. "Those little insects crawling around on it are the houseparty. Part of it, anyway. The rest are probably on the dock—you can't see that from here, it's under the bluff.
"Jump into your suit quick, Jock," she concluded, as the car executed a sniveling stop beside the house, "and we'll get right down there."
Johnny conducted him upstairs into a huge bedroom boasting several cot beds and a tremendous litter of masculine effects. "This," explained Johnny, "is the bachelors' boudoir. All in here together, have more fun that way. Make it snappy now, will you, Jock? We'll be ready in five minutes. Meet you downstairs."
Jock needed no exhortations to hurry. In several seconds less than five minutes he descended to the first floor again, and waited, full of a sense of expectancy so exquisite that it was scarcely to be endured. Johnny and Peg, descending a little after him, found him standing on the porch with his eyes toward the water, looking, as Peg whispered, "Like a statue of Adonis in tights."
She approached him and stood on tiptoe to lay a solicitous hand on his forehead. "Poor boy, how're you bearing up?" she begged. "Why, he's feverish! He ought to be put to bed!"
But Jock was past the point where he could jest. "Come on," he said. "Let's move." And then, as Peg and Johnny laughed at him, "That ole sea's going to feel good!"
"Dissembling to the last," Peg murmured.
When they reached the dock, however, he dissembled no longer. He surveyed the wet welcoming faces that surrounded him, listened to the cacophony of delighted voices for an instant, and then said quite simply, "Where's my girl?"
Of course they twitted him a little, being modern young people; but they answered. And in obedience to their answers he directed his glance toward the float that was anchored offshore. There were two figures on it, one large and mannish ("That's Larry Vane," somebody volunteered) the other little and slender and somehow breath-taking. Cecily. With a scarlet suit. . . . As he looked she flung up an arm in recognition and greeting.
"See you later," said Jock, and dived, and swam, using a swift crawl stroke and making a great churn of foam.
Half way to the float he lifted his head and saw Larry Vane almost beside him, going the other way. Larry grinned at him, and panted, "I abdicate—by request—you lucky stiff!"
Cecily was alone on the float. He could see her sitting there, at the edge, hugging her bare white knees in the curve of her arms, resting her chin upon them, smiling at him . . . just ahead of him. . . .
All the things in the world that he wanted were just ahead of him. . . .
He buried his face in the cool green, and swam faster.