Who Cares? Part 10

The girl threw open her door and turned up the light. "England, Home and Beauty," she said. "Excuse me while I dress the s.h.i.+p."

Seizing a pair of corsets that sprawled loosely on the center table, she rammed them under a not very pristine cus.h.i.+on on the sofa.

Martin burst out laughing. The Crystal Room wine was still in his head.

"Very nippy!" he said.

"Have to be nippy in this life, believe me. Give me a minute to powder my nose and murmur a prayer of thanksgivin', and then I'll set the festive board and show you how we used to scramble eggs in Shaftesbury Avenue."

"Right," said Martin, getting out of his overcoat. How about it? Was this one way of making the little old earth spin?

Susie Capper went into a bedroom even smaller than the sitting room, turned up the light over her dressing table and took off her little white hat. From where Martin stood, he could see in the looking-gla.s.s the girl's golden bobbed hair, pretty oval face with too red lips and round white neck. There, it was obvious, stood a little person feminine from the curls around her ears to the hole in one of her stockings, and as highly and gladly s.e.xed as a purring cat.

"Buck up, Tootles," cried Martin. "Where do you keep the frying pan?"

She turned and gave him another searching look, this time of marked approval. "My word, what a kid you look in the light!" she said. "No one would take you for a blooming road-hog. Well, who knows? You and I may have been brought together like this to work out one of Fate's little games. This may be the beginning of a side-street romance, eh?"

And she chuckled at the word and turned her nose into a small snow-capped hill.

IV

Pagliacci was to be followed as usual by "Cavalleria." It was the swan song of the opera season.

In a part that he acted as well as he sang, Caruso had been permitted finally to retire, wringing wet, to his dressing room. With all the dignity of a man of genuine feeling and sensitiveness he had taken call after call on the fall of the curtain and stood bent almost double before the increasing breakers of applause. Once more he had done his best in a role which demanded everything that he had of voice and pa.s.sion, comedy and tragedy. Once more, although his soul was with his comrades in battle, he had played the fool and broken his heart for the benefit of his good friends in front.

In her box on the first tier Mrs. Cooper Jekyll, in a dress imaginatively designed to display a considerable quant.i.ty of her figure, was surrounded by a party which attracted many gla.s.ses. Alice Palgrave was there, pretty and scrupulously neat, even perhaps a little prim, her pearls as big as marbles. Mrs. Alan Hosack made a most effective picture with her black hair and white skin in a geranium-colored frock--a Van Beers study to the life. Mrs. Noel d'Oyly lent an air of opulence to the box, being one of those lovely but all too ample women who, while compelling admiration, dispel intimacy.

Joan, a young daffodil, sat bolt upright among them, with diamonds glistening in her hair like dew. Of the four men, Gilbert Palgrave, standing where he could be seen, might have been an ill.u.s.tration by Du Maurier of one of Ouida's impossible guardsmen. He made the other three, all of the extraordinary ordinary type, appear fifty per cent, more manly than they really were--the young old Hosack with his groomlike face and immaculate clothes, the burly Howard Cannon, who retained a walrus mustache in the face of persistent chaff, and Noel d'Oyly, who when seen with his Junoesque wife made the gravest naturalists laugh at the thought of the love manners of the male and female spider.

Turning her chair round, Alice touched Joan's arm. "Will you do something for me?" she asked.

Joan looked at her with a smile of disturbing frankness. "It all depends whether it will upset any of my plans," she said.

"I wouldn't have asked you if I had thought that."

Joan laughed. "You've been studying my character, Alice."

"I did that at school, my dear." Mrs. Palgrave spoke lightly, but it was plain to see that there was something on her mind. "Don't go out to supper with Howard Cannon. Come back with me. I want to talk to you.

Will you?"

Joan had recently danced in Cannon's huge studio-apartment and been oppressed by its Gulliveresque atmosphere, and she had just come from the Fifth Avenue house of the Hosack family, where a characteristically dignified dinner had got on her nerves. Gilbert, she knew, was engaged to play roulette at the club, and none of her other new men friends was available for dancing. She hadn't seen anything of Martin for several days. She could easily oblige Alice under the circ.u.mstances.

So she said: "Yes, of course I will--just to prove how very little you really know about me."

"Thank you," said Alice. "I'll say that I have a headache and that you're coming home with me. Don't be talked out of it."

A puzzled expression came into Joan's eyes, and she turned her shoulder to Palgrave, who was giving her his most amorous glances. "It doesn't matter," she said, "but I notice that you are all beginning to treat me like a sort of moral weatherc.o.c.k. I wonder why?" She gave no more thought to the matter which just for the most fleeting moment had rather piqued her, but sat drinking in the music of Mascagni's immortal opera entirely ignoring the fact that Palgrave's face was within an inch of her shoulder and that Alan Hosack, on her other side, was whispering heavy compliments.

Alice sat back and looked anxiously from the face of the girl who had been her closest friend at school to that of the man to whom she had given all her heart. In spite of the fact that she had been married a year and had taken her place in the comparatively small set which made up New York society, Mrs. Palgrave was an optimist. As a fiction-fed girl she had expected, with a thrill of excitement, that after marriage she would find herself in a whirlpool of careless and extravagant people who made their own elastic code of morals and played ducks and drakes with the Commandments. She had accepted as a fact the novelist-playwright contention that society was synonymous with flippancy, selfishness and unchast.i.ty, and that the possession of money and leisure necessarily undermined all that was excellent in human nature. Perhaps a little to her disappointment, she had soon discovered how grotesque and ignorant this play-and-book idea was. She had returned from her honeymoon in November of the first year of the war and had been astonished to find that nearly all the well-known women whose names, in the public imagination, were a.s.sociated with decadence and irresponsibility, were as a matter of fact devoted to Red Cross work and allied war charities; that the majority of the men who were popularly supposed to be killing time with ingenious wickedness worked as hard as the average downtown merchant, and that even the debutantes newly burst upon the world had, for the most part, banded themselves together as a junior war-relief society and were turning out weekly an immense number of bandages for the wounded soldiers of France and England. Young men of high and gallant spirit, who bore the old names of New York, had disappeared without a line of publicity--to be heard of later as members of the already famous Escadrille or as ambulance workers on the Western front. Beautiful girls had slipped quietly away from their usual haunts, touched by a deep and rare emotion, to work in Allied hospitals three thousand miles and more away--if not as full-blown nurses, then as scullery maids or motor drivers.

There were, of course, the Oldershaws and the Marie Littlejohns and the Christine Hurleys and the rest. Alice had met and watched them throwing themselves against any bright light like all silly moths. And there were the girls like Joan, newly released from the exotic atmosphere of those fas.h.i.+onable finis.h.i.+ng schools which no sane country should permit. But even these wild and unbroken colts and fillies, she believed, had excuses. They were the natural results of a complete lack of parental discipline and school training. They ran amuck, advertised by the press and applauded by the hawks who pounced upon their wallets.

They were more to be pitied than condemned, far more foolish and ridiculous than decadent. They were not unique, either, or peculiar to their own country. Every nation possessed its "smart set," its little group of men and women who were ripe for the lunatic asylum, and even the war and its iron tonic had failed to shock them into sanity. In her particularly sane way of looking at things, Alice saw all this, was proud to know that the majority of the people who formed American society were fine and sound and generous, and kept as much as possible out of the way of those others whose one object in life was to outrage the conventions. It was only when people began to tell her of seeing her husband and her friend about together night after night that she found herself wondering, with jealousy in her heart, how long her optimism would endure, because Gilbert had already shown her a foot of clay, and Joan was deliberately flying wild.

It was, at any rate, all to the good that Joan kept her promise and utterly refused to be turned by the pleadings and blandishments of Cannon and Hosack. They drove together to Palgrave's elaborate house, a faithful replica of one of the famous Paris mansions in the Avenue Wagram and sat down to a little supper in Alice's boudoir.

They made a curious picture, these two children, one just over twenty, the other under nineteen; and as they sat in that lofty room hung with French tapestries and furnished with the spindle-legged gilt chairs and tables of Louis XIV, they might have been playing, with all the gravity and imitative genius of little girls in a nursery, at being grown up.

While the servants moved discreetly about, Joan kept up a rattle of impersonalities, laughing at Cannon's amazing mustache and Gargantuan furniture, enthusing wildly over Caruso's once-in-a-century voice, throwing satire at Mrs. Cooper Jekyll's confirmed belief in her divine right to queen it, and saying things that made Alice chuckle about the d'Oylys--that apparently ill-matched pair. She drank a gla.s.s of champagne with the air of a connoisseur and finally, having displayed an excellent appet.i.te, mounted a cigarette into a long thin mother-of-pearl holder, lighted it and sank with a sigh into the room's one comfortable chair.

"Gilbert gave me a cigarette holder like that," said Alice.

"Yes? I think this comes from him," said Joan. "A thoughtful person!"

That Joan was not quite sure from whom she received it annoyed Alice far more than if she had boasted of it as one of Gilbert's numerous gifts. She needed no s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up now to say what she had rather timidly brought this cool young slip of a thing there to discuss.

"Will you tell me about yourself and Gilbert?" she asked quietly. There was no need for Joan to act complete composure. She felt it. "What is there to tell, my dear?"

"I hope there isn't anything--I mean anything that matters. But perhaps you don't know that people have begun to talk about you, and I think you owe it to me to be perfectly frank."

Even then it didn't occur to Joan that there was anything serious in the business. "I'll be as frank as the front page of The Times--'All the news that's fit to print,'" she said. "What do you want to know?"

Alice proved her courage. She drew up a chair, bent forward and came straight to the point. "Be honest with me, Joan, even if you have to hurt me. Gilbert is very handsome, and women throw themselves at him. I did, I suppose; but having won him and being still in my first year of marriage, I'm naturally jealous when he lets himself be drawn off by them. The women who have tried to take Gilbert away from me I didn't know, and they owed me no friends.h.i.+p. But you're different, and I can't believe that you--"

Joan broke in with a peal of laughter. "Can't you? Why not? I haven't got wings on my shoulders. Isn't everything fair in love and war?"

Alice drew back. She had many times been called prim and old-fas.h.i.+oned, especially at school, by Joan and others when men were talked about, and the glittering life that lay beyond the walls. Sophistication, to put it mildly, had been the order of the day in that temporary home of the young idea. But this calm declaration of disloyalty took her color away, and her breath. Here was honesty with a vengeance!

"Joan!" she cried. "Joan!" And she put up her hand as though to ward off an unbelievable thought.

In an instant Joan was on her feet with her arms around the shoulders of the best friend she had, whose face had gone as white as stone. "Oh, my dear," she said, "I'm sorry. Forgive me. I didn't mean that in the least, not in the very least. It was only one of my cheap flippancies, said just to amuse myself and shock you. Don't you believe me?"

Tears came to Alice. She had had at least one utterly sleepless night and several days of mental anguish. She was one of the women who love too well. She confessed to these things, brokenly, and it came as a kind of shock to Joan to find some one taking things seriously and allowing herself to suffer.

"Why, Alice," she said, "Gilbert means nothing to me. He's a dear old thing; he's awfully nice to look at; he sums things up in a way that makes me laugh; and he dances like a streak. But as to flirting with him or anything of that sort--why, my dear, he looks on me as a little b.o.o.b from the country, and in my eyes he's simply a man who carries a latchkey to amus.e.m.e.nt and can give me a good time. That's true. I swear it."

It was true, and Alice realized it, with immense relief. She dried her eyes and held Joan away from her at arm's length and looked at her young, frank, intrepid face with puzzled admiration. It didn't go with her determined trifling. "I shall always believe what you tell me, Joan," she said. "You've taken a bigger load than you imagine off my heart--which is Gilbert's. And now sit down again and be comfortable and let's do what we used to do at school at night and talk about ourselves. We've both changed since those days, haven't we?"

"Have we? I don't think I have." Joan took another cigarette and went back to her chair. Her small round shoulders looked very white against the black of a velvet cus.h.i.+on. If there was nothing boyish or unfeminine about her, there was certainly an indefinable appearance of being untouched, unawakened. She was the same girl who had been found by Martin that afternoon clean-cut against the sky--the determined individualist.

Alice sat in front of her on a low stool with her hands clasped round a knee. "What a queer mixture you are of--of town and country, Joany.

You're like a piece of honeysuckle playing at being an orchid."

"That's because I'm a kid," said Joan. "The horrible hour will come when I shall be an orchid and try and palm myself off as honeysuckle, never fear."

"Don't you think marriage has changed you a little?" asked Alice. "It usually does. It changed me from an empty-headed little fool to a woman with oh, such a tremendous desire to be worthy of it."