FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
BY
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
AUTHOR OF " THIS SIDE OF PARADISE "
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1921
HEPLACING
COPYRIGHT, 1020, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published September, 1920
Reprinted September, October, December, 1920; De cember, 1921.
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING co. COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY THE SMART SET PUBLISHING CO.
PRINTED AT
THE SCRIBNER PRESS
NEW YORK, U. S. A.
TO ZELDA
M9Q2260
CONTENTS
f /
HTHE OFFSHORE PIRATE . 3
THE ICE PALACE 49
HEAD AND SHOULDERS 87 •"
-THE CUT-GLASS BOWL 124
BERNICE BOBS HER HAIR 155
BENEDICTION . 194
DALYRIMPLE GOES WRONG 219
THE FOUR FISTS 245
FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE
THIS unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and be neath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shy ing little golden disks at the sea — if you gazed in tently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset. About half-way between the Florida shore and the golden collar a white steam-yacht, very young and grace ful, was riding at anchor and under a blue-and- white awning aft a yellow-haired girl reclined in a wicker settee reading The Revolt of the Angels, by Anatole France.
She was about nineteen, slender and supple, with a spoiled alluring mouth and quick gray eyes full of a radiant curiosity. Her feet, stockingless, and adorned rather than clad in blue-satin slippers which swung nonchalantly from her toes, were perched on the arm of a settee adjoining the one she occupied. And as she read she intermittently regaled herself by a faint application to her tongue of a half-lemon that she held in her hand. The other half, sucked dry, lay on the deck at her feet
4 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
and rocked very gently to and fro at the almost im perceptible motion of the tide.
The second half -lemon was well-nigh pulpless and the golden collar had grown astonishing in width, when suddenly the drowsy silence which enveloped the yacht was broken by the sound of heavy foot steps and an elderly man topped with orderly gray hair and clad in a white-flannel suit appeared at the head of the companionway. There he paused for a moment until his eyes became accustomed to the sun, and then seeing the girl under the awning he uttered a long even grunt of disapproval.
If he had intended thereby to obtain a rise of any sort he was doomed to disappointment. The girl calmly turned over two pages, turned back one, raised the lemon mechanically to tasting distance, and then very faintly but quite unmistakably yawned.
"Ardita!" said the gray-haired man sternly.
Ardita uttered a small sound indicating nothing.
" Ardita ! " he repeated. " Ardita ! "
Ardita raised the lemon languidly, allowing three words to slip out before it reached her tongue.
"Oh, shut up. "
"Ardita!"
"What?"
"Will you listen to me — or will I have to get a servant to hold you while I talk to you?"
The lemon descended slowly and scornfully.
"Put it in writing."
"Will you have the decency to close that abomina-
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE 5
ble book and discard that damn lemon for two minutes?"
"Oh, can't you lemme alone for a second?"
"Ardita, I have just received a telephone message from the shore '
"Telephone?" She showed for the first time a faint interest.
"Yes, it was "
"Do you mean to say," she interrupted wonder- ingly, " 'at they let you run a wire out here?"
"Yes, and just now—
"Won't other boats bump into it?"
" No. It's run along the bottom. Five min "
" Well, I'll be darned ! Gosh ! Science is golden or something — isn't it?"
"Will you let me say what I started to?"
"Shoot!"
"Well, it seems— well, I am up here—" He paused and swallowed several times distractedly. "Oh, yes. Young woman, Colonel Moreland has called up again to ask me to be sure to bring you in to dinner. His son Toby has come all the way from New York to meet you and he's invited sev eral other young people. For the last time, will you "
"No," said Ardita shortly, "I won't. I came along on this darn cruise with the one idea of going to Palm Beach, and you knew it, and I absolutely refuse to meet any darn old colonel or any darn young Toby or any darn old young people or to set foot in any other darn old town in this crazy
6 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
state. So you either take me to Palm Beach or else shut up and go away."
"Very well. This is the last straw. In your in fatuation for this man — a man who is notorious for his excesses, a man your father would not have al lowed to so much as mention your name — you have reflected the demi-monde rather than the circles in which you have presumably grown up. From now on "
"I know," interrupted Ardita ironically, "from now on you go your way and I go mine. I've heard that story before. You know I'd like nothing bet ter."
"From now on," he announced grandiloquently, "you are no niece of mine. I "
"O-o-o-oh!" The cry was wrung from Ardita with the agony of a lost soul. "Will you stop boring me ! Will you go 'way ! Will you jump overboard and drown ! Do you want me to throw this book at you!"
"If you dare do any "
Smack ! The Revolt of the Angels sailed through the air, missed its target by the length of a short nose, and bumped cheerfully down the companionway.
The gray-haired man made an instinctive step backward and then two cautious steps forward. Ardita jumped to her five feet four and stared at him defiantly, her gray eyes blazing.
"Keep off!"
"How dare you !" he cried.
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE 7
"Because I darn please !"
"You've grown unbearable! Your disposi- tion-
" YouVe made me that way ! No child ever has a bad disposition unless it's her family's fault ! Whatever I am, you did it."
Muttering something under his breath her uncle turned and, walking forward, called in a loud voice for the launch. Then he returned to the awning, where Ardita had again seated herself and resumed her attention to the lemon.
"I am going ashore," he said slowly. "I will be out again at nine o'clock to-night. When I return we will start back to New York, where I shall turn you over to your aunt for the rest of your natural, or rather unnatural, life."
He paused and looked at her, and then all at once something hi the utter childishness of her beauty seemed to puncture his anger like an inflated tire, and render him helpless, uncertain, utterly fatuous.
"Ardita," he said not unkindly, "I'm no fool. I've been round. I know men. And, child, con firmed libertines don't reform until they're tired — and then they're not themselves — they're husks of themselves. ' ' He looked at her as if expecting agree ment, but receiving no sight or sound of it he con tinued. "Perhaps the man loves you — that's pos sible. He's loved many women and he'll love many more. Less than a month ago, one month, Ardita, he was involved in a notorious affair with that red-
8 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
haired woman, Mimi Merril; promised to give her the diamond bracelet that the Czar of Russia gave his mother. You know — you read the papers."
"Thrilling scandals by an anxious uncle," yawned Ardita. "Have it filmed. Wicked clubman mak ing eyes at virtuous flapper. Virtuous flapper con clusively vamped by his lurid past. Plans to meet him at Palm Beach. Foiled by anxious uncle."
"Will you tell me why the devil you want to marry him?"
"I'm sure I couldn't say," said Ardita shortly. "Maybe because he's the only man I know, good or bad, who has an imagination and the courage of his convictions. Maybe it's to get away from the young fools that spend their vacuous hours pursu ing me around the country. But as for the famous Russian bracelet, you can set your mind at rest on that score. He's going to give it to me at Palm Beach — if you'll show a little intelligence."
"How about the — red-haired woman?"
"He hasn't seen her for six months," she said angrily. "Don't you suppose I have enough pride to see to that? Don't you know by this time that I can do any darn thing with any darn man I want to?"
She put her chin in the air like the statue of France Aroused, and then spoiled the pose somewhat by raising the lemon for action.
"Is it the Russian bracelet that fascinates you?"
"No, I'm merely trying to give you the sort of argument that would appeal to your intelligence. And I wish you'd go 'way," she said, her temper
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE 9
rising again. "You know I never change my mind. You've been boring me for three days until I'm about to go crazy. I won't go ashore ! Won't ! Do you hear ? Won't ! "
"Very well," he said, "and you won't go to Palm Beach either. Of all the selfish, spoiled, uncon trolled, disagreeable, impossible girls I have "
Splush ! The half-lemon caught him in the neck. Simultaneously came a hail from over the side.
"The launch is ready, Mr. Farnam."
Too full of words and rage to speak, Mr. Farnam cast one utterly condemning glance at his niece and, turning, ran swiftly down the ladder.
II
Five o'clock rolled down from the sun ahd plumped soundlessly into the sea. The golden collar widened into a glittering island; and a faint breeze that had been playing with the edges of the awning and swaying one of the dangling blue slippers became suddenly freighted with song. It was a chorus of men in close harmony and in per fect rhythm to an accompanying sound of oars cleaving the blue waters. Ardita lifted her head and listened.
"Carrots and peas, Beans on their knees, Pigs in the seas,
Lucky fellows ! Blow us a breeze, Blow us a breeze, Blow us a breeze,
With your bellows."
io FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
Ardita's brow wrinkled in astonishment. Sitting very still she listened eagerly as the chorus took up a second verse.
"Onions and beans, Marshalls and Deans, Goldbergs and Greens
And Costellos. Blow us a breeze, Blow us a breeze, Blow us a breeze,
With your bellows. "
With an exclamation she tossed her book to the desk, where it sprawled at a straddle, and hurried to the rail. Fifty feet away a large rowboat was approaching containing seven men, six of them row ing and one standing up hi the stern keeping time to their song with an orchestra leader's baton.
"Oysters and rocks, Sawdust and socks, Who could make clocks Out of cellos?—"
The leader's eyes suddenly rested on Ardita, who was leaning over the rail spellbound with curiosity. He made a quick movement with his baton and the singing instantly ceased. She saw that he was the only white man hi the boat — the six rowers were negroes.
"Narcissus ahoy !" he called politely.
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE II
"What's the idea of all the discord?" demanded Ardita cheerfully. "Is this the varsity crew from the county nut farm ? "
By this time the boat was scraping the side of the yacht and a great hulking negro in the bow turned round and grasped the ladder. Thereupon the leader left his position in the stern and before Ardita had realized his intention he ran up the lad der and stood breathless before her on the deck.
"The women and children will be spared!" he said briskly. "All crying babies will be immedi ately drowned and all males put in double irons !"
Digging her hands excitedly down into the pockets of her dress Ardita stared at him, speechless with astonishment.
He was a young man with a scornful mouth and the bright blue eyes of a healthy baby set in a dark sensitive face. His hair was pitch black, damp and curly — the hair of a Grecian statue gone bru nette. He was trimly built, trimly dressed, and graceful as an agile quarter-back.
"Well, I'll be a son of a gun !" she said dazedly.
They eyed each other coolly.
"Do you surrender the ship?"
"Is this an outburst of wit?" demanded Ardita. "Are you an idiot — or just being initiated to some fraternity?"
"I asked you if you surrendered the ship."
"I thought the country was dry," said Ardita disdainfully. "Have you been drinking finger-nail enamel ? You better get off this yacht ! "
12 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
"What?" The young man's voice expressed in credulity.
" Get off the yacht ! You heard me ! "
He looked at her for a moment as if considering what she had said.
"No," said his scornful mouth slowly; "no, I won't get off the yacht. You can get off if you wish."
Going to the rail he gave a curt command and im mediately the crew of the rowboat scrambled up the ladder and ranged themselves in line before him, a coal-black and burly darky at one end and a minia ture mulatto of four feet nine at the other. They seemed to be uniformly dressed in some sort of blue costume ornamented with dust, mud, and tatters; over the shoulder of each was slung a small, heavy- looking white sack, and under their arms they car ried large black cases apparently containing musical instruments.
"'Ten-shun!" commanded the young man, snap ping his own heels together crisply. "Right driss ! Front ! Step out here, Babe ! "
The smallest negro took a quick step forward and saluted.
"Yas-suh!"
"Take command, go down below, catch the crew and tie 'em up — all except the engineer. Bring him up to me. Oh, and pile those bags by the rail there."
"Yas-suh!"
Babe saluted again and wheeling about motioned for tfcc five others to gather about him. Then after
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE 13
a short whispered consultation they all filed noise lessly down the companionway.
"Now," said the young man cheerfully to Ar- dita, who had witnessed this last scene in wither ing silence, "if you will swear on your honor as a flapper — which probably isn't worth much — that you'll keep that spoiled little mouth of yours tight shut for forty-eight hours, you can row yourself ashore in our rowboat."
"Otherwise what?"
"Otherwise you're going to sea in a ship."
With a little sigh as for a crisis well passed, the young man sank into the settee Ardita had lately vacated and stretched his arms lazily. The corners of his mouth relaxed appreciatively as he looked round at the rich striped awning, the polished brass, and the luxurious fittings of the deck. His eye fell on the book, and then on the exhausted lemon.
"Hm," he said, "Stonewall Jackson claimed that lemon-juice cleared his head. Your head feel pretty clear?"
Ardita disdained to answer.
"Because inside of five minutes you'll have to make a clear decision whether it's go or stay."
He picked up the book and opened it curiously.
"The Revolt of the Angels. Sounds pretty good. French, eh?" He stared at her with new interest. "You French?"
"No."
"What's your name?"
"Farnam."
14 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
"Farnam what?"
"Ardita Farnam."
"Well, Ardita, no use standing up there and chew ing out the insides of your mouth. You ought to break those nervous habits while you're young. Come over here and sit down."
Ardita took a carved jade case from her pocket, extracted a cigarette and lit it with a conscious coolness, though she knew her hand was trembling a little; then she crossed over with her supple, swinging walk, and sitting down in the other settee blew a mouthful of smoke at the awning.
"You can't get me off this yacht," she said steadily; "and you haven't got very much sense if you think you'll get far with it. My uncle'll have wirelesses zigzagging all over this ocean by half past six."
"Hm."
She looked quickly at his face, caught anxiety stamped there plainly in the faintest depression of the mouth's corners.
"It's all the same to me," she said, shrugging her shoulders. " 'Tisn't my yacht. I don't mind going for a coupla hours' cruise. I'll even lend you that book so you'll have something to read on the rev enue boat that takes you up to Sing Sing."
He laughed scornfully.
"If that's advice you needn't bother. This is part of a plan arranged before I ever knew this yacht existed. If it hadn't been this one it'd have been the next one we passed anchored along the coast."
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE 15
"Who are you?" demanded Ardita suddenly. "And what are you?"
"You've decided not to go ashore?"
"I never even faintly considered it."
"We're generally known," he said, "all seven of us, as Curtis Carlyle and his Six Black Buddies, late of the Winter Garden and the Midnight Frc^c."
"You're singers?"
"We were until to-day. At present, due to those white bags you see there, we're fugitives from jus tice, and if the reward offered for our capture hasn't by this time reached twenty thousand dollars I miss my guess."
"What's in the bags?" asked Ardita curiously.
"Well," he said, "for the present we'll call it- mud — Florida mud."
Ill
Within ten minutes after Curtis Carlyle's inter view with a very frightened engineer the yacht Nar cissus was under way, steaming south through a balmy tropical twilight. The little mulatto, Babe, who seemed to have Carlyle's implicit cc ifidence, took full command of the situation. Mr. Farnam's valet and the chef, the only member? of the crew on board except the engineer, having shown fight, were now reconsidering, strapped securely to their bunks below. Trombone Mose, the biggest negro, was set busy with a can of paint obliterating the name Narcissus from the bow, and substituting the name
1 6 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
Hula Hula, and the others congregated aft and be came intently involved in a game of craps.
Having given orders for a meal to be prepared and served on deck at seven-thirty, Carlyle rejoined Ardita, and, sinking back into his settee, half closed his eyes and fell into a state of profound abstraction.
Ardita scrutinized him carefully — and classed him immediately as a romantic figure. He gave the effect of towering self-confidence erected on a slight foundation — just under the surface of each of his decisions she discerned a hesitancy that was in de cided contrast to the arrogant curl of his lips.
"He's not like me," she thought. " There's a difference somewhere."
Being a supreme egotist Ardita frequently thought about herself; never having had her egotism dis puted she did it entirely naturally and with no de traction from her unquestioned charm. Though she was nineteen she gave the effect of a high- spirited precocious child, and in the present glow of her youth and beauty all the men and women she had known were but driftwood on the ripples of her temperament. She had met other egotists— in fact she found that selfish people bored her rather less than unselfish people — but as yet there had not been one she had not eventually defeated and brought to her feet.
But though she recognized an egotist in the set tee next to her, she felt none of that usual shutting of doors in her mind which meant clearing ship for action; on the contrary her instinct told her that
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE 17
this man was somehow completely pregnable and quite defenseless. When Ardita defied convention —and of late it had been her chief amusement — it was from an intense desire to be herself, and she felt that this man, on the contrary, was preoccupied with his own defiance.
She was much more interested in him than she was in her own situation, which affected her as the prospect of a matinee might affect a ten-year-old child. She had implicit confidence in her ability to take care of herself under any and all circumstances.
The night deepened. A pale new moon smiled misty-eyed upon the sea, and as the shore faded dimly out and dark clouds were blown like leaves along the far horizon a great haze of moonshine suddenly bathed the yacht and spread an avenue of glittering mail hi her swift path. From time to time there was the bright flare of a match as one of them lighted a cigarette, but except for the low under tone of the throbbing engines and the even wash of the waves about the stern the yacht was quiet as a dream boat star-bound through the heavens. Round them flowed the smell of the night sea, bring ing with it an infinite languor.
Carlyle broke the silence at last.
"Lucky girl/' he sighed, "I've always wanted to be rich — and buy all this beauty."
Ardita yawned.
"I'd rather be you," she said frankly.
"You would — for about a day. But you do seem to possess a lot of nerve for a flapper."
l8 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
"I wish you wouldn't call me that."
"Beg your pardon."
"As to nerve," she continued slowly, "it's my one redeeming feature. I'm not afraid of anything in heaven or earth."
"Hm, I am."
"To be afraid," said Ardita, "a person has either to be very great and strong — or else a coward. I'm neither." She paused for a moment, and eager ness crept into her tone. "But I want to talk about you. What on earth have you done — and how did you do it?"
"Why?" he demanded cynically. "Going to write a movie about me?"
"Go on," she urged. "Lie to me by the moon light. Do a fabulous story."
A negro appeared, switched on a string of small lights under the awning, and began setting the wicker table for supper. And while they ate cold sliced chicken, salad, artichokes, and strawberry jam from the plentiful larder below, Carlyle began to talk, hesitatingly at first, but eagerly as he saw she was interested. Ardita scarcely touched her food as she watched his dark young face — handsome, ironic, faintly ineffectual.
He began life as a poor kid in a Tennessee town, he said, so poor that his people were the only white family in their street. He never remembered any white children — but there were inevitably a dozen pickaninnies streaming in his trail, passionate ad mirers whom he kept in tow by the vividness of his
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE 19
imagination and the amount of trouble he was al ways getting them in and out of. And it seemed that this association diverted a rather unusual mu sical gift into a strange channel.
There had been a colored woman named Belle Pope Calhoun who played the piano at parties given for white children — nice white children that would have passed Curtis Carlyle with a sniff. But the ragged little "poh white" used to sit beside her piano by the hour and try to get in an alto with one of those kazoos that boys hum through. Before he was thirteen he was picking up a living teasing rag time out of a battered violin in little cafes round Nashville. Eight years later the ragtime craze hit the country, and he took six darkies on the Orpheum circuit. Five of them were boys he had grown up with; the other was the little mulatto, Babe Divine, who was a wharf nigger round New York, and long before that a plantation hand in Bermuda, until he stuck an eight-inch stiletto in his master's back. Almost before Carlyle realized his good fortune he was on Broadway, with offers of engagements on all sides, and more money than he had ever dreamed of.
It was about then that a change began in his whole attitude, a rather curious, embittering change. It was when he realized that he was spending the golden years of his life gibbering round a stage with a lot of black men. His act was good of its kind- three trombones, three saxaphones, and Carlyle's flute — and it was his own peculiar sense of rhythm
20 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
that made all the difference; but he began to grow strangely sensitive about it, began to hate the thought of appearing, dreaded it from day to day.
They were making money — each contract he signed called for more — but when he went to man agers and told them that he wanted to separate from his sextet and go on as a regular pianist, they laughed at him and told him he was crazy — it would be an artistic suicide. He used to laugh afterward at the phrase " artistic suicide.'7 They all used it.
Half a dozen times they played at private dances at three thousand dollars a night, and it seemed as if these crystallized all his distaste for his mode of livelihood. They took place in clubs and houses that he couldn't have gone into in the daytime. After all, he was merely playing the role of the eternal monkey, a sort of sublimated chorus man. He was sick of the very smell of the theatre, of powder and rouge and the chatter of the greenroom, and the patronizing approval of the boxes. He couldn't put his heart into it any more. The idea of a slow approach to the luxury of leisure drove him wild. He was, of course, progressing toward it, but, like a child, eating his ice-cream so slowly that he couldn't taste it at all.
He wanted to have a lot of money and tune, and opportunity to read and play, and the sort of men and women round him that he could never have — the kind who, if they thought of him at all, would have considered him rather contemptible; in short he wanted all those things which he was beginning
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE 21
to lump under the general head of aristocracy, an aristocracy which it seemed almost any money could buy except money made as he was making it. He was twenty-five then, without family or educa tion or any promise that he would succeed in a busi ness career. He began speculating wildly, and within three weeks he had lost every cent he had saved.
Then the war came. He went to Plattsburg, and even there his profession followed him. A brigadier- general called him up to headquarters and told him he could serve the country better as a band leader — so he spent the war entertaining celebrities behind the line with a headquarters band. It was not so bad — except that when the infantry came limping back from the trenches he wanted to be one of them. The sweat and mud they wore seemed only one of those ineffable symbols of aristocracy that were forever eluding him.
"It was the private dances that did it. After I came back from the war the old routine started. We had an offer from a syndicate of Florida hotels. It was only a question of tune then."
He broke off and Ardita looked at him expect antly, but he shook his head.
"No," he said, "I'm not going to tell you about it. I'm enjoying it too much, and I'm afraid I'd lose a little of that enjoyment if I shared it with any one else. I want to hang on to those few breath less, heroic moments when I stood out before them all and let them know I was more than a damn bobbing, squawking clown."
22 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
From up forward came suddenly the low sound of singing. The negroes had gathered together on the deck and their voices rose together in a haunting melody that soared in poignant harmonics toward the moon. And Ardita listened in enchantment.
"Oh down—
Oh down,
Mammy wanna take me downa milky way, Oh down —
Oh down,
Pappy say to-morra-a-a-ah ! But mammy say to-day, Yes — mammy say to-day ! "
Carlyle sighed and was silent for a moment, look ing up at the gathered host of stars blinking like arc- lights in the warm sky. The negroes' song had died away to a plaintive humming and it seemed as if minute by minute the brightness and the great silence were increasing until he could almost hear the midnight toilet of the mermaids as they combed their silver dripping curls under the moon and gos siped to each other of the fine wrecks they lived in on the green opalescent avenues below.
"You see," said Carlyle softly, "this is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astound ing — it's got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl."
He turned to her, but she was silent.
"You see, don't you, Anita — I mean, Ardita?"
Again she made no answer. She had been sound asleep for some time.
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE 23
IV
In the dense sun-flooded noon of next day a spot in the sea before them resolved casually into a green-and-gray islet, apparently composed of a great granite cliff at its northern end which slanted south through a mile of vivid coppice and grass to a sandy beach melting lazily into the surf. When Ardita, reading in her favorite seat, came to the last page of The Revolt of the Angels, and slam ming the book shut looked up and saw it, she gave a little cry of delight, and called to Carlyle, who was standing moodily by the rail.
"Is this it? Is this where you're going?"
Carlyle shrugged his shoulders carelessly.
" You've got me." He raised his voice and called up to the acting skipper: "Oh, Babe, is this your island?"
The mulatto's miniature head appeared from round the corner of the deck-house.
"Yas-suh! This yeah's it."
Carlyle joined Ardita.
"Looks sort of sporting, doesn't it?"
"Yes," she agreed ; " but it doesn't look big enough to be much of a hiding-place."
"You still putting your faith in those wirelesses your uncle was going to have zigzagging round?"
"No;" said Ardita frankly. "I'm all for you. I'd really like to see you make a get-away."
He laughed.
"You're our Lady Luck. Guess we'll have to
24 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
keep you with us as a mascot — for the present, anyway."
"You couldn't very well ask me to swim back/' she said coolly. "If you do I'm going to start writing dime novels founded on that interminable history of your life you gave me last night."
He flushed and stiffened slightly.
"I'm very sorry I bored you."
"Oh, you didn't — until just at the end with some story about how furious you were because you couldn't dance with the ladies you played music for."
He rose angrily.
"You have got a darn mean little tongue."
"Excuse me," she said, melting into laughter, "but I'm not used to having men regale me with the story of their life ambitions — especially if they've lived such deathly platonic lives."
" Why ? What do men usually regale you with ? "
"Oh, they talk about me," she yawned. "They tell me I'm the spirit of youth and .beauty."
"What do you teU them?"
"Oh, I agree quietly."
"Does every man you meet tell you he loves you?"-
Ardita nodded.
"Why shouldn't he? All life is just a progres sion toward, and then a recession from, one phrase —'I love you.'"
Carlyle laughed and sat down.
"That's very true. That's— that's not bad. Did you make that up?"
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE 25
"Yes — or rather I found it out. It doesn't mean anything especially. It's just clever."
"It's the sort of remark," he said gravely, ''that's typical of your class."
"Oh," she interrupted impatiently, "don't start that lecture on aristocracy again! I distrust peo ple who can be intense at this hour in the morning. It's a mild form of insanity — a sort of breakfast- food jag. Morning's the time to sleep, swim, and be careless."
Ten minutes later they had swung round in a wide circle as if to approach the island from the north.
"There's a trick somewhere," commented Ardita thoughtfully. "He can't mean mst to anchor up against this cliff."
They were heading straight in now toward the solid rock, which must have been well over a hun dred feet tall, and not until they were within fifty yards of it did Ardita see their objective. Then she clapped her hands in delight. There was a break in the cliff entirely hidden by a curious over lapping of rock, and through this break the yacht entered and very slowly traversed a narrow channel of crystal-clear water between high gray walls. Then they were riding at anchor in a miniature world of green and gold, a gilded bay smooth as glass and set round with tiny palms, the whole re sembling the mirror lakes and twig trees that chil dren set up in sand piles.
"Not so darned bad!" cried Carlyle excitedly.
26 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
"I guess that little coon knows his way round this corner of the Atlantic."
His exuberance was contagious, and Ardita be came quite jubilant.
"It's an absolutely sure-fire hiding-place!"
"Lordy, yes! It's the sort of island you read about."
The rowboat was lowered into the golden lake and they pulled ashore.
"Come on," said Carlyle as they landed in the slushy sand, "we'll go exploring."
The fringe of palms was in turn ringed in by a round mile of flat, sandy country. They followed it south and brushing through a farther rim of tropi cal vegetation came out on a pearl-gray virgin beach where Ardita kicked off her brown golf shoes — she seemed to have permanently abandoned stockings —and went wading. Then they sauntered back to the yacht, where the indefatigable Babe had luncheon ready for them. He had posted a lookout on the high cliff to the north to watch the sea on both sides, though he doubted if the entrance to the cliff was generally known — he had never even seen a map on which the island was marked.
"What's its name," asked Ardita— "the island, I mean?"
"No name 'tall," chuckled Babe. "Reckin she jus' island, 'at's all."
In the late afternoon they sat with their backs against great boulders on the highest part of the cliff and Carlyle sketched for her his vague plans.
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE 27
He was sure they were hot after him by this time. The total proceeds of the coup he had pulled off, and concerning which he still refused to enlighten her, he estimated as just under a million dollars. He counted on lying up here several weeks and then setting off southward, keeping well outside the usual channels of travel, rounding the Horn and heading for Callao, in Peru. The details of coaling and pro visioning he was leaving entirely to Babe, who, it seemed, had sailed these seas in every capacity from cabin-boy aboard a coffee trader to virtual first mate on a Brazilian pirate craft, whose skipper had long since been hung.
"If he'd been white he'd have been king of South America long ago/' said Carlyle emphatically. "When it comes to intelligence he makes Booker T. Washington look like a moron. He's got the guile of every race and nationality whose blood is in his veins, and that's half a dozen or I'm a liar. He worships me because I'm the only man in the world who can play better ragtime than he can. We used to sit together on the wharfs down on the New York water-front, he with a bassoon and me with an oboe, and we'd blend minor keys in African harmonics a thousand years old until the rats would crawl up the posts and sit round groaning and squeak ing like dogs will in front of a phonograph."
Ardita roared.
"How you can tell 'em!"
Carlyle grinned.
"I swear that's the gos "
28 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
"What you going to do when you get to Callao?" she interrupted.
"Take ship for India. I want to be a rajah. I mean it. My idea is to go up into Afghanistan somewhere, buy up a palace and a reputation, and then after about five years appear in England with a foreign accent and a mysterious past. But India first. Do you know, they say that all the gold in the world drifts very gradually back to India. Something fascinating about that to me. And I want leisure to read — an immense amount."
"How about after that?"
"Then," he answered defiantly, "comes aristoc racy. Laugh if you want to — but at least you'll have to admit that I know what I want — which I imagine is more than you do."
"On the contrary," contradicted Ardita, reach ing in her pocket for her cigarette case, "when I met you I was in the midst of a great uproar of all my friends and relatives because I did know what I wanted."
"What was it?"
"A man."
He started.
"You mean you were engaged?"
"After a fashion. If you hadn't come aboard I had every intention of slipping ashore yesterday evening — how long ago it seems — and meeting him in Palm Beach. He's waiting there for me with a bracelet that once belonged to Catharine of Russia. Now don't mutter anything about aristocracy,"
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE 29
she put in quickly. "I liked him simply because he had had an imagination and the utter courage of his convictions."
"But your family disapproved, eh?"
"What there is of it — only a silly uncle and a sillier aunt. It seems he got into some scandal with a red-haired woman named Mimi something — it was frightfully exaggerated, he said, and men don't lie to me — and anyway I didn't care what he'd done; it -was the future that counted. And I'd see to that. When a man's in love with me he doesn't care for other amusements. I told him to drop her like a hot cake, and he did."
"I feel rather jealous," said Carlyle, frowning — and then he laughed. "I guess I'll just keep you along with us until we get to Callao. Then I'll lend you enough money to get back to the States. By that time you'll have had a chance to think that gentleman over a little more."
"Don't talk to me like that!" fired up Ardita. "I won't tolerate the parental attitude from any body! Do you understand me?"
He chuckled and then stopped, rather abashed, as her cold anger seemed to fold him about and chill him.
"I'm sorry," he offered uncertainly. 'Oh, don't apologize! I can't stand men who say 'I'm sorry' hi that manly, reserved tone. Just shut up!"
A pause ensued, a pause which Carlyle found rather awkward, but which Ardita seemed not to
30 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
notice at all as she sat contentedly enjoying her cigarette and gazing out at the shining sea. After a minute she crawled out on the rock and lay with her face over the edge looking down. Carlyle, watching her, reflected how it seemed impossible for her to assume an ungraceful attitude.
"Oh, look!" she cried. "There's a lot of sort jf ledges down there. Wide ones of all different heights."
He joined her and together they gazed down the dizzy height.
"Well go swimming to-night !" she said excitedly. "By moonlight."
"Wouldn't you rather go in at the beach on the other end?"
"Not a chance. I like to dive. You can use my uncle's bathing-suit, only it'll fit you like a gunny sack, because he's a very flabby man. I've got a one-piece affair that's shocked the natives all along the Atlantic coast from Biddeford Pool to St. Augustine."
"I suppose you're a shark."
"Yes, I'm pretty good. And I look cute too. A sculptor up at Rye last summer told me my calves were worth five hundred dollars."
There didn't seem to be any answer to this, so Carlyle was silent, permitting himself only a dis creet interior smile.
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE 31
When the night crept down in shadowy blue and silver they threaded the shimmering channel in the rowboat and, tying it to a jutting rock, began climb ing the cliff together. The first shelf was ten feet up, wide, and furnishing a natural diving platform. There they sat down hi the bright moonlight and watched the faint incessant surge of the waters, almost stilled now as the tide set seaward.
"Are you happy?" he asked suddenly.
She nodded.
" Always happy near the sea. You know," she went on, "Fve been thinking all day that you and I are somewhat alike. We're both rebels — only for different reasons. Two years ago, when I was just eighteen, and you were "
"Twenty-five."
" — well, we were both conventional successes. I was an utterly devastating debutante and you were a prosperous musician just commissioned in the army "
"Gentleman by act of Congress," he put in ironi cally.
"Well, at any rate, we both fitted. If our cor ners were not rubbed off they were at least pulled in. But deep in us both was something that made us require more for happiness. I didn't know what I wanted. I went from man to man, restless, im patient, month by month getting less acquiescent
32 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
and more dissatisfied. I used to sit sometimes chew ing at the insides of my mouth and thinking I was going crazy — I had a frightful sense of transiency. I wanted things now — now — now! Here I was — beautiful — I am, aren't I?"
"Yes," agreed Carlyle tentatively.
Ardita rose suddenly.
"Wait a second. I want to try this delightful- looking sea."
She walked to the end of the ledge and shot out over the sea, doubling up in mid-air and then straightening out and entering the water straight as a blade in a perfect jack-knife dive.
In a minute her voice floated up to him.
"You see, I used to read all day and most of the night. I began to resent society "
"Come on up here," he interrupted. "What on earth are you doing?"
"Just floating round on my back. I'll be up in a minute. Let me tell you. The only thing I en joyed was shocking people; wearing something quite impossible and quite charming to a fancy-dress party, going round with the fastest men hi New York, and getting into some of the most hellish scrapes imag inable."
The sounds of splashing mingled with h£r words, and then he heard her hurried breathing as she be gan climbing up the side to the ledge.
"Go on in!" she called.
Obediently he rose and dived. When he emerged, dripping, and made the climb he found that she was
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE 33
no longer on the ledge, but after a frightened second he heard her light laughter from another shelf ten feet up. There he joined her and they both sat quietly for a moment, their arms clasped round their knees, panting a little from the climb.
"The family were wild," she said suddenly. "They tried to marry me off. And then when I'd begun to feel that after all life was scarcely worth living I found something " — her eyes went skyward exultantly — "I found something!"
Carlyle waited and her words came with a rush.
"Courage — just that; courage as a rule of life, and something to cling to always. I began to build up this enormous faith in myself. I began to see that in all my idols in the past some manifestation of courage had unconsciously been the thing that attracted me. I began separating courage from the other things of life. All sorts of courage — the beaten, bloody prize-fighter coming up for more — I used to make men take me to prize-fights; the declasse* woman sailing through a nest of cats and looking at them as if they were mud under her feet; the liking what you like always; the utter disregard for other people's opinions — just to live as I liked always and to die in my own way — Did you bring up the cigarettes?"
He handed one over and held a match for her silently.
"Still," Ardita continued, "the men kept gather ing — old men and young men, my mental and physi cal inferiors, most of them, but all intensely desiring
34 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
to have me — to own this rather magnificent proud tradition I'd built up round me. Do you see?"
"Sort of. You never were beaten and you never apologized."
"Never!"
She sprang to the edge, poised for a moment like a crucified figure against the sky; then describing a dark parabola plunked without a slash between two silver ripples twenty feet below.
Her voice floated up to him again.
"And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life — not only overriding people and circumstances but over riding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things."
She was climbing up now, and at her last words her head, with the damp yellow hair slicked sym metrically back, appeared on his level.
"All very well," objected Carlyle. "You can call it courage, but your courage is really built, after all, on a pride of birth. You were bred to that defiant attitude. On my gray days even courage is one of the things that's gray and lifeless."
She was sitting near the edge, hugging her knees and gazing abstractedly at the white moon; he was farther back, crammed like a grotesque god into a niche in the rock.
"I don't want to sound like Pollyanna," she be gan, "but you haven't grasped me yet. My cour age is faith — faith in the eternal resilience of me— that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity.
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE 35
And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high, and my eyes wide — not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite often — and the female hell is deadlier than the male."
"But supposing," suggested Carlyle, "that before joy and hope and all that came back the curtain was drawn on you for good?"
Ardita rose, and going to the wall climbed with some difficulty to the next ledge, another ten or fifteen feet above.
"Why," she called back, "then I'd have won!"
He edged out till he could see her.
"Better not dive from there! You'll break your back," he said quickly.
She laughed.
"Not I!"
Slowly she spread her arms and stood there swan- like, radiating a pride in her young perfection that lit a warm glow in Carlyle's heart.
"We're going through the black air with our arms wide," she called, "and our feet straight out behind like a dolphin's tail, and we're going to think we'll never hit the silver down there till suddenly it'll be all warm round us and full of little kissing, caressing waves."
Then she was in the air, and Carlyle involun tarily held his breath. He had not realized that the dive was nearly forty feet. It seemed an eter nity before he heard the swift compact sound as she reached the sea.
36 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
And it was with his glad sigh of relief when her light watery laughter curled up the side of the cliff and into his anxious ears that he knew he loved her.
VI
Time, having no axe to grind, showered down upon them three days of afternoons. When the sun cleared the port-hole of Ardita's cabin an hour after dawn she rose cheerily, donned her bathing-suit, and went up on deck. The negroes would leave their work when they saw her, and crowd, chuckling and chattering, to the rail as she floated, an agile minnow, on and under the surface of the clear water. Again in the cool of the after noon she would swim — and loll and smoke with Carlyle upon the cliff; or else they would lie on their sides in the sands of the southern beach, talk ing little, but watching the day fade colorfully and tragically into the infinite languor of a tropical evening.
And with the long, sunny hours Ardita's idea of the episode as incidental, madcap, a sprig of romance in a desert of reality, gradually left her. She dreaded the time when he would strike off southward; she dreaded all the eventualities that presented them selves to her; thoughts were suddenly troublesome and decisions odious. Had prayers found place in the pagan rituals of her soul she would have asked of life only to be unmolested for a while, lazily acquiescent to the ready, naif flow of Carlyle's
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE 37
ideas, his vivid boyish imagination, and the vein of monomania that seemed to run crosswise through his temperament and colored his every action.
But this is not a story of two on an island, nor concerned primarily with love bred of isolation. It is merely the presentation of two personalities, and its idyllic setting among the palms of the Gulf Stream is quite incidental. Most of us are content o^exist and breed and nghtTor the right JULdpJaojh^ aJuLfche dominant idea, the foredoomed attempt to control one's destiny, is reserved for the fortunate )T"u;5ortunate few. To me~the interesting thing ar56Hf~Ardita is the courage that will tarnish with her beauty and youth.
"Take me with you," she said late one night as they sat lazily in the grass under the shadowy spreading palms. The negroes had brought ashore their musical instruments, and the sound of weird ragtime was drifting softly over on the warm breath of the night. "I'd love to reappear in ten years as a fabulously wealthy high-caste Indian lady," she continued.
Carlyle looked at her quickly.
"You can, you know."
She laughed.
"Is it a proposal of marriage? Extra! Ardita Farnam becomes pirate's bride. Society girl kid napped by ragtime bank robber."
"It wasn't a bank."
"What was it? Why won't you tell me?"
"I don't want to break down your illusions."
38 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
"My dear man, I have no illusions about you."
"I mean your illusions about yourself."
She looked up in surprise.
"About myself! What on earth have I got to do with whatever stray felonies you've commit ted?"
"That remains to be seen."
She reached over and patted his hand.
"Dear Mr. Curtis Carlyle," she said softly, "are you in love with me?"
"As if it mattered."
"But it does — because I think I'm in love with you."
He looked at her ironically.
"Thus swelling your January total to half a dozen," he suggested. "Suppose I call your bluff and ask you to come to India with me?"
"Shall I?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"We can get married in Callao."
"What sort of life can you offer me? I don't mean that unkindly, but seriously; what would become of me if the people who want that twenty- thousand-dollar reward ever catch up with you?"
"I thought you weren't afraid."
"I never am — but I won't throw my life away just to show one man I'm not."
"I wish you'd been poor. Just a little poor girl dreaming over a fence in a warm cow country."
"Wouldn't it have been nice?"
"I'd have enjoyed astonishing you — watching
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE 39
your eyes open on things. If you only wanted things ! Don't you see?"
"I know — like girls who stare into the windows of jewelry -stores."
"Yes — and want the big oblong watch that's platinum and has diamonds all round the edge. Only you'd decide it was too expensive and choose one of white gold for a hundred dollars. Then I'd say: 'Expensive? I should say not!' And we'd go into the store and pretty soon the platinum one would be gleaming on your wrist."
"That sounds so nice and vulgar — and fun, doesn't it?" murmured Ardita.
"Doesn't it? Can't you see us travelling round and spending money right and left, and being wor shipped by bell-boys and waiters? Oh, blessed are the simple rich, for they inherit the earth !"
"I honestly wish we were that way."
"I love you, Ardita," he said gently.
Her face lost its childish look for a moment and became oddly grave.
"I love to be with you," she said, "more than with any man I've ever met. And I like your looks and your dark old hair, and the way you go over the side of the rail when we come ashore. In fact, Curtis Carlyle, I like all the things you do when you're perfectly natural. I think you've got nerve, and you know how I feel about that. Sometimes when you're around I've been tempted to kiss you suddenly and tell you that you were just an ideal istic boy with a lot of caste nonsense in his head.
40 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
Perhaps if I were just a little bit older and a little more bored I'd go with you. As it is, I think I'll go back and marry — that other man."
Over across the silver lake the figures of the negroes writhed and squirmed in the moonlight, like acrobats who, having been too long inactive, must go through their tricks from sheer surplus energy. In single file they marched, weaving in concentric circles, now with their heads thrown back, now bent over their instruments like piping fauns. And from trombone and saxaphone ceaselessly whined a blended melody, sometimes riotous and jubilant, sometimes haunting and plaintive as a death-dance from the Congo's heart.
"Let's dance!" cried Ardita. "I can't sit still with that perfect jazz going on."
Taking her hand he led her out into a broad stretch of hard sandy soil that the moon flooded with great splendor. They floated out like drifting moths under the rich hazy light, and as the fantastic symphony wept and exulted and wavered and de spaired Ardita's last sense of reality dropped away, and she abandoned her imagination to the dreamy summer scents of tropical flowers and the infinite starry spaces overhead, feeling that if she opened her eyes it would be to find herself dancing with a ghost in a land created by her own fancy.
"This is what I should call an exclusive private dance," he whispered.
"I feel quite mad—but delightfully mad !"
"We're enchanted. The shades of unnumbered
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE 41
generations of cannibals are watching us from high up on the side of the cliff there."
"And Fll bet the cannibal women are saying that we dance too close, and that it was immodest of me to come without my nose-ring."
They both laughed softly — and then their laughter died as over across the lake they heard the trom bones stop in the middle of a bar, and the saxa- phones give a startled moan and fc.de out.
" What's the matter?" caUed Carlyle.
After a moment's silence they made out the dark figure of a man rounding the silver lake at a run. As he came closer they saw it was Babe in a state of unusual excitement. He drew up before them and gasped out his news in a breath.
"Ship stan'in' off sho' 'bout half a mile, suh. Mose, he uz on watch, he say look's if she's done ancho'd."
"A ship — what kind of a ship?" demanded Car- lyie anxiously.
Dismay was in his voice, and Ardita's heart gave a sudden wrench as she saw his whole face suddenly droop.
"He say he don't know, suh."
"Are they landing a boat?"
"No, suh."
"We'll go up," said Carlyle.
They ascended the hill in silence, Ardita's hand still resting in Carlyle's as it had when they finished dancing. She felt it clinch nervously from time to time as though he were unaware of the contact, but
42 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
though he hurt her she made no attempt to remove it. It seemed an hour's climb before they reached the top and crept cautiously across the silhouetted plateau to the edge of the cliff. After one short look Carlyle involuntarily gave a little cry. It was a revenue boat with six-inch guns mounted fore and aft.
"They know!" he said with a short intake of breath. "Th?y know! They picked up the trail somewhere."
"Are you sure they know about the channel? They may be only standing by to take a look at the island in the morning. From where they are they couldn't see the opening in the cliff."
"They could with field-glasses," he said hope lessly. He looked at his wrist- watch. "It's nearly two now. They won't do anything until dawn, that's certain. Of course there's always the faint possibility that they're waiting for some other ship to join; or for a coaler."
"I suppose we may as well stay right here."
The hours passed and they lay there side by side, very silently, their chins in their hands like dream ing children. In back of them squatted the negroes, patient, resigned, acquiescent, announcing now and then with sonorous snores that not even the presence of danger could subdue their unconquerable African craving for sleep.
Just before five o'clock Babe approached Carlyle. There were half a dozen rifles aboard the Narcissus be said. Had it been decided to offer no resistance ?
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE 43
A pretty good fight might be made, he thought, if they worked out some plan.
Carlyle laughed and shook his head.
"That isn't a Spic army out there, Babe. That's a revenue boat. It'd be like a bow and arrow try ing to fight a machine-gun. If you want to bury those bags somewhere and take a chance on recov ering them later, go on and do it. But it won't work — they'd dig this island over from one end to the other. It's a lost battle all round, Babe."
Babe inclined his head silently and turned away, and Carlyle's voice was husky as he turned to Ardita.
"There's the best friend I ever had. He'd die for me, and be proud to, if I'd let him."
"You've given up?"
"I've no choice. Of course there's always one way out — the sure way—but that can wait. I wouldn't miss my trial for anything — it'll be an interesting experiment in notoriety. ' Miss Farnam testifies that the pirate's attitude to her was at all times that of a gentleman."
"Don't ! " she said. " I'm awfully sorry."
When the color faded from the sky and lustreless blue changed to leaden gray a commotion was visible on the ship's deck, and they made out a group of officers clad in white duck, gathered near the rail. They had field-glasses in their hands and were at tentively examining the islet.
"It's all up," said Carlyle grimly.
"Damn !" whispered Ardita. She felt tears gath ering in her eyes.
44 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
"We'll go back to the yacht," he said. "I prefer that to being hunted out up here like a 'possum."
Leaving the plateau they descended the hill, and reaching the lake were rowed out to the yacht by the silent negroes. Then, pale and weary, they sank into the settees and waited.
Half an hour later in the dim gray light the nose of the revenue boat appeared in the channel and stopped, evidently fearing that the bay might be too shallow. From the peaceful look of the yacht, the man and the girl in the settees, and the negroes lounging curiously against the rail, they evidently judged that there would be no resistance, for two boats were lowered casually over the side, one con taining an officer and six bluejackets, and the other, four rowers and in the stern two gray-haired men in yachting flannels. Ardita and Carlyle stood up, and half unconsciously started toward each other. Then he paused and putting his hand suddenly into his pocket he pulled out a round, glittering object and held it out to her.
"What is it?" she asked wonderingly.
"I'm not positive, but I think from the Russian inscription inside that it's your promised bracelet."
"Where— where on earth—
"It came out of one of those bags. You see, Curtis Carlyle and his Six Black Buddies, in the middle of their performance in the tea-room of the hotel at Palm Beach, suddenly changed their in struments for automatics and held up the crowd. I took this bracelet from a pretty, overrouged woman with red hair."
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE 45
Ardita frowned and then smiled.
"So that's what you did ! You have got nerve !"
He bowed.
"A well-known bourgeois quality," he said.
And then dawn slanted dynamically across the deck and flung the shadows reeling into gray cor ners. The dew rose and turned to golden mist, thin as a dream, enveloping them until they seemed gossamer relics of the late night, infinitely transient and already fading. For a moment sea and sky were breathless, and dawn held a pink hand over the young mouth of life — then from out in the lake came the complaint of a rowboat and the swish of oars.
Suddenly against the golden furnace low in the east their two graceful figures melted into one, and he was kissing her spoiled young mouth.
"It's a sort of glory," he murmured after a second.
She smiled up at him.
"Happy, are you?"
Her sigh was a benediction — an ecstatic surety that she was youth and beauty now as much as she would ever know. For another instant life was radiant and time a phantom and their strength eternal — then there was a bumping, scraping sound as the rowboat scraped alongside.
Up the ladder scrambled the two gray-haired men, the officer and two of the sailors with their hands on their revolvers. Mr. Farnam folded his arms and stood looking at his niece.
46 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
"So," he said, nodding his head slowly.
With a sigh her arms unwound from Carlyle's neck, and her eyes, transfigured and far away, fell upon the boarding party. Her uncle saw her upper lip slowly swell into that arrogant pout he knew so well.
"So," he repeated savagely. "So this is your idea of — of romance. A runaway affair, with a high-seas pirate."
Ardita glanced at him carelessly.
"What an old fool you are!" she said quietly.
"Is that the best you can say for yourself?"
"No," she said as if considering. "No, there's something else. There's that well-known phrase with which I have ended most of our conversations for the past few years — ' Shut up ! "
And with that she turned, included the two old men, the officer, and the two sailors in a curt glance of contempt, and walked proudly down the com- panionway.
But had she waited an instant longer she would have heard a sound from her uncle quite unfamiliar in most of their interviews. He gave vent to a whole-hearted amused chuckle, in which the second old man joined.
The latter turned briskly to Carlyle, who had been regarding this scene with an air of cryptic amusement.
"Well, Toby," he said genially, "you incurable, hare-brained, romantic chaser of rainbows, did you find that she was the person you wanted?"
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE 47
Carlyle smiled confidently.
"Why — naturally," he said. "I've been per fectly sure ever since I first heard tell of her wild career. That's why I had Babe send up the rocket last night."
"I'm glad you did," said Colonel Moreland gravely. " We've been keeping pretty close to you in case you should have trouble with those six strange niggers. And we hoped we'd find you two in some such compromising position," he sighed. "Well, set a crank to catch a crank!"
"Your father and I sat up all night hoping for the best — or perhaps it's the worst. Lord knows you're welcome to her, my boy. She's run me crazy. Did you give her the Russian bracelet my detective got from that Mimi woman?"
Carlyle nodded.
" Sh ! " he said. " She's coming on deck."
Ardita appeared at the head of the companion- way and gave a quick involuntary glance at Carlyle's wrists. A puzzled look passed across her face. Back aft the negroes had begun to sing, and the cool lake, fresh with dawn, echoed serenely to their low voices.
"Ardita," said Carlyle unsteadily.
She swayed a step toward him.
"Ardita," he repeated breathlessly, "I've got to tell you the — the truth. It was all a plant, Ardita. My name isn't Carlyle. It's Moreland, Toby Moreland. The story was invented, Ardita, in vented out of thin Florida air."
She stared at him, bewildered amazement, dis-
48 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
belief, and anger flowing in quick waves across her face. The three men held their breaths. More- land, Senior, took a step toward her; Mr. Farnam's mouth dropped a little open as he waited, panic- stricken, for the expected crash.
But it did not come. Ardita's face became sud denly radiant, and with a little laugh she went swiftly to young Moreland and looked up at him without a trace of wrath in her gray eyes.
"Will you swear," she said quietly, "that it was entirely a product of your own brain ?"
"I swear," said young Moreland eagerly.
She drew his head down and kissed him gently.
"What an imagination!" she said softly and almost enviously. "I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life."
The negroes7 voices floated drowsily back, mingled in an air that she had heard them sing before.
"Time is a thief; Gladness and grief Cling to the leaf As it yellows "
"What was in the bags?" she asked softly.
"Florida mud," he answered. "That was one of the two true things I told you."
"Perhaps I can guess the other one," she said; and reaching up on her tiptoes she kissed him softly in the illustration.
THE ICE PALACE
THE sunlight dripped over the house like golden paint over an art jar, and the freckling shadows here and there only intensified the rigor of the bath of light. The Butterworth and Larkin houses flanking were intrenched behind great stodgy trees; only the Happer house took the full sun, and all day long faced the dusty road-street with a tolerant kindly patience. This was the city of Tarleton in southernmost Georgia, September afternoon.
Up in her bedroom window Sally Carrol Happer rested her nineteen-year-old chin on a fifty-two-year- old sill and watched Clark Darrow's ancient Ford turn the corner. The car was hot — being partly metallic it retained all the heat it absorbed or evolved —and Clark D arrow sitting bolt upright at the wheel wore a pained, strained expression as though he considered himself a spare part, and rather likely to break. He laboriously crossed two dust ruts, the wheels squeaking indignantly at the encounter, and then with a terrifying expression he gave the steer ing-gear a final wrench and deposited self and car approximately in front of the Happer steps. There was a plaintive heaving sound, a death-rattle, fol lowed by a short silence; and then the air was rent by a startling whistle.
Sally Carrol gazed down sleepily. She started
49
50 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
to yawn, but finding this quite impossible unless she raised her chin from the window-sill, changed her mind and continued silently to regard the car, whose owner sat brilliantly if perfunctorily at at tention as he waited for an answer to his signal. After a moment the whistle once more split the dusty air.
"Good mawninV
With difficulty Clark twisted his tall body round and bent a distorted glance on the window.
"Tain't mawnin', Sally Carrol."
"Isn't it, sure enough?"
"What you doin'?"
"Eatin' 'n apple."
"Come on go swimmin' — want to?"
"Reckon so."
"How 'bout hurryin' up?"
"Sure enough."
Sally Carrol sighed voluminously and raised her self with profound inertia from the floor, where she had been occupied in alternately destroying parts of a green apple and painting paper dolls for her younger sister. She approached a mirror, regarded her ex pression with a pleased and pleasant languor, dabbed two spots of rouge on her lips and a grain of powder on her nose, and covered her bobbed corn-colored hair with a rose-littered sunbonnet. Then she kicked over the painting water, said, "Oh, damn!" — but let it lay — and left the room.
"How you, Clark?" she inquired a minute later as she slipped nimbly over the side of the car.
THE ICE PALACE * 51
"Mighty fine, Sally Carrol."
"Where we go swimmin'?"
"Out to Walley's Pool. Told Marylyn we'd call by an' get her an' Joe Ewing."
Clark was dark and lean, and when on foot was rather inclined to stoop. His eyes were ominous and his expression somewhat petulant except when startlingly illuminated by one of his frequent smiles. Clark had "a income" — just enough to keep him self in ease and his car in gasolene — and he had spent the two years since he graduated from Georgia Tech in dozing round the lazy streets of his home town, discussing how he could best invest his capital for an immediate fortune.
Hanging round he found not at all difficult; a crowd of little girls had grown up beautifully, the amazing Sally Carrol foremost among them; and they enjoyed being swum with and danced with and made love to in the flower-filled summery evenings —and they all liked Clark immensely. When fem inine company palled there were half a dozen other youths who were always just about to do something, and meanwhile were quite willing to join him in a few holes of golf, or a game of billiards, or the con sumption of a quart of "hard yella licker." Every once in a while one of these contemporaries made a farewell round of calls before going up to New York or Philadelphia or Pittsburgh to go into business, but mostly they just stayed round in this languid paradise of dreamy skies and firefly evenings and noisy niggery street fairs — and especially of gracious,
52 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
soft-voiced girls, who were brought up on memories instead of money.
The Ford having been excited into a sort of restless resentful life Clark and Sally Carrol rolled and rattled down Valley Avenue into Jefferson Street, where the dust road became a pavement; along opiate Millicent Place, where there were half a dozen prosperous, substantial mansions; and on into the down-town section. Driving was perilous here, for it was shopping tune; the population idled casually across the streets and a drove of low-moan ing oxen were being urged along in front of a placid street-car; even the shops seemed only yawning their doors and blinking their windows in the sun shine before retiring into a state of utter and finite coma.
"Sally Carrol," said Clark suddenly, "it a fact that you're engaged ?"
She looked at him quickly.
"Where'd you hear that?"
"Sure enough, you engaged?"
"'At's a nice question!"
"Girl told me you were engaged to a Yankee you met up in Asheville last summer."
Sally Carrol sighed.
"Never saw such an old town for rumors."
"Don't marry a Yankee, Sally Carrol. We need you round here."
Sally Carrol was silent a moment.
"Clark," she demanded suddenly, "who on earth shall I marry?"
THE ICE PALACE 53
"I offer my services."
"Honey, you couldn't support a wife," she an swered cheerfully. "Anyway, I know you too well to fall in love with you."
" 'At doesn't mean you ought to marry a Yankee," he persisted.
"S'posellovehim?"
He shook his head.
"You couldn't. He'd be a lot different from us, every way."
He broke off as he halted the car in front of a rambling, dilapidated house. Marylyn Wade and Joe Ewing appeared in the doorway.
"'Lo, Sally Carrol."
"Hi!"
"Howyou-all?"
"Sally Carrol," demanded Marylyn as they started off again, "you engaged?"
"Lawdy, where'd all this start? Can't I look at a man 'thout everybody in town engagin' me to him?"
Clark stared straight in front of him at a bolt on the clattering wind-shield.
"Sally CaiTol," he said with a curious intensity, "don't you like us?"
"What?"
"Us down here?"
'Why, Clark, you know I do. I adore all you boys."
"Then why you gettin' engaged to a Yankee?"
" Clark, I don't know. I'm not sure what I'll do,
\
54 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
but — well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale."
"What you mean?"
"Oh, Clark, I love you, and I love Joe here, and Ben Arrot, and you-aU, but you'll — you'll
"We'll all be failures?"
"Yes. I don't mean only money failures, but just sort of — of ineffectual and sad, and — oh, how can I tell you?"
"You mean because we stay here hi Tarleton?"
"Yes, Clark; and because you like it and never want to change things or think or go ahead."
He nodded and she reached over and pressed his hand.
"Clark," she said softly, "I wouldn't change you for the world. You're sweet the way you are. The things that'll make you fail I'll love always — the living in the past, the lazy days and nights you have, and all your carelessness and generosity."
"But you're goin' away?"
"Yes — because I couldn't ever marry you. You've a place hi my heart no one else ever could have, but tied down here I'd get restless. I'd feel I was — wastin' myself. There's two sides to me, you see. There's the sleepy old side you love; an' there's a sort of energy — the feelin' that makes me do wild things. That's the part of me that may be useful somewhere, that'll last when I'm not beau tiful any more."
THE ICE PALACE 55
She broke off with characteristic suddenness and sighed, "Oh, sweet cooky!" as her mood changed.
Half closing her eyes and tipping back her head till it rested on the seat-back she let the savory breeze fan her eyes and ripple the fluffy curls of her bobbed hair. They were in the country now, hurrying between tangled growths of bright-green coppice and grass and tall trees that sent sprays of foliage to hang a cool welcome over the road. Here and there they passed a battered negro cabin, its oldest white-haired inhabitant smoking a corncob pipe beside the door, and half a dozen scantily clothed ^pickaninnies parading tattered dolls on the wild-grown grass in front. Farther out were lazy cotton-fields, where even the workers seemed in tangible shadows lent by the sun to the earth, not for toil, but to while away some age-old tradition in the golden September fields. And round the drowsy picturesqueness, over the trees and shacks and muddy rivers, flowed the heat, never hostile, only comforting, like a great warm nourishing bosom for the infant earth.
"Sally Carrol, we're here!"
"Poor chile's soun' asleep."
"Honey, you dead at last outa sheer laziness?"
"Water, Sally Carrol! Cool water waitin' for you!"
Her eyes opened sleepily.
"Hi!" she murmured, smiling.
$6 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
II
In November Harry Bellamy, tall, broad, and brisk, came down from his Northern city to spend four days. His intention was^to settle a matter that had been hanging fire since he and Sally Carrol had met in Asheville, North Carolina, in midsummer. The settlement took only a quiet afternoon and an evening in front of a glowing open fire, for Harry Bellamy had everything she wanted; and, besides, she loved him — loved him with that side of her she kept especially for loving. Sally Carrol had several rather clearly defined sides.
On his last afternoon they walked, and she found their steps tending half-unconsciously toward one of her favorite haunts, the cemetery. When it came in sight, gray-white and golden-green under the cheerful late sun, she paused, irresolute, by the iron gate.
"Are you mournful by nature, Harry?" she asked with a faint smile.
"Mournful? Not I."
"Then let's go in here. It depresses some folks, but I like it."
They passed through the gateway and followed a path that led through a wavy valley of graves — dusty-gray and mouldy for the fifties; quaintly carved with flowers and jars for the seventies; ornate and hideous for the nineties, with fat marble cherubs lying in sodden sleep on stone pillows, and great impossible growths of nameless granite flowers.
THE ICE PALACE 57
Occasionally they saw a kneeling figure with trib utary flowers, but over most of the graves lay silence and withered leaves with only the fragrance that their own shadowy memories could waken in living minds.
They reached the top of a hill where they were fronted by a tall, round head-stone, freckled with dark spots of damp and half grown over with vines.
"Marger> 'Lee," she read; "1844-1873. Wasn't she nice? She died when she was twenty-nine. Dear Margery Lee," she added softly. "Can't you see her, Harry?"
"Yes, Sally Carrol."
He felt a little hand insert itself into his.
"She was dark, I think; and she always wore her hair with a ribbon in it, and gorgeous hoop- skirts of alice blue and old rose."
"Yes."
"Oh, she was sweet, Harry! And she was the sort of girl born to stand on a wide, pillared porch and welcome folks in. I think perhaps a lot of men went away to war meanin' to come back to her; but maybe none of 'em ever did."
He stooped down close to the stone, hunting for any record of marriage.
"There's nothing here to show."
"Of course not. How could there be anything there better than just 'Margery Lee,' and that elo quent date?"
She drew close to him and an unexpected lump
58 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
came into his throat as her yellow hair brushed his cheek.
"You see how she was, don't you, Harry?"
"I see," he agreed gently. "I see through your precious eyes. You're beautiful now, so I know she must have been."
Silent and close they stood, and he could feel her shoulders trembling a little. An ambling breeze swept up the hill and stirred the brim of her floppidy hat.
"Let's go down there!"
She was pointing to a flat stretch on the other side of the hill where along the green turf were a thou sand grayish- white crosses stretching in endless, ordered rows like the stacked arms of a battalion.
"Those are the Confederate dead," said SaUy Carrol simply.
They walked along and read the inscriptions, always only a name and a date, sometimes quite in decipherable.
"The last row is the saddest — see, 'way over there. Every cross has just a date on it, and the word ' Unknown.'"
She looked at him and her eyes brimmed with tears.
"I can't tell you how real it is to me, darling — if you don't know."
"How you feel about it is beautiful to me."
"No, no, it's not me, it's them — that old time that I've tried to have live in me. These were just men, unimportant evidently or they wouldn't have
THE ICE PALACE 59
been ' unknown '; but they died for the most beauti ful thing in the world — the dead South. You see," she continued, her voice still husky, her eyes glisten ing with tears, "people have these dreams they fasten onto things, and I've always grown up with that dream. It was so easy because it was all dead and there weren't any disillusions comin' to me. I've tried in a way to live up to those past standards of noblesse oblige — there's just the last remnants of it, you know, like the roses of an old garden dying all round us — streaks of strange courtliness and chivalry in some of these boys an' stories I used to hear from a Confederate soldier who lived next door, and a few old darkies. Oh, Harry, there was something, there was something! I couldn't ever make you understand, but it was there."
"I understand," he assured her again quietly.
Sally Carrol smiled and dried her eyes on the tip of a handkerchief protruding from his breast pocket.
"You don't feel depressed, do you, lover? Even when I cry I'm happy here, and I get a sort of strength from it."
Hand in hand they turned and walked slowly away. Finding soft grass she drew him down to a seat beside her with their backs against the rem nants of a low broken wall.
"Wish those three old women would clear out," he complained. "I want to kiss you, Sally Carrol."
"Me, too."
They waited impatiently for the three bent fig ures to move off, and then she kissed him until the
60 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
sky seemed to fade out and all her smiles and tears to vanish in an ecstasy of eternal seconds.
Afterward they walked slowly back together, while on the corners twilight played at somnolent black-and-white checkers with the end of day.
"You'll be up about mid- January," he said, "and you've got to stay a month at least. It'll be slick. There's a winter carnival on, and if youVe never really seen snow it'll be like fairy-land to you. There'll be skating and skiing and tobogganing and sleigh-riding, and all sorts of torchlight parades on snow-shoes. They haven't had one for years, so they're going to make it a knock-out."
"Will I be cold, Harry?" she asked suddenly.
"You certainly won't. You may freeze your nose, but you won't be shivery cold. It's hard and dry, you know."
"I guess I'm a summer child. I don't like any cold I've ever seen."
She broke off and they were both silent for a minute.
"Sally Carrol," he said very slowly, "what do you say to — March?"
"I say I love you."
"March?"
"March, Harry."
HI
All night in the Pullman it was very cold. She rang for the porter to ask for another blanket, and when he couldn't give her one she tried vainly, by
THE ICE PALACE 61
squeezing down into the bottom of her berth and doubling back the bedclothes, to snatch a few hours' sleep. She wanted to look her best in the morning.
She rose at six and sliding uncomfortably into her clothes stumbled up to the diner for a cup of coffee. The snow had filtered into the vestibules and cov ered the floor with a slippery coating. It was in triguing, this cold, it crept in everywhere. Her breath was quite visible and she blew into the air with a naive enjoyment. Seated in the diner she stared out the window at white hills and valleys and scattered pines whose every branch was a green platter for a cold feast of snow. Sometimes a solitary farmhouse would fly by, ugly and bleak and lone on the white waste; and with each one she had an instant of chill compassion for the souls shut in there waiting for spring.
As she left the diner and swayed back into the Pullman she experienced a surging rush of energy and wondered if she was feeling the bracing air of which Harry had spoken. This was the North, tha North — her land now !
"Then blow, ye winds, heigho ! A-roving I will go,"
she chanted exultantly to herself.
" What's 'at?" inquired the porter politely.
" I said :' Brush me off.'"
The long wires of the telegraph-poles doubled;
62 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
two tracks ran up beside the train — three — four; came a succession of white-roofed houses, a glimpse of a trolley-car with frosted windows, streets — more streets — the city.
She stood for a dazed moment in the frosty sta tion before she saw three fur-bundled figures de scending upon her.
"There she is!"
"Oh, Sally Carrol!"
Sally Carrol dropped her bag.
"Hi!"
A faintly familiar icy-cold face kissed her, and then she was in a group of faces all apparently emit ting great clouds of heavy smoke; she was shaking hands. There were Gordon, a short, eager man of thirty who looked like an amateur knocked-about model for Harry, and his wife, Myra, a listless lady with flaxen hair under a fur automobile cap. Al most immediately Sally Carrol thought of her as vaguely Scandinavian. A cheerful chauffeur adopted her bag, and amid ricochets of half-phrases, excla mations, and perfunctory listless "my dears" from Myra, they swept each other from the station.
Then they were in a sedan bound through a crooked succession of snowy streets where dozens of little boys were hitching sleds behind grocery wagons and automobiles.
"Oh," cried Sally Carrol, "I want to do that! Can we, Harry?"
"That's for kids. But we might "
"It looks like such a circus !" she said regretfully.
THE ICE PALACE 63
Home was a rambling frame house set on a white lap of snow, and there she met a big, gray-haired man of whom she approved, and a lady who was like an egg, and who kissed her — these were Harry's parents. There was a breathless indescribable hour crammed full of half-sentences, hot water, bacon and eggs and confusion; and after that she was alone with Harry in the library, asking him if she dared smoke.
It was a large room with a Madonna over the fire place and rows upon rows of books in covers of light gold and dark gold and shiny red. All the chairs had little lace squares where one's head should rest, the couch was just comfortable, the books looked as if they had been read — some — and Sally Carrol had an instantaneous vision of the battered old library at home, with her father's huge medical books, and the oil-paintings of her three great-uncles, and the old couch that had been mended up for forty-five years and was still luxurious to dream in. This room struck her as being neither attractive nor particularly otherwise. It was simply a room with a lot of fairly expensive things in it that all looked about fifteen years old.
"What do you think of it up here?" demanded Harry eagerly. "Does it surprise you? Is it what you expected, I mean?"
"You are, Harry," she said quietly, and reached out her arms to him.
But after a brief kiss he seemed anxious to extort enthusiasm from her.
64 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
"The town, I mean. Do you like it? Can you feel the pep in the air?"
"Oh, Harry," she laughed, "you'll have to give me time. You can't just fling questions at me."
She puffed at her cigarette with a sigh of con tentment.
"One thing I want to ask you," he began rather apologetically; "you Southerners put quite an emphasis on family, and all that — not that it isn't quite all right, but you'll find it a little different here. I mean — you'll notice a lot of things that'll seem to you sort of vulgar display at first, Sally Carrol; but just remember that this is a three- generation town. Everybody has a father, and about half of us have grandfathers. Back of that we don't go."
"Of course," she murmured.
"Our grandfathers, you see, founded the place, and a lot of them had to take some pretty queer jobs while they were doing the founding. For in stance, there's one woman who at present is about the social model for the town; well, her father was the first public ash man — things like that."
"Why," said Sally Carrol, puzzled, "did you s'pose I was goin' to make remarks about people?"
"Not at all," interrupted Harry; "and I'm not apologizing for any one either. It's just that — well, a Southern girl came up here last summer and said some unfortunate things, and — oh, I just thought I'd tell you."
Sally Carrol felt suddenly indignant — as though
THE ICE PALACE 65
she had been unjustly spanked — but Harry evi dently considered the subject closed, for he went on with a great surge of enthusiasm.
"It's carnival time, you know. First in ten years. And there's an ice palace they're building now that's the first they've had since eighty-five. Built out of blocks of the clearest ice they could find — on a tremendous scale."
She rose and walking to the window pushed aside the heavy Turkish portieres and looked out.
"Oh!" she cried suddenly. "There's two little boys makin' a snow man ! Harry, do you reckon I can go out an' help 'em?"
"You dream! Come here and kiss me."
She left the window rather reluctantly.
"I don't guess this is a very kissable climate, is it? I mean, it makes you so you don't want to sit round, doesn't it?"
"We're not going to. I've got a vacation for the first week you're here, and there's a dinner-dance to-night."
"Oh, Harry," she confessed, subsiding in a heap, half in his lap, half in the pillows, "I sure do feel confused. I haven't got an idea whether I'll like it or not, an' I don't know what people expect, or anythin'. You'll have to tell me, honey."
"I'll tell you," he said softly, "if you'll just tell me you're glad to be here."
"Glad — just awful glad!" she whispered, insinu ating herself into his arms in her own peculiar way. "Where you are is home for me, Harry."
66 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
And as she said this she had the feeling for almost the first time in her life that she was acting a part.
That night, amid the gleaming candles of a dinner-party, where the men seemed to do most of the talking while the girls sat in a haughty and ex pensive aloofness, even Harry's presence on her left failed to make her feel at home.
" They're a good-looking crowd, don't you think ? " he demanded. "Just look round. There's Spud Hubbard, tackle at Princeton last year, and Junie Morton — he and the red-haired fellow next to him were both Yale hockey captains; Junie was in my class. Why, the best athletes in the world come from these States round here. This is a man's country, I tell you. Look at John J. Fishburn !"
"Who's he?" asked Sally Carrol innocently.
"Don't you know?"
"I've heard the name."
" Greatest wheat man in the Northwest, and one of the greatest financiers in the country.""
She turned suddenly to a voice on her right.
"I guess they forgot to introduce us. My name's Roger Patton."
"My name is Sally Carrol Happer," she said graciously.
"Yes, I know. Harry told me you were coming."
"You a relative?"
"No, I'm a professor."
"Oh," she laughed.
"At the university. You're from the South, aren't you?"
THE ICE PALACE 67
"Yes; Tarleton, Georgia."
She liked him immediately — a reddish-brown mustache under watery blue eyes that had some thing in them that these other eyes lacked, some quality of appreciation. They exchanged stray sentences through dinner, and she made up her mind to see him again.
After coffee she was introduced to numerous good- looking young men who danced with conscious pre cision and seemed to take it for granted that she wanted to talk about nothing except Harry.
"Heavens," she thought, "they talk as if my being engaged made me older than they are — as if I'd tell their mothers on them!"
In the South an engaged girl, even a young mar ried woman, expected the same amount of half- affectionate badinage and flattery that would be accorded a debutante, but here all that seemed banned. One young man, after getting well started on the subject of Sally Carrol's eyes, and how they had allured him ever since she entered the room, went into a violent confusion when he found she was visiting the Bellamys — was Harry's fianc£e. He seemed to feel as though he had made some risque and inexcusable blunder, became immediately formal, and left her at the first opportunity.
She was rather glad when Roger Patton cut in on her and suggested that they sit out a while.
"Well," he inquired, blinking cheerily, "how's Carmen from the South?"
"Mighty fine. How's — how's Dangerous Dan
68 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
McGrew? Sorry, but he's the only Northerner I know much about."
He seemed to enjoy that.
"Of course," he confessed, "as a professor of literature I'm not supposed to have read Dangerous Dan McGrew."
"Are you a native?"
"No, I'm a Philadelphian. Imported from Har vard to teach French. But I've been here ten years."
"Nine years, three hundred an' sixty-four days longer than me."
"Like it here?"
"Uh-huh. Sure do!"
"Really?"
"Well, why not? Don't I look as if I were havin' a good time?"
"I saw you look out the window a minute ago — and shiver."
"Just my imagination," laughed Sally Carrol. "I'm used to havin' every thin' quiet outside, an' sometimes I look out an' see a flurry of snow, an' it's just as if somethin' dead was movin'."
He nodded appreciatively.
"Ever been North before?"
"Spent two Julys in Asheville, North Carolina."
"Nice-looking crowd, aren't they?" suggested Patton, indicating the swirling floor.
Sally Carrol started. This had been Harry's re mark.
" Sure are ! They're— canine."
THE ICE PALACE 69
"What?"
She flushed.
"I'm sorry; that sounded worse than I meant it. You see I always think of people as feline or canine, irrespective of sex."
"Which are you?"
"I'm feline. So are you. So are most Southern men an' most of these girls here."
" What's Harry?"
"Harry's canine distinctly. All the men IVe met to-night seem to be canine."
"What does ' canine' imply? A certain conscious | masculinity as opposed to subtlety?"
"Reckon so. I never analyzed it — only I just look at people an' say ' canine' or l feline' right off. It's right absurd, I guess."
"Not at all. I'm interested. I used to have a theory about these people. I think they're freezing up."
"What?"
"I think they're growing like Swedes — Ibsenesque, you know. Very gradually getting gloomy and melancholy. It's these long winters. Ever read any Ibsen?"
She shook her head.
"Well, you find in his characters a certain brood- injyjjgidit.y:. They're righteous, narrow, and cheer less, without infinite possibilities for great sorrow or joy."
"Without smiles or tears?"
"Exactly. That's my theory. You see there
70 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
are thousands of Swedes up here. They come, I imagine, because the climate is very much like their own, and there's been a gradual mingling. There're probably not half a dozen here to-night, but — we've had four Swedish governors. Am I boring you?'
"I'm mighty interested."
"Your future sister-in-law is half Swedish. Per sonally I like her, but my theory is that Swedes re act rather badly on us as a whole. Scandinavians, you know, have the largest suicide rate in the world."
"Why do you live here if it's st) depressing?"
" Oh, it doesn't get me. I'm pretty well cloistered, and I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway."
"But writers all speak about the South being tragic. You know — Spanish senoritas, black hair and daggers an' haunting music."
He shook his head.
"No, the Northern races are the tragic races — they don't indulge in the cheering luxury of tears."
Sally Carrol thought of her graveyard. She sup posed that that was vaguely what she had meant when she said it didn't depress her.
"The Italians are about the gayest people in the world — but it's a dull subject," he broke off. " Any way, I want to tell you you're marrying a pretty fine man."
Sally Carrol was moved by an impulse of con fidence.
"I know. I'm the sort of person who wants to
THE ICE PALACE 71
be taken care of after a certain point, and I feel sure I will be."
"Shall we dance? You know," he continued as they rose, "it's encouraging to find a girl who knows what she's marrying for. Nine-tenths of them think of it as a sort of walking into a moving-picture sunset."
She laughed, and liked him immensely.
Two hours later on the way home she nestled near Harry in the back seat.
"Oh, Harry," she whispered, "it's so co-old!"
"But it's warm in here, darling girl."
"But outside it's cold; and oh, that howling wind!"
She buried her face deep in his fur coat and trem bled involuntarily as his cold lips kissed the tip of her ear.
IV
The first week of her visit passed in a whirl. She had her promised toboggan-ride at the back of an automobile through a chill January twilight. Swathed in furs she put in a morning tobogganing on the country-club hill; even tried skiing, to sail through the air for a glorious moment and then land in a tangled laughing bundle on a soft snow drift. She liked all the winter sports, except an afternoon spent snow-shoeing over a glaring plain under pale yellow sunshine, but she soon realized that these things were for children — that she was
72 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
being humored and that the enjoyment round her was only a reflection of her own.
At first the Bellamy family puzzled her. The men were reliable and she liked them; to Mr. Bel lamy especially, with his iron-gray hair and ener getic dignity, she took an immediate fancy, once she found that he was born in Kentucky; this made of him a link between the old life and the new. But toward the women she felt a definite hostility. Myra, her future sister-in-law, seemed the essence of spiritless conventionality. Her conversation was so utterly devoid of personality that Sally Carrol, who came from a country where a certain amount of charm and assurance could be taken for granted in the women, was inclined to despise her.
"If those women aren't beautiful," she thought, "they're nothing. They just fade out when you look at them. They're glorified domestics. Men are the centre of every mixed group."
Lastly there was Mrs. Bellamy, whom Sally Car rol detested. The first day's impression of an egg had been confirmed — an egg with a cracked, veiny voice and such an ungracious dumpiness of carriage that Sally Carrol felt that if she once fell she would surely scramble. In addition, Mrs. Bellamy seemed to typify the town in being innately hostile to strangers. She called Sally Carrol "Sally," and could not be persuaded that the double name was anything more than a tedious ridiculous nickname. To Sally Carrol this shortening of her name was like presenting her to the public half clothed. She loved
THE ICE PALACE 73
"Sally Carrol"; she loathed "Sally." She knew also that Harry's mother disapproved of her bobbed hair; and she had never dared smoke down-stairs after that first day when Mrs. Bellamy had come into the library sniffing violently.
Of all the men she met she preferred Roger Pat- ton, who was a frequent visitor at the house. He never again alluded to the Ibsenesque tendency of the populace, but when he came in one day and found her curled upon the sofa bent over "Peer Gynt" he laughed and told her to forget what he'd said — that it was all rot.
And then one afternoon in her second week she and Harry hovered on the edge of a dangerously steep quarrel. She considered that he precipitated it entirely, though the Serbia in the case was an unknown man who had not had his trousers pressed.
They had been walking homeward between mounds of high-piled snow and under a sun which Sally Car rol scarcely recognized. They passed a little girl done up in gray wool until she resembled a small Teddy bear, and Sally Carrol could not resist a gasp of maternal appreciation.
"Look! Harry!"
"What?"
"That little girl--did you see her face?"
"Yes, why?"
"It was red as a little strawberry. Oh, she was cute!"
"Why, your own face is almost as red as that already ! Everybody's healthy here. We're out in
74 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
the cold as soon as we're old enough to walk. Won derful climate !"
She looked at him and had to agree. He was mighty healthy-looking; so was his brother. And she had noticed the new red in her own cheeks that very morning.
Suddenly their glances were caught and held, and they stared for a moment at the street-corner ahead of them. A man was standing there, his knees bent, his eyes gazing upward with a tense expres sion as though he were about to make a leap toward the chilly sky. And then they both exploded into a shout of laughter, for coming closer they discov ered it had been a ludicrous momentary illusion pro duced by the extreme bagginess of the man's trou sers.
"Reckon that's one on us," she laughed.
"He must be a Southerner, judging by those trousers," suggested Harry mischievously.
"Why, Harry!"
Her surprised look must have irritated him.
"Those damn Southerners!"
Sally Carrol's eyes flashed.
"Don't call 'em that!"
"I'm sorry, dear," said Harry, malignantly apolo getic, " but you know what I think of them. They're sort of — sort of degenerates — not at all like the old Southerners. They've lived so long down there with all the colored people that they've gotten lazy and shiftless."
"Hush your mouth, Harry!" she cried angrily.
THE ICE PALACE 75
"They're not ! They may be lazy — anybody would be in that climate — but they're my best friends, an' I don't want to hear 'em criticised in any such sweepin' way. Some of 'em are the finest men in the world."
"Oh, I know. They're all right when they come North to college, but of all the hangdog, ill-dressed, slovenly lot I ever saw, a bunch of small-town Southerners are the worst!"
Sally Carrol was clinching her gloved hands and biting her lip furiously.
"Why," continued Harry, "there was one in my class at New Haven, and we all thought that at last we'd found the true type of Southern aristocrat* but it turned out that he wasn't an aristocrat at all —just the son of a Northern carpetbagger, who owned about all the cotton round Mobile."
"A Southerner wouldn't talk the way you're talk ing now," she said evenly.
"They haven't the energy!"
"Or the somethin' else."
"I'm sorry, Sally Carrol, but I've heard you say yourself that you'd never marry "
"That's quite different. I told you I wouldn't want to tie my life to any of the boys that are round Tarleton now, but I never made any sweepin' gen eralities."
They walked along in silence.
"I probably spread it on a bit thick, Sally Car rol. I'm sorry."
She nodded but made no answer. Five minutes
76 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
later as they stood in the hallway she suddenly threw her arms round him.
"Oh, Harry," she cried, her eyes brimming with tears, "let's get married next week. I'm afraid of having fusses like that. I'm afraid, Harry. It wouldn't be that way if we were married."
But Harry, being in the wrong, was still irritated.
"That'd be idiotic. We decided on March."
The tears in Sally Carrol's eyes faded; her expres sion hardened slightly.
"Very well — I suppose I shouldn't have said that."
Harry melted.
"Dear little nut!" he cried. "Come and kiss me and let's forget."
That very night at the end of a vaudeville per formance the orchestra played "Dixie" and Sally Carrol felt something stronger and more enduring than her tears and smiles of the day brim up inside her. She leaned forward gripping the arms of her chair until her face grew crimson.
"Sort of get you, dear?" whispered Harry.
But she did not hear him. To the spirited throb of the violins and the inspiring beat of the kettle drums her own old ghosts were marching by and on into the darkness, and as fifes whistled and sighed in the low encore they seemed so nearly out of sight that she could have waved good-by.
"Away, Away,
Away down South in Dixie ! Away, away,
Away down South in Dixie!"
THE ICE PALACE 77
It was a particularly cold night. A sudden thaw had nearly cleared the streets the day before, but now they were traversed again with a powdery wraith of loose snow that travelled hi wavy lines before the feet of the wind, and filled the lower air with a fine-particled mist. There was no sky- only a dark, ominous tent that draped hi the tops of the streets and was in reality a vast approaching army of snowflakes — while over it all, chilling away the comfort from the brown-and-green glow of lighted windows and muffling the steady trot of the horse pulling their sleigh, interminably washed the north wind. It was a dismal town after all, she thought — dismal.
Sometimes at night it had seemed to her as though no one lived here — they had all gone long ago — leaving lighted houses to be covered in time by tombing heaps of sleet. Oh, if there should be snow on her grave ! To be beneath great piles of it all winter long, where even her headstone would be a light shadow against light shadows. Her grave — a grave that should be flower-strewn and washed with sun and rain.
She thought again of those isolated country houses that her train had passed, and of the life there the long winter through — the ceaseless glare through the windows, the crust forming on the soft drifts of snow, finally the slow, cheerless melting, and the harsh spring of which Roger Patton had told her.
78 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
Her spring — to lose it forever — with its lilacs and the lazy sweetness it stirred in her heart. She was laying away that spring — afterward she would lay away that sweetness.
With a gradual insistence the storm broke. Sally Carrol felt a film of flakes melt quickly on her eye lashes, and Harry reached over a furry arm and drew down her complicated flannel cap. Then the small flakes came hi skirmish-line, and the horse bent his neck patiently as a transparency of white appeared momentarily on his coat.
"Oh, he's cold, Harry," she said quickly.
"Who? The horse? Oh, no, he isn't. He likes it!"
After another ten minutes they turned a corner and came hi sight of their destination. On a tall hill outlined in vivid glaring green against the wintry sky stood the ice palace. It was three stories in the air, with battlements and embrasures and narrow icicled windows, and the innumerable electric lights inside made a gorgeous transparency of the great central hall. Sally Carrol clutched Harry's hand under the fur robe.
"It's beautiful !" he cried excitedly. "My goUy, it's beautiful, isn't it ! They haven't had one here since eighty-five!"
Somehow the notion of there not having been one since eighty-five oppressed her. Ice was a ghost, and this mansion of it was surely peopled by those shades of the eighties, with pale faces and blurred snow-filled hair.
THE ICE PALACE 79
"Come on, dear," said Harry.
She followed him out of the sleigh and waited while he hitched the horse. A party of four- Gordon, Myra, Roger Patton, and another girl- drew up beside them with a mighty jingle of bells. There were quite a crowd already, bundled in fur or sheepskin, shouting and calling to each other as they moved through the snow, which was now so thick that people could scarcely be distinguished a few yards away.
"It's a hundred and seventy feet tall," Harry was saying to a muffled figure beside him as they trudged toward the entrance; "covers six thousand square yards."
She caught snatches of conversation: "One main hall"— "walls twenty to forty inches thick"— "and the ice cave has almost a mile of — " — "this Canuck who built it —
They found their way inside, and dazed by the magic of the great crystal walls Sally Carrol found herself repeating over and over two lines from "KublaKhan":
" It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !"
In the great glittering cavern with the dark shut out she took a seat on a wooden bench, and the evening's oppression lifted. Harry was right — it was beautiful; and her gaze travelled the smooth surface of the walls, the blocks for which had been
8o FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
selected for their purity and clearness to obtain this opalescent, translucent effect.
"Look! Here we go — oh, boy!" cried Harry.
A band in a far corner struck up "Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here!" which echoed over to them in wild muddled acoustics, and then the lights suddenly went out; silence seemed to flow down the icy sides and sweep over them. Sally Carrol could still see her white breath in the darkness, and a dim row of pale faces over on the other side.
The music eased to a sighing complaint, and from outside drifted in the full-throated resonant chant of the marching clubs. It grew louder like some paean of a viking tribe traversing an ancient wild; it swelled — they were coming nearer; then a row of torches appeared, and another and another, and keeping tune with their moccasined feet a long column of gray-mackinawed figures swept in, snow- shoes slung at their shoulders, torches soaring and flickering as their voices rose along the great walls.
The gray column ended and another followed, the light streaming luridly this time over red toboggan caps and flaming crimson mackinaws, and as they entered they took up the refrain; then came a long platoon of blue and white, of green, of white, of brown and yellow.
"Those white ones are the Wacouta Club," whis pered Harry eagerly. "Those are the men you've met round at dances."
The volume of the voices grew; the great cavern was a phantasmagoria of torches waving m great
THE ICE PALACE 81
banks of fire, of colors and the rhythm of soft-leather steps. The leading -column turned and halted, pla toon deployed in front of platoon until the whole procession made a solid flag of flame, and then from thousands of voices burst a mighty shout that filled the air like a crash of thunder, and sent the torches wavering. It was magnificent, it was tremendous ! To Sally Carrol it was the North offering sacrifice on some mighty altar to the gray pagan God of Snow. As the shout died the band struck up again and there came more singing, and then long reverberating cheers by each dub. She sat very quiet listening while the staccato cries rent the stillness; and then she started, for there was a volley of explosion, and great clouds of smoke went up here and there through the cavern — the flash-light photographers at work — and the council was over. With the band at their head the clubs formed in column once more, took up their chant, and began to march out.
"Come on!" shouted Harry. "We want to see the labyrinths down-stairs before they turn the lights off!"
They all rose and started toward the chute — Harry and Sally Carrol in the lead, her little mitten buried in his big fur gantlet. At the bottom of the chute was a long empty room of ice, with the ceiling so low that they had to stoop — and their hands were parted. Before she realized what he intended Harry had darted down one of the half-dozen glittering pas sages that opened into the room and was only a vague receding blot against the green shimmer.
82 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
" Harry !" she caUed.
"Come on!" he cried back.
She looked round the empty chamber; the rest of the party had evidently decided to go home, were already outside somewhere in the blundering snow. She hesitated and then darted in after Harry.
"Harry!" she shouted.
She had reached a turning-point thirty feet down; she heard a faint muffled answer far to the left, and with a touch of panic fled toward it. She passed another turning, two more yawning alleys.
"Harry!"
No answer. She started to run straight forward, and then turned like lightning and sped back the way she had come, enveloped in a sudden icy terror.
She reached a turn — was it here? — took the left and came to what should have been the outlet into the long, low room, but it was only another glitter ing passage with darkness at the end. She called again, but the walls gave back a flat, lifeless echo with no reverberations. Retracing her steps she turned another corner, this tune following a wide passage. It was like the green lane between the parted waters of the Red Sea, like a damp vault connecting empty tombs.
She slipped a little now as she walked, for ice had formed on the bottom of her overshoes; she had to run her gloves along the half-slippery, half- sticky walls to keep her balance.
"Harry!"
THE ICE PALACE 83
Still no answer. The sound she made bounced mockingly down to the end of the passage.
Then on an instant the lights went out, and she was in complete darkness. She gave a small, fright ened cry, and sank down into a cold little heap on the ice. She felt her left knee do something as she fell, but she scarcely noticed it as some deep terror far greater than any fear of being lost settled upon her. She was alone with this presence that came out of the North, the dreary loneliness that rose from ice-bound whalers in the Arctic seas, from smokeless, trackless wastes where were strewn the whitened bones of adventure. It was an icy breath of death; it was rolling down low across the land to clutch at her.
With a furious, despairing energy she rose again and started blindly down the darkness. She must get out. She might be lost in here for days, freeze to death and lie embedded hi the ice like corpses she had read of, kept perfectly preserved until the melting of a glacier. Harry probably thought she had left with the others — he had gone by now; no one would know until late next day. She reached pitifully for the wall. Forty inches thick, they had said — forty inches thick !
"Oh!"
On both sides of her along the walls she felt things creeping, damp souls that haunted this palace, this town, this North.
"Oh, send somebody — send somebody !" she cried aloud.
84 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
Clark Darrow — he would understand; or Joe Ewing; she couldn't be left here to wander forever —to be frozen, heart, body, and soul. This her — this Sally Carrol! Why, she was a happy thing. She was a happy little girl. She liked warmth and summer and Dixie. These things were foreign — foreign.
"You're not crying," something said aloud. "You'll never cry any more. Your tears would just freeze; all tears freeze up here!"
She sprawled full length on the ice.
"Oh, God!" she faltered.
A long single file of minutes went by, and with a great weariness she felt her eyes closing. Then some one seemed to sit down near her and take her face in warm, soft hands. She looked up grate fully.
"Why, it's Margery Lee," she crooned softly to herself. "I knew you'd come." It really was Margery Lee, and she was just as Sally Carrol had known she would be, with a young, white brow, and wide, welcoming eyes, and a hoop-skirt of some soft material that was quite comforting to rest on.
"Margery Lee."
It was getting darker now and darker — all those tombstones ought to be repainted, sure enough, only that would spoil 'em, of course. Still, you ought to be able to see 'em.
Then after a succession of moments that went fast and then slow, but seemed to be ultimately re solving themselves into a multitude of blurred rays
THE ICE PALACE 85
converging toward a pale-yellow sun, she heard a great cracking noise break her new-found stillness.
It was the sun, it was a light; a torch, and a torch beyond that, and another one, and voices; a face took flesh below the torch, heavy arms raised her, and she felt something on her cheek — it felt wet. Some one had seized her and was rubbing her face with snow. How ridiculous — with snow !
" Sally Carrol ! Sally Carrol ! "
It was Dangerous Dan McGrew; and two other faces she didn't know.
"Child, child! We've been looking for you two hours ! Harry's half -crazy ! "
Things came rushing back into place — the sing ing, the torches, the great shout of the marching clubs. She squirmed in Patton's arms and gave a long low cry.
"Oh, I want to get out of here ! I'm going back home. Take me home" — her voice rose to a scream that sent a chill to Harry's heart as he came racing down the next passage — "to-morrow!" she cried with delirious, unrestrained passion — "To-morrow! To-morrow ! To-morrow ! "
VI
The wealth of golden sunlight poured a quite enervating yet oddly comforting heat over the house where day long it faced the dusty stretch of road. Two birds were making a great to-do in a cool spot found among the branches of a tree next door, and
86 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
down the street a colored woman was announcing herself melodiously as a purveyor of strawberries. It was April afternoon.
Sally Carrol Happer, resting her chin on her arm, and her arm on an old window-seat, gazed sleepily down over the spangled dust whence the heat waves were rising for the first time this spring. She was watching a very ancient Ford turn a perilous corner and rattle and groan to a jolting stop at the end of the walk. She made no sound, and in a minute a strident familiar whistle rent the air. Sally Carrol smiled and blinked.
"Good mawnin'."
A head appeared tortuously from under the car- top below.
"Tain't mawnin', Sally Carrol."
"Sure enough!" she said in affected surprise. "I guess maybe not."
"What you doin'?"
"Eatin' green peach. 'Spect to die any minute."
Clark twisted himself a last impossible notch to get a view of her face.
"Water's warm as a kettla steam, Sally Carrol. Wanta go swimmin'?"
"Hate to move," sighed Sally Carrol lazily, "but I reckon so."
HEAD AND SHOULDERS
IN 1915 Horace Tarbox was thirteen years old. In that year he took the examinations for entrance to Princeton University and received the Grade A — excellent — in Caesar, Cicero, Vergil, Xenophon, Homer, Algebra, Plane Geometry, Solid Geometry, and Chemistry.
Two years later, while George M. Cohan was composing "Over There," Horace was leading the sophomore class by several lengths and digging out theses on "The Syllogism as an Obsolete Scholastic Form," and during the battle of Chateau-Thierry he was sitting at his desk deciding whether or not to wait until his seventeenth birthday before begin ning his series of essays on "The Pragmatic Bias of the New Realists."
After a while some newsboy told him that the war was over, and he was glad, because it meant that Peat Brothers, publishers, would get out their new edition of "Spinoza's Improvement of the Un derstanding." Wars were all very well in their way, made young men self-reliant or something, but Horace felt that he could never forgive the President for allowing a brass band to play under his window on the night of the false armistice, causing him to leave three important sentences out of his thesis on "German Idealism."
87
88 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
The next year he went up to Yale to take his degree as Master of Arts.
He was seventeen then, tall and slender, with near-sighted gray eyes and an air of keeping himself utterly detached from the mere words he let drop.
"I never feel as though I'm talking to him,"
expostulated Professor Dillinger to a sympathetic
I colleague. "He makes me feel as though I were
! talking to his representative. I always expect him
to say: 'Well, I'll ask myself and find out.'"
And then, just as nonchalantly as though Horace Tarbox had been Mr. Beef the butcher or Mr. Hat the haberdasher, life reached in, seized him, handled him, stretched him, and unrolled him like a piece of Irish lace on a Saturday-afternoon bargain -counter.
To move in the literary fashion I should say that this was all because when way back in colonial days the hardy pioneers had come to a bald place in Connecticut and asked of each other, "Now, what shall we build here?" the hardiest one among 'em had answered: "Let's build a town where theatrical managers can try out musical comedies I" How afterward they founded Yale College there, to try the musical comedies on, is a story every one knows. At any rate one December, "Home James" opened at the Shubert, and all the students encored Marcia Meadow, who sang a song about the Blundering Blimp in the first act and did a shaky, shivery, celebrated dance in the last.
Marcia was nineteen. She didn't have wings, but audiences agreed generally that she didn't need
HEAD AND SHOULDERS 89
them. She was a blonde by natural pigment, and she wore no paint on the streets at high noon. Out side of that she was no better than most women.
It was Charlie Moon who promised her five thou sand Pall Malls if she would pay a call on Horace Tarbox, prodigy extraordinary. Charlie was a senior in Sheffield, and he and Horace were first cousins. They liked and pitied each other.
Horace had been particularly busy that night. The failure of the Frenchman Laurier to appreciate the significance of the new realists was preying on his mind. In fact, his only reaction to a low, clear- cut rap at his study was to make him speculate as to whether any rap would have actual existence without an ear there to hear it. He fancied he was verging more and more toward pragmatism. But at that moment, though he did not know it, he was verging with astounding rapidity toward some thing quite different.
The rap sounded — three seconds leaked by — the rap sounded.
"Come in," muttered Horace automatically.
He heard the door open and then close, but, bent over his book in the big armchair before the fire, he did not look up.
" Leave it on the bed in the other room," he said absently.
"Leave what on the bed in the other room?"
Marcia Meadow had to talk her songs, but her speaking voice was like byplay on a harp.
"The laundry."
90 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
" I can't."
Horace stirred impatiently in his chair.
" Why can't you?"
"Why, because I haven't got it."
"Hm!" he replied testily. "Suppose you go back and get it."
Across the fire from Horace was another easy- chair. He was accustomed to change to it in the course of an evening by way of exercise and variety. One chair he called Berkeley, the other he called Hume. He suddenly heard a sound as of a rustling, diaphanous form sinking into Hume. He glanced up.
"Well," said Marcia with the sweet smile she used in Act Two ("Oh, so the Duke liked my dancing !"), "Well, Omar Khayyam, here I am beside you singing in the wilderness."
Horace stared at her dazedly. The momentary suspicion came to him that she existed there only as a phantom of his imagination. Women didn't come into men's rooms and sink into men's Humes. Women brought laundry and took your seat in the street-car and married you later on when you were old enough- to know .fetters.
This woman had clearly materialized out of Hume. The very froth of her brown gauzy dress was an emanation from Hume's leather arm there ! If he looked long enough he would see Hume right through her and then he would be alone again in the room. He passed his fist across his eyes. He really must take up those trapeze exercises again.
HEAD AND SHOULDERS 91
"For Pete's sake, don't look so critical !" ob jected the emanation pleasantly. "I feel as if you were going to wish me away with that patent dome of yours. And then there wouldn't be anything left of me except my shadow in your eyes."
Horace coughed. Coughing was one of his two gestures. When he talked you forgot he had a body at all. It was like hearing a phonograph record by a singer who had been dead a long time.
"What do you want?" he asked.
"I want them letters," whined Marcia melodra matically — "them letters of mine you bought from my grandsire in 1881."
Horace considered.
"I haven't got your letters," he said evenly. "I am only seventeen years old. My father was not born until March 3, 1879. You evidently have me confused with some one else."
"You're only seventeen?" repeated Marcia sus piciously.
"Only seventeen."
"I knew a girl," said Marcia reminiscently, "who went on the ten-twenty-thirty when she was sixteen. She was so stuck on herself that she could never say * sixteen' without putting the 'only' before it. We got to calling her 'Only Jessie.' And she's just where she was when she started — only worse. 'Only' is a bad habit, Omar — it sounds like an alibi."
"My name is not Omar."
"I know," agreed Marcia, nodding — "your name's
92 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
Horace. I just call you Omar because you remind me of a smoked cigarette."
"And I haven't your letters. I doubt if I've ever met your grandfather. In fact, I think it very improbable that you yourself were alive in 1881."
Marcia stared at him in wonder.
" Me — 1881 ? Why sure ! I was second-line stuff when the Florodora Sextette was still in the con vent. I was the original nurse to Mrs. Sol Smith's Juliette. Why, Omar, I was a canteen singer during the War of 1812."
Horace's mind made a sudden successful leap, and he grinned.
"Did Charlie Moon put you up to this?"
Marcia regarded him inscrutably.
"Who's Charlie Moon?"
"Small — wide nostrils — big ears."
She grew several inches and sniffed.
"I'm not in the habit of noticing my friends' nostrils."
"Then it was Charlie?"
Marcia bit her lip — and then yawned.
"Oh, let's change the subject, Omar. I'll pull a snore in this chair in a minute."
"Yes," replied Horace gravely, "Hume has often been considered soporific."
"Who's your friend — and will he die?"
Then of a sudden Horace Tarbox rose slenderly and began to pace the room with his hands in his pockets. This was his other gesture.
HEAD AND SHOULDERS 93
"I don't care for this," he said as if he were talk ing to himself — "at all. Not that I mind your being here — I don't. You're quite a pretty little thing, but I don't like Charlie Moon's sending you up here. Am I a laboratory experiment on which the janitors as well as the chemists can make experi ments? Is my intellectual development humorous in any way? Do I look like the pictures of the little Boston boy in the comic magazines? Has that callow ass, Moon, with his eternal tales about his weeTTin l^aris, any right to " .
"No," interrupted Marcia emphatically. "And you're a sweet boy. Come here and kiss me."
Horace stopped quickly in front of her.
"Why do you want me to kiss you?" he asked intently. "Do you just go round kissing people?"
"Why, yes," admitted Marcia, unruffled. "'At's all life is. Just going round kissing people."
"Well," replied Horace emphatically, "I must say your ideas are horribly garbled ! In the first place life isn't just that, and in the second place I won't kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can't get rid of habits. This year I've got in the habit of lolling in bed until seven-thirty."
Marcia nodded understandingly.
"Do you ever have any fun?" she asked.
"What do you mean by fun?"
"See here," said Marcia sternly, "I like you, Omar, but I wish you'd talk as if you had a line on what you were saying. You sound as if you were gargling a lot of words in your mouth and lost a
\r
94 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
bet every time you spilled a few. I asked you if you ever had any fun."
Horace shook his head.
"Later, perhaps," he answered. "You see I'm a plan. I'm an experiment. I don't say that I don't get tired of it sometimes — I do. Yet — oh, I can't explain ! But what you and Charlie Moon call fun wouldn't be fun to me."
"Please explain."
Horace stared at her, started to speak and then, changing his mind, resumed his walk. After an un successful attempt to determine whether or not he was looking at her Marcia smiled at him.
"Please explain."
Horace turned.
"If I do, will you promise to tell Charlie Moon that I wasn't in?"
"Uh-uh."
"Very well, then. Here's my history: I was a 'why' child. I wanted to see lie wheels go round. My father was a young economics professor at Princeton. He brought me up on the system of answering every question I asked him to the best of his ability. My response to that gave him the idea of making an experiment in precocity. To aid hi the massacre I had ear trouble — seven opera tions between the ages of nine and twelve. Of course this kept me apart from other boys and made me ripe for forcing. Anyway, while my generation was laboring through Uncle Remus I was honestly en joying Catullus in the original.
HEAD AND SHOULDERS 95
"I passed off my college examinations when I was thirteen because I couldn't help it. My chief associates were professors, and I took a tremendous pride in knowing that I had a fine intelligence, for though I was unusually gifted I was not abnormal in other ways. When I was sixteen I got tired of being a freak; I decided that some one had made a bad mistake. Still as I'd gone that far I concluded to finish it up by taking my degree of Master of Arts. My chief interest in life is the study of mod ern philosophy. I am a realist of the School of Anton Laurier — with Bergsonian trimmings — and I'll be eighteen years old in two months. That's all."
"Whew!" exclaimed Marcia. "That's enough! You do a neat job with the parts of speech."
"Satisfied?"
"No, you haven't kissed me."
"It's not in my programme," demurred Horace. "Understand that I don't pretend Ticf be above physical things. They have their place, but "
"Oh, don't be so darned reasonable!"
"I can't help it."
"I hate these slot-machine people."
"I assure you I — " began Horace.
"Oh, shut up!"
"My own rationality "
"I didn't say anything about your nationality. You're an Amuricun, ar'n't you?"
"Yes."
"Well, that's O. K. with me. I got a notion I
96 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
want to see you do something that isn't in your highbrow programme. I want to see if a what-ch- call-em with Brazilian trimmings — that thing you said you were — can be a little human."
Horace shook his head again.
"I won't kiss you."
"My life is blighted," muttered Marcia tragically. "I'm a beaten woman. I'll go through life without ever having a kiss with Brazilian trimmings." She sighed. "Anyways, Omar, will you come and see my show?"
"What show?"
"I'm a wicked actress from 'Home James' !"
"Light opera?"
"Yes — at a stretch. One of the characters is a Brazilian rice-planter. That might interest you."
"I saw 'The Bohemian Girl' once," reflected Horace aloud. "I enjoyed it — to some extent."
"Then you'll come?"
"Well, I'm— I'm "
"Oh, I know — you've got to run down to Brazil for the week-end."
"Not at all. I'd be delighted to come."
Marcia clapped her hands.
"Goodyforyou! I'll mail you a ticket — Thurs day night?"
"Why, I "
" Good ! Thursday night it is."
She stood up and walking close to him laid both hands on his shoulders.
"I like you, Omar. I'm sorry I tried to kid you.
HEAD AND SHOULDERS 97
I thought you'd be sort of frozen, but you're a nice boy."
He eyed her sardonically.
"I'm several thousand generations older than you are."
"You carry your age well."
They shook hands gravely.
"My name's Marcia Meadow," she said em phatically. "'Member it — Marcia Meadow. And I won't tell Charlie Moon you were in."
An instant later as she was skimming down the last flight of stairs three at a time she heard a voice call over the upper banister: "Oh, say "
She stopped and looked up — made out a vague form leaning over.
"Oh, say!" called the prodigy again. "Can you hear me?"
"Here's your connection, Omar."
"I hope I haven't given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational."
"Impression? Why, you didn't even give me the kiss ! Never fret — so long."
Two doors near her opened curiously at the sound of a feminine voice. A tentative cough sounded from above. Gathering her skirts, Marcia dived wildly down the last flight, and was swallowed up in the murky Connecticut air outside.
Up-stairs Horace paced the floor of his study. From time to time he glanced toward Berkeley wait ing there in suave dark-red respectability, an open book lying suggestively on his cushions. And then
g8 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
he found that his circuit of the floor was bringing him each tune nearer to Hume. There was some thing about Hume that was strangely and inex pressibly different. The diaphanous form still seemed hovering near, and had Horace sat there he would have felt as if he were sitting on a lady's lap. And though Horace couldn't have named the quality of difference, there was such a quality — quite intangible to the speculative mind, but real, nevertheless. Hume was radiating something that in all the two hundred years of his influence he had never radiated before. Hume was radiating attar of roses.
•%
II
On Thursday night Horace Tarbox sat in an aisle seat in the fifth row and witnessed "Home James." Oddly enough he found that he was en joying himself . The cynical students near him were annoyed at his audible appreciation of tune-honored jokes in the Hammerstein tradition. But Horace was waiting with anxiety for Marcia Meadow sing ing her song about a Jazz-bound Blundering Blimp. When she did appear, radiant under a floppity flower-faced hat, a warm glow settled over him, and when the song was over he did not join in the storm of applause. He felt somewhat numb.
In the intermission after the second act an usher materialized beside him, demanded to know if he were Mr. Tarbox, and then handed him a note
HEAD AND SHOULDERS 99
written in a round adolescent hand. Horace read it in some confusion, while the usher lingered with withering patience in the aisle.
"DEAR OMAR: After the show I always grow an awful hunger. If you want to satisfy it for me in the Taf t Grill just communicate your answer to the big-timber guide that brought this and oblige. Your friend,
MARCIA MEADOW."
"TeB her "— he coughed— " tell her that it will be quite all right. I'll meet her in front of the theatre."
The big-timber guide smiled arrogantly.
"I giss she meant for you to come roun' t' the stage door."
"Where— where is it?"
"Ou'side. Tunayulef. Down ee alley."
"What?"
"Ou'side. Turn to y' left ! Down ee alley !"
The arrogant person withdrew. A freshman be hind Horace snickered.
Then half an hour later, sitting in the Taft Grill opposite the hair that was yellow by natural pig ment, the prodigy was saying an odd thing.
"Do you have to do that dance in the last act?" he was asking earnestly — "I mean, would they dis miss you if you refused to do it?"
Marcia grinned.
"It's fun to do it. I like to do it."
100 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
And then Horace came out with a faux pas.
"I should think you'd detest it," he remarked succinctly. "The people behind me were making remarks about your bosom."
Marcia blushed fiery red.
"I can't help that," she said quickly. "The dance to me is only a sort of acrobatic stunt. Lord, it's hard enough to do! I rub liniment into my shoulders for an hour every night."
"Do you have — fun while you're on the stage?"
"Uh-huh — sure! I got hi the habit of having people look at me, Omar, and I like it."
"Hm !" Horace sank into a brownish study.
"How's the Brazilian trimmings?"
"Hm!" repeated Horace, and then after a pause: "Where does the play go from here?"
"New York."
"For how long?"
"All depends. Winter — maybe."
"Oh!"
"Coming up to lay eyes on me, Omar, or aren't you int'rested? Not as nice here, is it, as it was up in your room? I wish we was there now."
"I feel idiotic in this place," confessed Horace, looking round him nervously.
"Too bad ! We got along pretty well."
At this he looked suddenly so melancholy that she changed her tone, and reaching over patted his hand.
"Ever take an actress out to supper before?"
"No," said Horace miserably, "and I never will
HEAD AND SHOULDERS 101
again. I don't know why I came to-night. Here under all these lights and with all these people laughing and chattering I feel completely out of my sphere. I don't know what to talk to you about."
"We'll talk about me. We talked about you last time."
"Very well."
"Well, my name really is Meadow, but my first name isn't Marcia — it's Veronica. I'm nineteen. Question — how did the girl make her leap to the footlights? Answer — she was born in Passaic, New Jersey, and up to a year ago she got the right to breathe by pushing Nabiscoes in Marcel's tea-room in Trenton. She started going with a guy named Robbins, a singer in the Trent House cabaret, and he got her to try a song and dance with him one evening. In a month we were filling the supper- room every night. Then we went to New York with meet-my-friend letters thick as a pile of napkins.
"In two days we'd landed a job at Divinerries', and I learned to shimmy from a kid at the Palais Royal. We stayed at Divinerries' six months until one night Peter Boyce Wendell, the columnist, ate his milk -toast there. Next morning a poem about Marvellous Marcia came out in his newspaper, and within two days I had three vaudeville offers and a chance at the Midnight Frolic. I wrote Wendell a thank-you letter, and he printed it in his column — said that the style was like Carlyle's, only more rugged, and that I ought to quit dancing and do
102 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
North American literature. This got me a coupla more vaudeville offers and a chance as aixJngenue in a regular show. I took it — and here I am, Omar."
When she finished they sat for a moment in silence, she draping the last skeins of a Welsh rabbit on her fork and waiting for him to speak.
"Let's get out of here," he said suddenly.
Marcia's eyes hardened.
"What's the idea? Am I making you sick?"
"No, but I don't like it here. I don't like to be sitting here with you."
Without another word Marcia signalled for the waiter.
"What's the check?" she demanded briskly. "My part — the rabbit and the ginger ale."
Horace watched blankly as the waiter figured it.
"See here," he began, "I intended to pay for yours too. You're my guest."
With a half -sigh Marcia rose from the table and walked from the room. Horace, his face a docu ment in bewilderment, laid a bill down and followed her out, up the stairs and into the lobby. He over took her in front of the elevator and they faced each other.
"See here," he repeated, "you're my guest. Have I said something to offend you?"
After an instant of wonder Marcia's eyes soft ened. »
"You're a rude fella," she said slowly. "Don't you know you're rude?"
HEAD AND SHOULDERS 103
"I can't help it," said Horace with a directness she found quite disarming. " You know I like you."
"You said you didn't like being with me."
"I didn't like it."
"Why not?"
Fire blazed suddenly from the gray forests of his eyes.
"Because I didn't. I've formed the habit of liking you. I've been thinking of nothing much else for two days."
"Well, if you "
"Wait a minute," he interrupted. "I've got something to say. It's this: in six weeks I'll be eighteen years old. When I'm eighteen years old I'm coming up to New York to see you. Is there some place in New York where we can go and not have a lot of people in the room?"
"Sure!" smiled Marcia. "You can come up to my 'partment. Sleep on the couch, if you want to."
"I can't sleep on couches," he said shortly. "But I want to talk to you."
"Why, sure," repeated Marcia — "in my 'part ment."
In his excitement Horace put his hands in his pockets.
"All right — just so I can see you alone. I want to talk to you as we talked up in my room."
"Honey boy," cried Marcia, laughing, "is it that you want to kiss me?"
"Yes," Horace almost shouted. "I'll kiss you if you want me to."
104 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
The elevator man was looking at them reproach fully. Marcia edged toward the grated door.
"I'll drop you a post-card/' she said.
Horace's eyes were quite wild.
"Send me a post-card! I'll come up any time after January first. I'll be eighteen then."
And as she stepped into the elevator he coughed enigmatically, yet with a vague challenge, at the ceiling, and walked quickly away.
Ill
He was there again. She saw him when she took her first glance at the restless Manhattan audience — down in the front row with his head bent a bit forward and his gray eyes fixed on her. And she knew that to him they were alone together in a world where the high-rouged row of ballet faces and the massed whines of the violins were as imperceiva- ble as powder on a marble Venus. An instinctive defiance rose within her.
"Silly boy!" she said to herself hurriedly, and she didn't take her encore.
"What do they expect for a hundred a week — perpetual motion?" she grumbled to herself hi the wings.
"What's the trouble, Marcia?"
"Guy I don't like down in front."
During the last act as she waited for her specialty she had an odd attack of stage fright. She had never sent Horace the promised post-card. Last
HEAD AND SHOULDERS 105
night she had pretended not to see him — had hurried from the theatre immediately after her dance to pass a sleepless night in her apartment, thinking — as she had so often in the last month — of his pale, rather intent face, his slim, boyish figure, the merci less, unworldly abstraction that made him charming to her.
And now that he had come she felt vaguely sorry < —as though an unwonted responsibility was being forced on her.
"Infant prodigy!" she said aloud.
"What?" demanded the negro comedian stand ing beside her.
"Nothing — just talking about myself."
On the stage she felt better. This was her dance — and she always felt that the way she did it wasn't suggestive any more than to some men every pretty girl is suggestive. She made it a stunt.
"Uptown, downtown, jelly on a spoon, After sundown shiver by the moon."
He was not watching her now. She saw that clearly. He was looking very deliberately at a castle on the back drop, wearing that expression he had worn in the Taft Grill. A wave of exasperation swept over her — he was criticising her.
"That's the vibration that thr-ills me, Funny how affection fi-lls me, Uptown, downtown "
io6 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
Unconquerable revulsion seized her. She was suddenly and horribly conscious of her audience as she had never been since her first appearance. Was that a leer on a pallid face in the front row, a droop of disgust on one young girl's mouth? These shoul ders of hers — these shoulders shaking — were they hers? Were they real? Surely shoulders weren't made for this !
"Then — you'll see at a glance I'll need some funeral ushers with St. Vitus dance At the end of the world I'll "
The bassoon and two cellos crashed into a final chord. She paused and poised a moment on her toes with every muscle tense, her young face look ing out dully at the audience in what one young girl afterward called "such a curious, puzzled look," and then without bowing rushed from the stage. Into the dressing-room she sped, kicked out of one dress and into another, and caught a taxi outside.
Her apartment was very warm — small, it was, with a row of professional pictures and sets of Kip ling and O. Henry which she had bought once from a blue-eyed agent and read occasionally. And there were several chairs which matched, but were none of them comfortable, and a pink-shaded lamp with blackbirds painted on it and an atmosphere of rather stifled pink throughout. There were nice things in it — nice things unrelentingly hostile to each other, offsprings of a vicarious, impatient taste acting in stray moments. The worst was typified by a great
HEAD AND SHOULDERS 107
picture framed in oak bark of Passaic as seen from the Erie Railroad — altogether a frantic, oddly ex travagant, oddly jgeniicious attempt to make a cheer ful room. Marcia knew it was a failure.
Into this room came the prodigy and took her two hands awkwardly.
"I followed you this tune," he said.
"Oh!"
"I want you to marry me," he said.
Her arms went out to him. She kissed his mouth with a sort of passionate wholesomeness.
"There!"
"I love you," he said.
She kissed him again and then with a little sigh flung herself into an armchair and half lay there, shaken with absurd laughter.
"Why, you infant prodigy!" she cried.
"Very well, call me that if you want to. I once told you that I was ten thousand years older than you — I am."
She laughed again.
"I don't like to be disapproved of."
"No one's ever going to disapprove of you again."
"Omar," she asked, "why do you want to marry me?"
The prodigy rose and put his hands in his pockets.
"Because I love you, Marcia Meadow."
And then she stopped calling him Omar.
"Dear boy," she said, "you know I sort of love you. There's something about you — I can't tell what — that just puts my heart through the wringer
io8 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
every time I'm round you. But, honey — " She paused.
"But what?"
"But lots of things. But you're only just eigh teen, and I'm nearly twenty."
"Nonsense!" he interrupted. "Put it this way — that I'm in my nineteenth year and you're nine teen. That makes us pretty close — without count ing that other ten thousand years I mentioned."
Marcia laughed.
"But there are some more 'buts.' Your peo- pie »
"My people!" exclaimed the prodigy ferociously. "My people tried to make a monstrosity out of me." His face grew quite crimson at the enormity of what he was going to say. "My people can go way back and sit down!"
"My heavens!" cried Marcia in alarm. "All that? On tacks, I suppose."
"Tacks — yes," he agreed wildly — "on anything. The more I think of how they allowed me to become a little dried-up mummy "
"What makes you think you're that?" asked Marcia quietly — "me?"
"Yes. Every person I've met on the streets since I met you has made me jealous because they knew what love was before I did. I used to call it the ' sex impulse. ' Heavens ! ' '
"There's more 'buts,'" said Marcia.
"What are they?"
"How could we live?"
HEAD AND SHOULDERS 109
"I'll make a living."
" You're in college. "
"Do you think I care anything about taking a Master of Arts degree?"
"You want to be Master of Me, hey?"
"Yes! What? I mean, no!"
Marcia laughed, and crossing swiftly over sat hi his lap. He put his arm round her wildly and im planted the vestige of a kiss somewhere near her neck.
"There's something white about you," mused Marcia, "but it doesn't sound very logical."
"Oh, don't be so darned reasonable!"
"I can't help it," said Marcia.
"I hate these slot-machine people!"
"But we "
"Oh, shut up!"
And as Marcia couldn't talk through her ears she had to.
IV
Horace and Marcia were married early in Feb ruary. The sensation in academic circles both at Yale and Princeton was tremendous. Horace Tar- box, who at fourteen had been played up in the Sunday magazines sections of metropolitan news papers, was throwing over his career, his chance of being a world authority on American philosophy, by marrying a chorus girl — they made Marcia a chorus girl. But like all modern stories it was a four-and-a-half -day wonder.
no FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
They took a flat in Harlem. After two weeks' search, during which his idea of the value of aca demic knowledge faded unmercifully, Horace took a position as clerk with a South American export company — some one had told him that exporting was the coming thing. Marcia was to stay in her show for a few months — anyway until he got on his feet. He was getting a hundred and twenty-five to start with, and though of course they told him it was only a question of months until he would be earn ing double that, Marcia refused even to consider giving up the hundred and fifty a week that she was getting at the time.
"We'll call ourselves Head and Shoulders, dear," she said softly, "and the shoulders'!! have to keep shaking a little longer until the old head gets started."
"I hate it," he objected gloomily.
"Well," she replied emphatically, "your salary wouldn't keep us in a tenement. Don't think I want to be public — I don't. I want to be yours. But I'd be a half-wit to sit in one room and count the sunflowers on the wall-paper while I waited for you. When you pull down three hundred a month I'll quit."
And much as it hurt his pride, Horace had to admit that hers was the wiser course.
March mellowed into April. May read a gor geous riot act to the parks and waters of Manhattan, and they were very happy. Horace, who had no habits whatsoever — he had never had time to form any — proved the most adaptable of husbands, and
HEAD AND SHOULDERS in
as Marcia entirely lacked opinions on the subjeetsi that engrossed him there were very few joltings andl bumpings. Their minds moved in different spheres. Marcia acted as practical factotum, and Horace lived either hi his old world of abstract ideas or in a sort of triumphantly earthy worship and adora tion of his wife. She was a continual source of astonishment to him — the freshness and originality of her mind, her dynamic, clear-headed energy, and her unfailing good humor.
And Marcia's co-workers in the nine-o'clock show, whither she had transferred her talents, were im pressed with her tremendous pride in her husband's mental powers. Horace they knew only as a very slim, tight-lipped, and immature-looking young man, who waited every night to take her home.
" Horace," said Marcia one evening when she met him as usual at eleven, "you looked like a ghost standing there against the street lights. You losing weight?"
He shook his head vaguely.
"I don't know. They raised me to a hundred and thirty-five dollars to-day, and "
"I don't care," said Marcia severely. "You're killing yourself working at night. You read those big books on economy "
"Economics," corrected Horace.
"Well, you read 'em every night long after I'm asleep. And you're getting all stooped over like you were before we were married."
"But, Marcia, I've got to "
112 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
"No, you haven't, dear. I guess I'm running this shop for the present, and I won't let my fella ruin his health and eyes. You got to get some exercise."
"I do. Every morning I "
"Oh, I know! But those dumb-bells of yours wouldn't give a consumptive two degrees of fever. I mean real exercise. You've got to join a gym nasium. 'Member you told me you were such a trick gymnast once that they tried to get you out for the team in college and they couldn't because you had a standing date with Herb Spencer?"
"I used to enjoy it," mused Horace, "but it would take up too much tune now."
"All right," said Marcia. "I'll make a bargain with you. You join a gym and I'll read one of those books from the brown row of 'em."
"Tepys' Diary'? Why, that ought to be en joyable. He's very light."
"Not for me— he isn't. It'll be like digesting plate glass. But you been telling me how much it'd broaden my lookout. Well, you go to a gym three nights a week and I'll take one big dose of Sammy."
Horace hesitated.
"Well "
"Come on, now! You do some giant swings for me and I'll chase some culture for you."
So Horace finally consented, and all through a baking summer he spent three and sometimes four evenings a week experimenting on the trapeze in
HEAD AND SHOULDERS 113
Skipper's Gymnasium. And in August he admitted to Marcia that it made him capable of more mental work during the day.
"Mens sana in cor pore sano" he said.
"Don't believe in it," replied Marcia. "I tried one of those patent medicines once and they're all bunk. You stick to gymnastics."
One night in early September while he was going through one of his contortions on the rings in the nearly deserted room he was addressed by a medi tative fat man whom he had noticed watching him for several nights.
"Say, lad, do that stunt you were doin' last night."
Horace grinned at him from his perch.
"I invented it," he said. "I got the idea from the fourth proposition of Euclid."
"What circus he with?"
"He's dead."
"Well, he must of broke his neck doin' that stunt. I set here last night thinkin' sure you was goin' to break yours."
"Like this!" said Horace, and swinging onto the trapeze he did his stunt.
"Don't it kill your neck an' shoulder muscles?"
"It did at first, but inside of a week I wrote the quod erat demonstrandum on it."
"Hm!"
Horace swung idly on the trapeze.
"Ever think of takin' it up professionally?" asked the fat man.
H4 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
"Not I."
'Good money in it if you're willin' to do stunts like 'at an' can get away with it."
"Here's another," chirped Horace eagerly, and the fat man's mouth dropped suddenly agape as he watched this pink-jerseyed Prometheus again defy the gods and Isaac Newton.
The night following this encounter Horace got home from work to find a rather pale Marcia stretched out on the sofa waiting for him.
"I fainted twice to-day," she began without pre liminaries.
"What?"
"Yep. You see baby's due in four months now. Doctor says I ought to have quit dancing two weeks ago."
Horace sat down and thought it over.
"I'm glad, of course," he said pensively — "I mean glad that we're going to have a baby. But this means a lot of expense."
"I've got two hundred and fifty in the bank," said Marcia hopefully, "and two weeks' pay coming."
Horace computed quickly.
"Including my salary, that'll give us nearly four teen hundred for the next six months."
Marcia looked blue.
"That all? Course I can get a job singing some where this month. And I can go to work again in March."
"Of course nothing!" said Horace gruffly. "You'll stay right here. Let's see now — there'll
HEAD AND SHOULDERS 115
be doctor's bills and a nurse, besides the maid. We've got to have some more money."
"Well," said Marcia wearily, "I don't know where it's coming from. It's up to the old head now. Shoulders is out of business."
Horace rose and pulled on his coat.
"Where are you going?"
"I've got an idea," he answered. "I'll be right back."
Ten minutes later as he headed down the street toward Skipper's Gymnasium he felt a placid won der, quite unmixed with humor, at what he was going to do. How he would have gaped at him self a year before! How every one would have gaped! But when you opened your door at the rap of life you let in many things.
The gymnasium was brightly lit, and when his eyes became accustomed to the glare he found the meditative fat man seated on a pile of canvas mats smoking a big cigar.
"Say," began Horace directly, "were you in earnest last night when you said I could make money on my trapeze stunts?"
"Why, yes," said the fat man in surprise.
"Well, I've been thinking it over, and I believe I'd like to try it. I could work at night and on Saturday afternoons — and regularly if the pay is high enough."
The fat man looked at his watch.
"Well," he said, "Charlie Paulson's the man to see. He'll book you inside of four days, once he
n6 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
sees you work out. He won't be in now, but 111 get hold of him for to-morrow night."
The fat man was as good as his word. Charlie Paulson arrived next night and put in a wondrous hour watching the prodigy swoop through the air in amazing parabolas, and on the night following he brought two large men with him who looked as though they had been born smoking black cigars and talking about money in low, passionate voices. Then on the succeeding Saturday Horace Tarbox's torso made its first professional appearance in a gymnastic exhibition at the Coleman Street Gar dens. But though the audience numbered nearly five thousand people, Horace felt no nervousness. From his childhood he had read papers to audi ences — learned that trick of detaching himself.
"Marcia," he said cheerfully later that same night, "I think we're out of the woods. Paulson thinks he can get me an opening at the Hippodrome, and that means an all-winter engagement. The Hippodrome, you know, is a big "
"Yes, I believe I've heard of it," interrupted Marcia, "but I want to know about this stunt you're doing. It isn't any spectacular suicide, is it?"
"It's nothing," said Horace quietly. "But if you can think of any nicer way of a man killing himself than taking a risk for you, why that's the way I want to die."
Marcia reached up and wound both arms tightly round his neck.
"Kiss me," she whispered, "and call me 'dear heart.' I love to hear you say 'dear heart.' And
HEAD AND SHOULDERS 117
bring me a book to read to-morrow. No more Sam Pepys, but something trick and trashy. IVe been wild for something to do all day. I felt like writing letters, but I didn't have anybody to write to."
"Write to me," said Horace. "I'll read them."
"I wish I could," breathed Marcia. "If I knew words enough I could write you the longest love- letter in the world— and never get tired."
But after two more months Marcia grew very tired indeed, and for a row of nights it was a very anxious, weary-looking young athlete who walked out before the Hippodrome crowd. Then there were two days when his place was taken by a young man who wore pale blue instead of white, and got very little applause. But after the two days Horace appeared again, and those who sat close to the stage remarked an expression of beatific happiness on that young acrobat's face, even when he was twisting breathlessly hi the air in the middle of his amazing and original shoulder swing. After that perform ance he laughed at the elevator man and dashed up the stairs to the flat five steps at a time — and then tiptoed very carefully into a quiet room.
"Marcia," he whispered.
"Hello!" She smiled up at him wanly. "Hor ace, there's something I want you to do. Look hi my top bureau drawer and you'll find a big stack of paper. It's a book — sort of — Horace. I wrote it down in these last three months while I've been laid up. I wish you'd take it to that Peter Boyce Wendell who put my letter in his paper. He could
Ii8 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
tell you whether it'd be a good book. I wrote it just the way I talk, just the way I wrote that letter to him. It's just a story about a lot of things that happened to me. Will you take it to him, Horace ? "
"Yes, darling."
He leaned over the bed until his head was beside her on the pillow, and began stroking back her yellow hair.
" Dearest Marcia," he said softly.
"No," she murmured, "call me what I told you to call me."
"Dear heart," he whispered passionately — "dear est, dearest heart."
"What'llwecallher?"
They rested a minute in happy, drowsy content, while Horace considered.
"We'll call her Marcia Hume Tarbox," he said at length.
"Why the Hume?"
"Because he's the fellow who first introduced us."
"That so?" she murmured, sleepily surprised. "I thought his name was Moon."
Her eyes closed, and after a moment the slow, lengthening surge of the bedclothes over her breast showed that she was asleep.
Horace tiptoed over to the bureau and opening the top drawer found a heap of closely scrawled, lead-smeared pages. He looked at the first sheet:
SANDRA PEPYS, SYNCOPATED BY MARCIA TARBOX
HEAD AND SHOULDERS 119
He smiled. So Samuel Pepys had made an im pression on her after all. He turned a page and began to read. His smile deepened — he read on. Half an hour passed and he became aware that Marcia had waked and was watching him from the bed.
"Honey," came in a whisper.
"What, Marcia?"
" Do you like it?"
Horace coughed.
"I seem to be reading on. It's bright."
"Take it to Peter Boyce Wendell. Tell him you got the highest marks in Princeton once and that you ought to know when a book's good. Tell him this one's a world beater."
"All right, Marcia," said Horace gently.
Her eyes closed again and Horace crossing over kissed her forehead — stood there for a moment with a look of tender pity. Then he left the room.
All that night the sprawly writing on the pages, the constant mistakes in spelling and grammar, and the weird punctuation danced before his eyes. He woke several times in the night, each time full of a welling chaotic sympathy for this desire of Marcia's soul to express itself in words. To him there was something infinitely pathetic about it, and for the first time in months he began to turn over in his mind his own half -forgotten dreams.
He had meant to write a series of books, to pop ularize the new realism as Schopenhauer had pop ularized pessimism and William James pragmatism.
120 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
But life hadn't come that way. Life took hold of people and forced them into flying rings. He laughed to think of that rap at his door, the diaphanous shadow in Hume, Marcia's threatened kiss.
"And it's still me," he said aloud in wonder as he lay awake hi the darkness. "I'm the man who sat in Berkeley with temerity to wonder if that rap would have had actual existence had my ear not been there to hear it. I'm still that man. I could be electrocuted for the crimes he committed.
"Poor gauzy souls trying to express ourselves in something tangible. Marcia with her written book; I with my unwritten ones. Trying to choose our mediums and then taking what we get — and being glad."
"Sandra Pepys, Syncopated," with an introduc tion by Peter Boyce Wendell, the columnist, ap peared serially in Jordan's Magazine, and came out in book form in March. From its first published instalment it attracted attention far and wide. A trite enough subject — a girl from a small New Jer sey town coming to New York to go on the stage — treated simply, with a peculiar vividness of phrasing and a haunting undertone of sadness in the very inadequacy of its vocabulary, it made an irresisti ble appeal.
Peter Boyce Wendell, who happened at that time to be advocating the enrichment of the American language by the immediate adoption of expressive
HEAD AND SHOULDERS 121
vernacular words, stood as its sponsor and thun- ~dered TSs indorsement over the placid bromides of the conventional reviewers.
Marcia received three hundred dollars an instal ment for the serial publication, which came at an opportune time, for though Horace's monthly salary at the Hippodrome was now more than Marcia's had ever been, young Marcia was emitting shrill cries which they interpreted as a demand for coun try air. So early April found them installed in a bungalow in Westchester County, with a place for a lawn, a place for a garage, and a place for every thing, including a sound-proof impregnable study, in which Marcia faithfully promised Mr. Jordan she would shut herself up when her daughter's de mands began to be abated, and compose immortally illiterate literature.
"It's not half bad," thought Horace one night as he was on his way from the station to his house. He was considering several prospects that had opened up, a four months' vaudeville offer in five figures, a chance to go back to Princeton in charge of all gym nasium work. Odd ! He had once intended to go back there in charge of all philosophic work, and now he had not even been stirred by the arrival in New York of Anton Laurier, his old idol.
The gravel crunched raucously under his heel. He saw the lights of his sitting-room gleaming and noticed a big car standing in the drive. Probably Mr. Jordan again, come to persuade Marcia to set tle down to work.
122 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
She had heard the sound of his approach and her form was silhouetted against the lighted door as she came out to meet him.
"There's some Frenchman here," she whispered nervously. "I can't pronounce his name, but he sounds awful deep. You'll have to jaw with him."
" What Frenchman?"
"You can't prove it by me. He drove up an hour ago with Mr. Jordan, and said he wanted to meet Sandra Pepys, and all that sort of thing."
Two men rose from chairs as they went inside.
"Hello, Tarbox," said Jordan. "I've just been bringing together two celebrities. I've brought M'sieur Laurier out with me. M'sieur Laurier, let me present Mr. Tarbox, Mrs. Tarbox's husband."
"Not Anton Laurier!" exclaimed Horace.
"But, yes. I must come. I have to come. I have read the book of Madame, and I have been charmed" — he fumbled in his pocket — "ah, I have read of you too. In this newspaper which I read to-day it has your name."
He finally produced a clipping from a magazine.
"Read it!" he said eagerly. "It has about you too."
Horace's eye skipped down the page.
"A distinct contribution to American dialect lit erature," it said. "No attempt at literary tone; the book derives its very quality from this fact, as did ' Huckleberry Finn.'"
Horace's eyes caught a passage lower down; he became suddenly aghast — read on hurriedly:
HEAD AND SHOULDERS 123
"Marcia Tarbox's connection with the stage is not only as a spectator but as the wife of a per former. She was married last year to Horace Tar- box, who every evening delights the children at the Hippodrome with his wondrous flying-ring per formance. It is said that the young couple have dubbed themselves Head and Shoulders, referring doubtless to the fact that Mrs. Tarbox supplies the literary and mental qualities, while the supple and agile shoulders of her husband contribute their share to the family fortunes.
"Mrs. Tarbox seems to merit that much-abused title — ' prodigy.' Only twenty "
Horace stopped reading, and with a very odd ex pression in his eyes gazed intently at Anton Laurier.
"I want to advise you — " he began hoarsely.
"What?"
"About raps. Don't answer them! Let them alone — have a padded door."
THE CUT-GLASS BOWL
THERE was a rough stone age and a smooth stone age and a bronze age, and many years afterward a cut-glass age. In the cut-glass age, when young ladies had persuaded young men with long, curly mustaches to marry them, they sat down several months afterward and wrote thank-you notes for all sorts of cut-glass presents — punch-bowls, finger- bowls, dinner-glasses, wine-glasses, ice-cream dishes, bonbon dishes, decanters, and vases — for, though cut glass was nothing new in the nineties, it was then especially busy reflecting the dazzling light of fashion from the Back Bay to the fastnesses of the Middle West.
After the wedding the punch-bowls were arranged on the sideboard with the big bowl in the centre; the glasses were set up in the china-closet; the can dlesticks were put at both ends of things — and then the struggle for existence began. The bonbon dish lost its little handle and became a pin-tray up stairs; a promenading cat knocked the little bowl off the sideboard, and the hired girl chipped the middle-sized one with the sugar-dish; then the wine-glasses succumbed to leg fractures, and even the dinner-glasses disappeared one by one like the ten little niggers, the last one ending up, scarred and maimed, as a tooth-brush holder among other
124
THE CUT-GLASS BOWL 125
shabby genteels on the bathroom shelf. But by the time all this had happened the cut-glass age was over, anyway.
It was well past its first glory on the day the curious Mrs. Roger Fairboalt came to see the beautiful Mrs. Harold Piper.
"My dear" said the curious Mrs. Roger Fair boalt, " I love your house. I think it's quite artistic."
"I'm so glad," said the beautiful Mrs. Harold Piper, lights appearing in her young, dark eyes; "and you must come often. I'm almost always alone in the afternoon."
Mrs. Fairboalt would have liked to remark that she didn't believe this at all and couldn't see how she'd be expected to — it was all over town that Mr. Freddy Gedney had been dropping in on Mrs. Piper five afternoons a week for the past six months. Mrs. Fairboalt was^at that ripe age where she dis trusted all beautiful women ^
"I love the dining-room most" she said, "all that marvellous china, and that huge cut-glass bowl."
Mrs. Piper laughed, so prettily that Mrs. Fair- boalt's lingering reservations about the Freddy Gedney story quite vanished.
"Oh, that big bowl !" Mrs. Piper's mouth form ing the words was a vivid rose petal. "There's a story about that bowl "
"Oh "
"You remember young Carleton Canby? Well, he was very attentiveCat one tirpeTJand the night I told him I was going to marry Harold, seven years
126 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
ago, in ninety-two, he drew himself way up and said: 'Evylyn, I'm going to give a present that's as hard as you are and as beautiful and as empty and as easy to see through.' He frightened me a little — his eyes were so black. I thought he was going to deed me a haunted house or something that would explode when you opened it. That bowl came, and of course it's beautiful. Its diam eter or circumference pr^somethJLng is two and a half feet — or perhaps it's three and a half. Anyway, the sideboard is really too small for it; k sticks way out."
"My dear, wasn't that odd! And he left town about then, didn't he?" Mrs. Fairboalt was scrib bling italicized notes on her memory — "hard, beau tiful, empty, and easy to see through."
"Yes, he went West — or South — or somewhere," answered Mrs. Piper, radiating that divine vague ness that helps to lift beauty out of time.
Mrs. Fairboalt drew on her gloves, approving the effect of largeness given by the open sweep from the spacious music-room through the library, disclosing a part of the dining-room beyond. It was really the nicest smaller house in town, and Mrs. Piper had talked of moving to a larger one on Devereaux Avenue. Harold Piper must be coining money.
As she turned into the sidewalk under the gather ing autumn dusk she assumed that disapproving, faintly unpleasant expression that almost all suc cessful women of forty wear on the street.
If / were Harold Piper, she thought, I'd spend a
THE CUT-GLASS BOWL 127
little less time on business and a little more time at home. Some friend, should speak to him.
But if Mrs. Fairboalt had considered it a success ful afternoon she would have named it a triumph had she waited two minutes longer. For while she was still a black receding figure a hundred yards down the street, a very good-looking distraught young man turned up the walk to the Piper house. Mrs. Piper answered the door-bell herself, and with a rather dismayed expression led him quickly into the library.
"I had to see you," he began wildly; "your note played the devil with me. Did Harold frighten you into this?"
She shook her head.
"Fin through, Fred," she said slowly, and her lips had never looked to him so much like tearings from a rose. "He came home last night sick with it. Jessie Piper's sense of duty was too much for her, so she went down to his office and told him. He was hurt and — oh, I can't help seeing it his way, Fred. He says we've been club gossip all summer and he didn't know it, and now he understands snatches of conversation he's caught and veiled hints people have dropped about me. He's mighty angry, Fred, and he loves me and I love him — rather."
Gedney nodded slowly and half closed his eyes.
"Yes," he said, "yes, my trouble's like yours. I can see other people's points of view too plainly." His gray eyes met her dark ones frankly. "The
128 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
blessed thing's over. My God, Evylyn, I've been sitting down at the office all day looking at the out side of your letter, and looking at it and looking at it "
"You've got to go, Fred," she said steadily, and the slight emphasis of hurry in her voice was a new thrust for him. "I gave him my word of honor I wouldn't see you. I know just how far I can go with Harold, and being here with you this evening is one of the things I can't do."
They were still standing, and as she spoke she made a little movement toward the door. Gedney looked at her miserably, trying, here at the end, to treasure up a last picture of her — and then sud denly both of them were stiffened into marble at the sound of steps on the walk outside. Instantly her arm reached out grasping the lapel of his coat — half urged, half swung him through the big door into the dark dining-room.
'Til make him go up-stairs," she whispered close to his ear; " don't move till you hear him on the stairs. Then go out the front way."
Then he was alone listening as she greeted her husband in the hall.
Harold Piper was thirty-six, nine years older than his wife. He was handsome — with marginal notes: these being eyes that were too close together, and a certain woodenness when his face was in repose. His attitude toward this Gedney matter was typical of all his attitudes. He had told Evylyn that he considered the subject closed and would never re proach her nor allude to it in any form; and he told
THE CUT-GLASS BOWL 129
himself that this was rather a big way of looking at it — that she was not a little impressed. Yet, like all men who are preoccupied with their own broadness, he was exceptionally narrow.
He greeted Evylyn with emphasized cordiality this evening.
"You'll have to hurry and dress, Harold," she said eagerly; "we're going to the Bronsons'."
He nodded.
"It doesn't take me long to dress, dear," and, his words trailing off, he walked on into the library. Evylyn's heart clattered loudly.
"Harold— " she began, with a little catch in her voice, and followed him in. He was lighting a cigarette. "You'll have to hurry, Harold," she finished, standing in the doorway.
"Why?" he asked, a trifle impatiently; "you're not dressed yourself yet, Evie."
He stretched out in a Morris chair and unfolded a newspaper. With a sinking sensation Evylyn saw that this meant at least ten minutes — and Ged- ney was standing breathless in the next room. Supposing Harold decided that before he went up stairs he wanted a drink from the decanter on the sideboard. Then it occurred to her to forestall this contingency by bringing him the decanter and a glass. She dreaded calling his attention to the dining-room in any way, but she couldn't risk the other chance.
But at the same moment Harold rose and, throw ing his paper down, came toward her.
"Evie, dear," he said, bending and putting his
130 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
arms about her, "I hope you're not thinking about last night — " She moved close to him, trembling. "I know," he continued, "it was just an imprudent friendship on your part. We all make mistakes."
Evylyn hardly heard him. She was wondering if by sheer clinging to him she could draw him out and up the stairs. She thought of playing sick, asking to be carried up — unfortunately, she knew he would lay her on the couch and bring her whiskey.
Suddenly her nervous tension moved up a last impossible notch. She had heard a very faint but quite unmistakable creak from the floor of the dining- room. Fred was trying to get out the back way.
Then her heart took a flying leap as a hollow ring ing note like a gong echoed and re-echoed through the house. Gedney's arm had struck the big cut- glass bowl.
"What's that !" cried Harold. "Who's there?"
She clung to him but he broke away, and the room seemed to crash about her ears. She heard the pantry-door swing open, a scuffle, the rattle of a tin pan, and in wild despair she rushed into the kitchen and pulled up the gas. Her husband's arm slowly unwound from Gedney's neck, and he stood there very still, first in amazement, then with pain dawning m his face.
"My golly!" he said hi bewilderment, and then repeated: "Myg0%/"
He turned as if to jump again at Gedney, stopped, his muscles visibly relaxed, and he gave a bitter little laugh.
THE CUT-GLASS BOWL 131
"You people — you people — ; Evylyn's arms were around him and her eyes were pleading with him frantically, but he pushed her away and sank dazed into a kitchen chair, his face like porcelain. "You've been doing things to me, Evylyn. Why, you little devil ! You little devil!"
She had never felt so sorry for him; she had never loved him so much.
"It wasn't her fault," said Gedney rather humbly. "I just came." But Piper shook his head, and his expression when he stared up was as if some physical accident had jarred his mind into a temporary in ability to function. His eyes, grown suddenly piti ful, struck a deep, unsounded chord in Evylyn — and simultaneously a furious anger surged hi her. She felt her eyelids burning; she stamped her foot violently; her hands scurried nervously over the table as if searching for a weapon, and then she flung herself wildly at Gedney.
"Get out !" she screamed, dark eyes blazing, little fists beating helplessly on his outstretched arm. "You did this! Get out of here — get out — get out! Get out!"
II
Concerning Mrs. Harold Piper at thirty-five, opin ion was divided — women said she was still handsome; men said she was pretty no longer. And this was probably because the qualities in her beauty that women had feared and men had followed had van ished. Her eyes were still as large and as dark
132 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
and as sad, but the mystery had departed; their sadness was no longer eternal, only human, and she had developed a habit, when she was startled or annoyed, of twitching her brows together and blinking several times. Her mouth also had. lost: the red had receded and the faint down-turning of its corners when she smiled, that had added to the sadness of the eyes and been vaguely mocking and beautiful, was quite gone. When she smiled now the corners of her lips turned up. Back in the days when she revelled in her own beauty Evylyn had enjoyed that smile of hers — she had accentuated it. When she stopped accentuating it, it faded out and the last of her mystery with it.
Evylyn had ceased accentuating her smile within a month after the Freddy Gedney affair. Externally things had gone on very much as they had before. But hi those few minutes during which she had dis covered how much she loved her husband Evylyn had realized how indelibly she had hurt him. For a month she struggled against aching silences, wild reproaches and accusations — she pled with him, made quiet, pitiful little love to him, and he laughed at her bitterly — and then she, too, slipped gradu ally into silence and a shadowy, unpenetrable bar rier dropped between them. The surge of love that had risen in her she lavished on Donald, her little boy, realizing him almost wonderingly as a part of her life.
The next year a piling up of mutual interests and responsibilities and some stray flicker from the past
THE CUT-GLASS BOWL 133
brought husband and wife together again — but after a rather pathetic flood of passion Evylyn realized that her great opportunity was gone. There sim ply wasn't anything left. She might have been youth and love for both — but that time of silence had slowly dried up the springs of affection and her own desire to drink again of them was dead.
She began for the first time to seek women friends, to prefer books she had read before, to sew a little where she could watch her two children to whom she was devoted. She worried about little things — if she saw crumbs on the dinner-table her mind drifted off the conversation: she was receding gradually into middle age.
Her thirty-fifth birthday had been an exception ally busy one, for they were entertaining on short notice that night, and as she stood in her bedroom window in the late afternoon she discovered that she was quite tired. Ten years before she would have lain down and slept, but now she had a feeling that things needed watching: maids were cleaning down-stairs, bric-a-brac was all over the floor, and there were sure to be grocery-men that had to be talked to imperatively — and then there was a letter to write Donald, who was fourteen and in his first year away at school.
She had nearly decided to lie down, nevertheless, when she heard a sudden familiar signal from little Julie down-stairs. She compressed her lips, her brows twitched together, and she blinked.
"Julie!" she called.
134 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
"Ah-h-h-ow !" prolonged Julie plaintively. Then the voice of Hilda, the second maid, floated up the stairs.
"She cut herself a little, Mis' Piper."
Evylyn flew to her sewing-basket, rummaged un til she found a torn handkerchief, and hurried down- stajrs. In a moment Julie was crying in her arms as she searched for the cut, faint, disparaging evi dences of which appeared on Julie's dress !
"My fc-umb!" explained Julie. "Oh-h-h-h, t'urts."
"It was the bowl here, the he one," said Hilda apologetically. "It was waitin' on the floor while I polished the sideboard, and Julie come along an' went to foolin' with it. She yust scratch herself."
Evylyn frowned heavily at Hilda, and twisting Julie decisively in her lap, began tearing strips off the handkerchief.
"Now — let's see it, dear."
Julie held it up and Evylyn pounced.
"There!"
Julie surveyed her swathed thumb doubtfully. She crooked it; it waggled. A pleased, interested look appeared in her tear-stained face. She sniffled and waggled it again.
"You precious!" cried Evylyn and kissed her, but before she left the room she levelled another frown at Hilda. Careless! Servants all that way nowadays. If she could get a good Irishwoman — but you couldn't any more — and these Swedes
At five o'clock Harold arrived and, coming up
THE CUT-GLASS BOWL 135
to her room, threatened in a suspiciously jovial tone to kiss her thirty-five times for her birthday. Evylyn resisted.
"You've been drinking," she said shortly, and then added qualitatively, "a little. You know I loathe the smeU of it."
"Evie," he said, after a pause, seating himself in a chair by the window, "I can tell you something now. I guess you've known things haven't been going quite right down- town."
She was standing at the window combing her hair, but at these words she turned and looked at him.
"How do you mean? You've always said there was room for more than one wholesale hardware house in town." Her voice expressed some alarm.
"There was" said Harold significantly, "but this Clarence Ahearn is a smart man."
"I was surprised when you said he was coming to dinner."
"Evie," he went on, with another slap at his knee, "after January first 'The Clarence Ahearn Company ' becomes 'The Ahearn, Piper Company ' —and 'Piper Brothers' as a company ceases to exist."
Evylyn was startled. The sound of his name in second place was somehow hostile to her; still he appeared jubilant.
"I don't understand, Harold."
"Well, Evie, Ahearn has been fooling around with Marx. If those two had combined we'd have
136 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
been the little fellow, struggling along, picking up smaller orders, hanging back on risks. It's a ques tion of capital, Evie, and ' Ahearn and Marx' would have had the business just like l Ahearn and Piper' is going to now/' He paused and coughed and a little cloud of whiskey floated up to her nostrils. "Tell you the truth, Evie, I've suspected that Ahearn's wife had something to do with it. Am bitious little lady, I'm told. Guess she knew the Marxes couldn't help her much here."
"Is she — common?", asked Evie.
"Never met her, I'm sure — but I don't doubt it. Clarence Ahearn's name's been up at the Country Club five months — no action taken." He waved his hand disparagingly. "Ahearn and I had lunch together to-day and just about clinched it, so I thought it'd be nice to have him and his wife up to-night — just have nine, mostly family. After all, it's a big thing for me, and of course we'll have to see something of them, Evie."
"Yes," said Evie thoughtfully, "I suppose we will."
Evylyn was not disturbed over the social end of it — but the idea of "Piper Brothers" becoming "The Ahearn, Piper Company" startled her. It seemed like going down in the world.
Half an hour later, as she began to dress for din ner, she heard his voice from down-stairs.
"Oh, Evie, come down!"
She went out into the hall and called over the banister :
THE CUT-GLASS BOWL 137
"What is it ?"
"I want you to help me make some of that punch before dinner."
Hurriedly rehooking her dress, she descended the stairs and found him grouping the essentials on the dining-room table. She went to the sideboard and, lifting one of the bowls, carried it over.
"Oh, no," he protested, "let's use the big one. There'll be Ahearn and his wife and you and I and Milton, that's five, and Tom and Jessie, that's seven, and your sister and Joe Ambler, that's nine. You don't know how quick that stuff goes when you make it."
"We'll use this bowl," she insisted. "It'll hold plenty. You know how Tom is."
Tom Lowrie, husband to Jessie, Harold's first cousin, was rather inclined to finish anything in a liquid way that he began.
Harold shook his head.
"Don't be foolish. That one holds only about three quarts and there's nine of us, and the ser- vants'll want some — and it isn't strong punch. It's so much more cheerful to have a lot, Evie; we don't have to drink all of it."
"I say the small one."
Again he shook his head obstinately.
"No; be reasonable."
"I am reasonable," she said shortly. "I don't want any drunken men in the house."
"Who said you did?"
"Then use the small bowl."
138 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
"Now, Evie-
He grasped the smaller bowl to lift it back. In stantly her hands were on it, holding it down. There was a momentary struggle, and then, with a little exasperated grunt, he raised his side, slipped it from her fingers, and carried it to the sideboard.
She looked at him and tried to make her expres sion contemptuous, but he only laughed. Acknowl edging her defeat but disclaiming all future interest in the punch, she left the room.
HI
At seven-thirty, her cheeks glowing and her high- piled hair gleaming with a suspicion of brilliantine, Evylyn descended the stairs. Mrs. Ahearn, a little woman concealing a slight nervousness under red hair and an extreme Empire gown, greeted her vol ubly. Evylyn disliked her on the spot, but the husband she rather approved of. He had keen blue eyes and a natural gift of pleasing people that might have made him, socially, had he not so ob viously committed the blunder of marrying too early in his career.
"I'm glad to know Piper's wife," he said simply. "It looks as though your husband and I are going to see a lot of each other in the future."
She bowed, smiled graciously, and turned to greet the others: Milton Piper, Harold's quiet, unasser tive younger brother; the two Lowries, Jessie and Tom; Irene, her own unmarried sister; and finally
THE CUT-GLASS BOWL 139
Joe Ambler, a confirmed bachelor and Irene's per ennial beau.
Harold led the way into dinner.
"We're having a punch evening/' he announced jovially — Evylyn saw that he had already sampled his concoction — "so there won't be any cocktails except the punch. It's m' wife's greatest achieve ment, Mrs. Ahearn; she'll give you the recipe if you want it; but owing to a slight " — he caught his wife's eye and paused — "to a slight indisposition, I'm re sponsible for this batch. Here's how!"
All through dinner there was punch, and Evylyn, noticing that Ahearn and Milton Piper and aU the women were shaking their heads negatively at the maid, knew she had been right about the bowl; it was still half full. She resolved to caution Harold directly afterward, but when the women left the table Mrs. Ahearn cornered her, and she found herself talking cities and dressmakers with a polite show of interest.
"We've moved around a lot," chattered Mrs. Ahearn, her red head nodding violently. "Oh, yes, we've never stayed so long in a town before — but I do hope we're here for good. I like it here; don't you?"
"Well, you see, I've always lived here, so, nat- urally-
"Oh, that's true," said Mrs. Ahearn and laughed. "Clarence always used to tell me he had to have a wife he could come home to and say: 'Well, we're going to Chicago to-morrow to live, so pack up.'
140 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
I got so I never expected to live anywhere. " She laughed her little laugh again; Evylyn suspected that it was her society laugh.
"Your husband is a very able man, I imagine." "Oh, yes," Mrs. Ahearn assured her eagerly. "He's brainy, Clarence is. Ideas and enthusiasm, you know. Finds out what he wants and then goes and gets it."
Evylyn nodded. She was wondering if the men were still drinking punch back in the dining-room. Mrs. Ahearn's history kept unfolding jerkily, but Evylyn had ceased to listen. The first odor of massed cigars began to drift in. It wasn't really a large house, she reflected; on an evening like this the library sometimes grew blue with smoke, and next day one had to leave the windows open for hours to air the heavy staleness out of the curtains. Per haps this partnership might . . . she began to spec ulate on a new house . . . Mrs. Ahearn's voice drifted in on her: "I really would like the recipe if you have it
written down somewhere "
Then there was a sound of chairs in the dining- room and the men strolled in. Evylyn saw at once that her worst fears were realized. Harold's face was flushed and his words ran together at the ends of sentences, while Tom Lowrie lurched when he walked and narrowly missed Irene's lap when he tried to sink onto the couch beside her. He sat there blinking dazedly at the company. Evylyn found herself blinking back at him, but she saw no
THE CUT-GLASS BOWL 141
humor in it. Joe Ambler was smiling contentedly and purring on his cigar. Only Ahearn and Milton Piper seemed unaffected.
"It's a pretty fine town, Ahearn," said Ambler, "you'll find that."
"I've found it so," said Ahearn pleasantly.
"You find it more, Ahearn," said Harold, nod ding emphatically, "'f I've an'thin' do 'th it."
He soared into a eulogy of the city, and Evylyn wondered uncomfortably if it bored every one as it bored her. Apparently not. They were all listen ing attentively. Evylyn broke in at the first gap.
" Where Ve you been living, Mr. Ahearn?" she asked interestedly. Then she remembered that Mrs. Ahearn had told her, but it didn't matter. Harold mustn't talk so much. He was such an ass when he'd been drinking. But he plopped directly back in.
"Tell you, Ahearn. Firs' you wanna get a house up here on the hill. Get Stearne house or Ridge- way house. Wanna have it so people say: 'There's Ahearn house.' Solid, you know, tha's effec' it gives."
Evylyn flushed. This didn't sound right at all. Still Ahearn didn't seem to notice anything amiss, only nodded gravely.
"Have you been looking — " But her words trailed off unheard as Harold's voice boomed on.
"Get house — tha's start. Then you get know people. Snobbish town first toward outsider, but not long — not after know you. People like you"
142 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
—he indicated Ahearn and his wife with a sweeping gesture — "all right. Cordial as an'thin' once get by first barrer-bar-barrer — " He swallowed, and then said "barrier," repeated it masterfully.
Evylyn looked appealingly at her brother-in-law, but before he could intercede a thick mumble had come crowding out of Tom Lowrie, hindered by the dead cigar which he gripped firmly with his teeth.
"Huma uma ho huma ahdy um "
"What?" demanded Harold earnestly.
Resignedly and with difficulty Tom removed the cigar — that is, he removed part of it, and then blew the remainder with a whut sound across the room, where it landed liquidly and limply in Mrs. Ahearn 's lap.
"Beg pardon," he mumbled, and rose with the vague intention of going after it. Milton's hand on his coat collapsed him in time, and Mrs. Ahearn not ungracefully flounced the tobacco from her skirt to the floor, never once looking at it.
"I was sayin'," continued Tom thickly, "'fore 'at happened" — he waved his hand apologetically toward Mrs. Ahearn — "I was sayin' I heard all truth that Country Club matter."
Milton leaned and whispered something to him.
"Lemme 'lone," he said petulantly; "know what I'm doin'. 'At's what they came for."
Evylyn sat there in a panic, trying to make her mouth form words. She saw her sister's sardonic expression and Mrs. Ahearn 's face turning a vivid
THE CUT-GLASS BOWL 143
red. Ahearn was looking down at his watch-chain, fingering it.
"I heard who's been keepin' y' out, an* he's not a bit better'n you. I can fix whole damn thing up. Would've before, but I didn't know you. HaroP tol' me you felt bad about the thing "
Milton Piper rose suddenly and awkwardly to his feet. In a second every one was standing tensely and Milton was saying something very hurriedly about having to go early, and the Ahearns were listening with eager intentness. Then Mrs. Ahearn swallowed and turned with a forced smile toward Jessie. Evylyn saw Tom lurch forward and put his hand on Ahearn's shoulder — and suddenly she was listening to a new, anxious voice at her elbow, and, turning, found Hilda, the second maid.
"Please, Mis' Piper, I tank Yulie got her hand poisoned. It's all swole up and her cheeks is hot and she's moanin' an' groanin' '
"Julie is?" Evylyn asked sharply. The party suddenly receded. She turned quickly, sought with her eyes for Mrs. Ahearn, slipped toward her.
"If you'll excuse me, Mrs.— She had momen tarily forgotten the name, but she went right on: " My little girl's been taken sick. I'll be down when I can." She turned and ran quickly up the stairs, retaining a confused picture of rays of cigar smoke and a loud discussion in the centre of the room that seemed to be developing into an argument.
Switching on the light in the nursery, she found Julie tossing feverishly and giving out odd little
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cries. She put her hand against the cheeks. They were burning. With an exclamation she followed the arm down under the cover until she found the hand. Hilda was right. The whole thumb was swollen to the wrist and in the centre was a little in flamed sore. Blood-poisoning! her mind cried in terror. The bandage had come off the cut and she'd gotten something hi it. She'd cut it at three o'clock — it was now nearly eleven. Eight hours. Blood-poisoning couldn't possibly develop so soon. She rushed to the 'phone.
Doctor Martin across the street was out. Doctor Foulke, their family physician, didn't answer. She racked her brains and in desperation called her throat specialist, and bit her lip furiously while he looked up the numbers of two physicians. During that in terminable moment she thought she heard loud voices down-stairs — but she seemed to be hi another world now. After fifteen minutes she located a physician who sounded angry and sulky at being called out of bed. She ran back to the nursery and, looking at the hand, found it was somewhat more swollen.
"Oh, God!" she cried, and kneeling beside the bed began smoothing back Julie's hair over and over. With a vague idea of getting some hot water, she rose and started toward the door, but the lace of her dress caught in the bed-rail and she fell for ward on her hands and knees. She struggled up and jerked frantically at the lace. The bed moved and Julie groaned. Then more quietly but with
THE CUT-GLASS BOWL 145
suddenly fumbling fingers she found the pleat in front, tore the whole pannier completely off, and rushed from the room.
Out in the hall she heard a single loud, insistent voice,\ but as she reached the head of the stairs it ceased and an outer door banged.
The music-room came into view. Only Harold and Milton were there, the former leaning against a chair, his face very pale, his collar open, and his mouth moving loosely.
"What's the matter?"
Milton looked at her anxiously.
"There was a little trouble "
Then Harold saw her and, straightening up with an effort, began to speak.
"'Suit m'own cousin m'own house. God damn common nouveau rish. 'Suit m'own cousin "
"Tom had trouble with Ahearn and Harold in terfered," said Milton.
"My Lord, Milton," cried Evylyn, "couldn't you have done something?"
"I tried; I "
"Julie's sick," she interrupted; "she's poisoned herself. Get him to bed if you can."
Harold looked up.
"Julie sick?"
Paying no attention, Evylyn brushed by through the dining-room, catching sight, with a burst of horror, of the big punch-bowl still on the table, the liquid from melted ice in its bottom. She heard steps on the front stairs — it was Milton helping
146 FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS
Harold up — and then a mumble: "Why, Julie's a'righ'."
" Don't let him go into the nursery !" she shouted.
The hours blurred into a nightmare. The doctor arrived just before midnight and within a half-hour had lanced the wound. He left at two after giving her the addresses of two nurses to call up and prom ising to return at half past six. It was blood- poisoning.
At four, leaving Hilda by the bedside, she went to her room, and slipping with a shudder out of her evening dress, kicked it into a corner. She put on a house dress and returned