Part 10

“Funny way of showing it! I may be a lot of things, Wheeler, but I’m not cheap. You’re darn lucky that the war is on and I’m not asking for a French car.”

He crushed his lips to hers.

“You devil!” he said.

There were frequent parties. Dancing at Broadway cabarets. All-night joy rides, punctuated with road-house stop-overs and not infrequently, in groups of three or four couples, ten-day pilgrimages to showy American spas.

“Getting boiled out,” they called it. It was part of Hester’s scheme for keeping her sveltness.

Her friendships were necessarily rather confined to a definite circle--within her own apartment-house, in fact. On the floor above, also in large, bright rooms of high rental, and so that they were exchanging visits frequently during the day, often _en déshabille_, using the stairway that wound up round the elevator-shaft, lived a certain Mrs. Kitty Drew, I believe she called herself. She was plump and blond, and so very scented that her aroma lay on a hallway for an hour after she had scurried through it. She was well known and chiefly distinguished by a large court-plaster crescent which she wore on her left shoulder-blade. She enjoyed the bounty of a Wall Street broker who for one day had attained the conspicuousness of cornering the egg-market.

There were two or three others within this group. A Mrs. Denison, half French, and a younger girl called Babe. But Mrs. Drew and Hester were intimates. They twaddled daily in one or the other’s apartments, usually lazy and lacy with negligée, lounging about on the mounds of lingerie pillows over chocolates, cigarettes, novels, Pomeranians, and always the headache-powders, nerve-sedatives, or smelling-salts, a running line of “Lord, I’ve a head!” “I need a good cry for the blues!” “Talk about a dark-brown taste,” or, “There was some kick to those cocktails last night,” through their conversation.

KITTY: Br-r-r! I’m as nervous as a cat to-day.

HESTER: Naughty, naughty bad doggie to bite muvver’s diamond ring.

KITTY: Leave it to you to land a pear-shaped diamond on your hooks.

HESTER: He fell for it, just like that!

KITTY: You could milk a billiard-ball.

HESTER: I don’t see any “quality of mercy” to spare around your flat.

There were the two years of high school, you see.

“Ed’s going out to Geyser Springs next month for the cure. I told him he could not go without me unless over my dead body, he could not.”

“Geyser Springs. That’s thirty miles from my home town.”

“Your home town? Nighty-night! I thought you was born on the corner of Forty-second street and Broadway with a lobster claw in your mouth.”

“Demopolis, Ohio.”

“What is that--a skin-disease?”

“My last relation in the world died out there two years ago. An aunt. Wouldn’t mind some Geyser Springs myself if I could get some of this stiffness out of my joints.”

“Come on, I dare you! May Denison and Chris will come in on it, and Babe can always find somebody. Make it three or four cars full and let’s motor out. We all need a good boiling, anyways. Wheeler looks about ready for spontaneous combustion, and I got a twinge in my left little toe. You on?”

“I am, if he is.”

“‘If he is!’ He’d fall for life in an Igorrote village with a ring in his nose if you wanted it.”

And truly enough, it did come about that on a height-of-the-season evening, a highly cosmopolitan party of four couples trooped into the solid-marble foyer of the Geyser Springs Hotel, motor-coated, goggled, veiled; a whole litter of pigskin and patent-leather bags, hampers, and hat-boxes, two golf-bags, two Pomeranians, a bull in spiked collar, furs, leather coats, monogrammed rugs, thermos bottles, air-pillows, robes, and an ensemble of fourteen wardrobe-trunks sent by express.

They took the “cure.” Rode horseback, motored, played roulette at the casino for big stakes, and eschewed the American plan of service for the smarter European idea, with a special à-la-carte menu for each meal. Extraordinary-looking mixed drinks, and strictly against the mandates of the “cure,” appeared at their table. Strange midnight goings-on were reported by the more conservative hotel guests, and the privacy of their circle was allowed full integrity by the little veranda groups of gouty ladies or middle-aged husbands with liver-spots on their faces. The bath-attendants reveled in the largest tips of the season. When Hester walked down the large dining-room evenings, she was a signal for the craning of necks for the newest shock of her newest extreme toilette. The kinds of toilettes that shocked the women into envy and mental notes of how the under arm was cut, and the men into covert delight. Wheeler liked to sit back and put her through her paces like a high-strung filly.

“Make ’em sit up, girl! You got them all looking like dimes around here.”

One night, she descended to the dining-room in a black evening gown so daringly lacking in back and yet, withal, so slimly perfect an elegant thing that an actual breathlessness hung over the hall, the clatter of dishes pausing.

There was a gold bird of paradise dipped down her hair over one shoulder, trailing its smoothness like fingers of lace. She defied with it as she walked.

“Take it from me,” said Kitty, who felt fat in lavender that night, “she’s going it one too strong.”

Another evening, she descended, always last, in a cloth of silver, with a tiny, an absurd, an impeccably tight silver turban dipped down over one eye, and absolutely devoid of jewels except the pear-shaped diamond on her left forefinger.

They were a noisy, a spending, a cosmopolitan crowd of too well-fed men and too well-groomed women, ignored by the veranda groups of wives and mothers, openly dazzling and arousing a tremendous curiosity in the younger set, and quite obviously sought after by their own kind.

But Hester’s world, too, is all run through with sharply defined, social schisms.

“I wish that Irwin woman wouldn’t always hang round our crowd,” she said, one morning, as she and Kitty lay side by side in the cooling-room after their baths, massages, manicures, and shampoos. “I don’t want to be seen running with her.”

“Did you see the square emerald she wore last night?”

“Fake. I know the clerk at the Synthetic Jewelry Company had it made up for her. She’s cheap, I tell you. Promiscuous. Who ever heard of anybody standing back of her. She knocks around. She sells her old clothes to Tessie, my manicurist. I’ve got a line on her. She’s cheap.”

Kitty, who lay with her face under a white mud of cold-cream and her little mouth merely a hole, turned on her elbow.

“We can’t all be top-notchers, Hester,” she said. “You’re hard as nails.”

“I guess I am, but you’ve got to be to play this game. The ones who aren’t end up by stuffing the keyhole and turning on the gas. You’ve got to play it hard or not at all. If you’ve got the name, you might as well have the game.”

“If I had it to do over again--well, there would be one more wife-and-mother rôle being played in this little old world, even if I had to play it on a South Dakota farm.”

“‘Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well,’ I used to write in the copy-book. Well, that’s the way I feel about this: To me, anything is worth doing to escape the cotton stockings and lisle next to your skin. I admit I never sit down and _think_. You know, sit down and take stock of myself. What’s the use thinking? Live! Yes,” mused Hester, her arms in a wreath over her head, “I think I’d do it all over again. There’s not been so many at that. Three. The first was a Jew. He’d have married me, but I couldn’t see it on six thousand a year. Nice fellow, too--an easy spender in a small way, but I couldn’t see a future to ladies’ neckwear. They make good husbands, Jews do. I hear he made good later in munitions. Al was a pretty good sort, too, but tight. How I hate tightness! I’ve been pretty lucky in the long run, I guess.”

“Did I say ‘hard as nails’?” said Kitty, grotesquely fitting a cigarette in the aperture of her mouth. “I apologize. Why, alongside of you, a piece of flint is morning cereal. Haven’t you ever had a love-affair? I’ve been married twice--that’s how chicken-hearted I can be. Haven’t you ever pumped a little faster just because a certain some one walked into the room?”

“Once.”

“Once what?”

“I liked a fellow. Pretty much. A blond. Say, he was blond! I always think to myself, Kit--next to Gerald you’ve got the bluest eyes under heaven. Only, his didn’t have any dregs.”

“Thanks, dearie.”

“I sometimes wonder about Gerald. I ought to drive over while we’re out here. Poor old Gerald Fishback!”

“Sweet name--‘Fishback.’ No wonder you went wrong, dearie.”

“Oh, I’m not getting soft. I saw my bed and made it, nice and soft and comfy, and I’m lying on it without a whimper.”

“You just bet your life you made it up nice and comfy! You’ve the right idea; I have to hand that to you. You command respect from them. Lord! Ed would as soon fire a teacup at me as not. But, with me, it pays. The last one he broke he made up to me with my opal-and-diamond beetle.”

“Wouldn’t wear an opal if it was set next to the Hope diamond.”

“Superstitious, dearie?”

“Unlucky. Never knew it to fail.”

“Not a superstition in my bones. I don’t believe in walking under ladders or opening an umbrella in the house or sitting down with thirteen, but, Lordy, never saw the like with you! Thought you’d have the hysterics over that little old vanity mirror you broke that day out at the races.”

“Br-r-r; I hated it.”

“Lay easy, dearie. Nothing can touch you the way he’s raking in the war-contracts.”

“Great--isn’t it?”

“Play for a country home, dearie. I always say real estate and jewelry are something in the hand. Look ahead in this game, I always say.”

“You just bet I’ve looked ahead.”

“So have I, but not enough.”

“Somehow, I never feel afraid. I could get a job to-morrow if I had to.”

“Say, dearie, if it comes to that, with twenty pounds off me, there’s not a chorus I couldn’t land back in.”

“I worked once, you know, in Lichtig’s import shop.”

“Fifth Avenue.”

“Yes. It was in between the Jew and Al. I sold two thousand five hundred dollars’ worth of gowns the first week.”

“Sure enough?”

“‘Girl,’ old man Lichtig said to me the day I quit; ‘girl,’ he said, ‘if ever you need this job again, come back; it’s waiting.’”

“Fine chance!”

“I’ve got the last twenty-five dollars I earned pinned away this minute in the pocket of the little dark-blue suit I wore to work. I paid for that suit with my first month’s savings. A little dark-blue Norfolk, Lichtig let me have out of a stock for twenty-seven fifty.”

“Were they giving them away with a pound of tea?”

“Honest, Kitty, it was neat. Little white shirt-waist, tan shoes, and one of those slick little five-dollar sailors, and every cent paid out of my salary. I could step into that outfit to-morrow, look the part, and land back that job or any other. I had a way with the trade, even back at Finley’s.”

“Here, hold my jewel-bag, honey; I’m going to die of cold-cream suffocation if she don’t soon come back and unsmear me.”

“Opal beetle in it?”

“Yes, dearie; but it won’t bite. It’s muzzled with my diamond horseshoe.”

“Nothing doing. Kit. Put it under your pillow.”

“You better watch out. There’s a thirteenth letter in the alphabet; you might accidentally use it some day. You’re going to have a sweet time to-night, you are!”

“Why?”

“The boys have engaged De Butera to come up to the rooms.”

“You mean the fortune-teller over at the Stag Hotel?”

“She’s not a fortune-teller, you poor nervous wreck. She’s the highest-priced spiritualist in the world. Moving tables--spooks--woof!”

“Faugh!” said Hester, rising from her couch and feeling about with her little bare feet for the daintiest of pink-silk mules. “I could make tables move too, at forty dollars an hour. Where’s my attendant? I want an alcohol rub.”

They did hold séance that night in a fine spirit of lark, huddled together in the _de-luxe_ sitting-room of one of their suites, and little half-hysterical shrieks and much promiscuous ribaldry under cover of darkness.

Madame De Butera was of a distinctly fat and earthy blondness, with a coarse-lace waist over pink, and short hands covered with turquoise rings of many shapes and blues.

Tables moved. A dead sister of Wheeler’s spoke in thin, high voice. Why is it the dead are always so vocally thin and high?

A chair tilted itself on hind legs, eliciting squeals from the women. Babe spoke with a gentleman friend long since passed on, and Kitty with a deceased husband, and began to cry quite sobbily and took little sips of high-ball quite gulpily. May Denison, who was openly defiant, allowed herself to be hypnotized and lay rigid between two chairs, and Kitty went off into rampant hysteria until Wheeler finally placed a hundred-dollar bill over the closed eyes, and whether under it, or to the legerdemain of madam’s manipulating hands, the tight eyes opened, May, amid riots of laughter claiming for herself the hundred-dollar bill, and Kitty, quite resuscitated, jumping up for a table cancan, her yellow hair tumbling, and her China-blue eyes with the dregs in them inclined to water.

All but Hester. She sat off by herself in a peacock-colored gown that wrapped her body-suavity as if the fabric were soaking wet, a band of smoky blue about her forehead. Never intoxicated, a slight amount of alcohol had a tendency to make her morose.

“What’s the matter, Cleo?” asked Wheeler, sitting down beside her and lifting her cool fingers one by one, and, by reason of some remote analogy that must have stirred within him, seeing in her a Nile queen. “What’s the matter, Cleo; does the spook-stuff get your goat?”

She turned on him eyes that were all troubled up like waters suddenly wind-blown.

“God!” she said, her fingers, nails inward, closing about his arm. “Wheeler--can--can the--dead--speak?”

But fleeting as the hours themselves were the moods of them all, and the following morning there they were, the eight of them, light with laughter and caparisoned again as to hampers, veils, coats, dogs, off for a day’s motoring through the springtime countryside.

“Where to?” shouted Wheeler, twisting from where he and Hester sat in the first of the cars to call to the two motor-loads behind.

“I thought Crystal Cave was the spot”--from May Denison in the last of the cars, winding her head in a scarlet veil.

“Crystal Springs it is, then.”

“Is that through Demopolis?”

Followed a scanning of maps.

“Sure! Here it is! See! Granite City. Mitchell. Demopolis. Crystal Cave.”

“Good Lord, Hester, you’re not going to spend any time in that dump?”

“It’s my home town,” she replied coldly. “The only relation I had is buried there. It’s nothing out of your way to drop me on the court-house steps and pick me up as you drive back. I’ve been wanting to get there ever since we’re down here. Wanting to stop by your home town you haven’t seen in five years isn’t unreasonable, is it?”

He admitted it wasn’t, leaning to kiss her.

She turned to him a face, soft, with one of the pouts he usually found irresistible.

“Honey,” she said, “what do you think?”

“What?”

“Chris is buying May that chinchilla coat I showed you in Meyerbloom’s window the day before we left.”

“The deuce he is!” he said, letting go of her hand but hers immediately covering his.

“She’s wiring her sister in the ‘Girlie Revue’ to go in and buy it for her.”

“Outrage--fifteen thousand dollars to cover a woman’s back! Look at the beautiful scenery, honey! You’re always prating about views. Look at those hills over there! Great--isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t expect it, Wheeler, if it wasn’t war-year and you landing one big contract after another. I’d hate to see May show herself in that chinchilla coat when we could beat her to it by a wire. I could telegraph Meyerbloom himself. I bought the sable rug off him. I’d hate it, Wheeler, to see her and Chris beat us to it. So would you. What’s fifteen thousand when one of your contracts alone runs into the hundred thousands? Honey?”

“Wire,” he said sourly, but not withdrawing his hand from hers.

They left her at the shady court-house steps in Demopolis, but with pleasantry and gibe.

“Give my love to the town pump.”

“Rush the old oaken growler for me.”

“So long!” she called, eager to be rid of them. “Pick me up at six sharp.”

She walked slowly up High Street. Passers-by turned to stare, but otherwise she was unrecognized. There was a new Five-and-Ten-Cent Store, and Finley Brothers had added an ell. High Street was paved. She made a foray down into the little side street where she had spent those queerly remote first seventeen years of her life. How dim her aunt seemed! The little unpainted frame house was gone. There was a lumber-yard on the site. Everything seemed to have shrunk. The street was narrower and dirtier than she recalled it.

She made one stop, at the house of Maggie Simms, a high-school chum. It was a frame house, too, and she remembered that the front door opened directly into the parlor and the side entrance was popularly used in lieu. But a strange sister-in-law opened the side door. Maggie was married and living in Cincinnati. Oh, fine--a master mechanic, and there were twins. She started back toward Finley’s, thinking of Gerald, and half-way she changed her mind.

Maggie Simms married and living in Cincinnati. Twins! Heigh-ho--what a world! The visit was hardly a success. At half after five, she was on her way back to the court-house steps. Stupid to have made it six!

And then, of course, and quite as you would have it, Gerald Fishback came along. She recognized his blondness long before he saw her. He was bigger and more tanned, and, as of old, carried his hat in his hand. She noticed that there were no creases down the front of his trousers, but the tweed was good and he gave off that intangible aroma of well-being.

She was surprised at the old thrill racing over her. Seeing him was like an exquisite stab of quick steel through the very pit of her being. She reached out, touching him, before he saw her.

“Gerald,” she said, soft and teasingly.

It was actually as if he had been waiting for that touch, because, before he could possibly have perceived her, her name was on his lips.

“Hester!” he said, the blueness of his eyes flashing between blinks. “Not Hester?”

“Yes; Hester,” she said, smiling up at him.

He grasped both her hands, stammering for words that wanted to come quicker than he could articulate.

“Hester!” he kept repeating. “Hester!”

“To think you knew me, Gerald!”

“Know you! I’d know you blind-folded. And how--I--you’re beautiful, Hester! I think you’ve grown five years younger.”

“You’ve got on, Gerald. You look it.”

“Yes; I’m general manager now at Finley’s.”

“I’m so glad. Married?”

“Not while there’s a Hester Bevins on earth.”

She started at her own name.

“How do you know I’m not?”

“I--I know--” he said, reddening up.

“Isn’t there some place we can talk, Gerald? I’ve thirty minutes before my friends call for me.”

“Thirty minutes?”

“Your rooms? Haven’t you rooms or a room where we could go and sit down?”

“Why--why, no, Hester,” he said, still red. “I’d rather you didn’t go there. But here. Let’s stop in at the St. James Hotel. There’s a parlor.”

To her surprise, she felt herself color up and was pleasantly conscious of her finger-tips.

“You darling!” She smiled up at him.

They were seated presently in the unaired plush-and-cherry, Nottingham-and-Axminster parlor of a small-town hotel.

“Hester!” he kept repeating. “Hester!”

“I’m a bad durl,” she said, challenging his eyes for what he knew.

“You’re a little saint walked down and leaving an empty pedestal in my dreams.”

She placed his forefinger over his mouth.

“Sh-h,” she said. “I’m not a saint, Gerald; you know that.”

“Yes,” he said, with a great deal of boyishness in his defiance; “I do know it, Hester, but it is those who have been through the fire who come out--new. It was your early environment.”

“My aunt died on the town, Gerald, I heard. I could have saved her all that if I had only known. She was cheap, aunt was. Poor soul! She never looked ahead.”

“It was your early environment, Hester. I’ve explained that often enough to them here. I’d bank on you, Hester--swear by you.”

She patted him.

“I’m a pretty bad egg, Gerald. According to the standards of a town like this, I’m rotten, and they’re about right. For five years, Gerald, I’ve--”

“The real _you_ is ahead of, and not behind you, Hester.”

“How wonderful,” she said, “for you to feel that way, but--”

“Hester,” he said, more and more the big boy, his knees touching the floor now, and his big blond head nearing hers, “I don’t care about anything that’s past; I only know that, for me, you are the--”

“Gerald,” she said, “for God’s sake!”

“I’m a two-hundred-a-month man now, Hester; I want to build you the prettiest, the whitest little house in this town. Out in the Brierwood section. I’ll make them kowtow to you, Hester; I--”

“Why,” she said slowly, and looking at him with a certain sadness, “you couldn’t keep me in stockings, Gerald. The gora on this hat cost more than one month of your salary.”

“Good God!” he said.

“You’re a dear, sweet boy just the same; but you remember what I told you about my crêpe-de-Chine soul.”

“Just the same, I love you best in those crispy white shirt-waists you used to wear and the little blue suits and sailor-hats. You remember that day at Finley’s picnic, Hester, that day, dear, that you--you--”

“You dear boy!”

“But it--your mistake--it--it’s all over. You work now, don’t you, Hester?”

Somehow, looking into the blueness of his eyes and their entreaty for her affirmative, she did what you or I might have done. She half lied, regretting it while the words still smoked on her lips.

“Why, yes, Gerald, I’ve held a fine position in Lichtig Brothers, New York importers. Those places sometimes pay as high as seventy-five a week. But I don’t make any bones, Gerald; I’ve not been an angel.”

“The--the Jew, Hester?”--his lips quivering with a nausea for the question.

“I haven’t seen him in four years,” she answered truthfully.

He laid his cheek on her hand.

“I knew you’d come through. It was your environment. I’ll marry you to-morrow--to-day, Hester; I love you.”

“You darling boy!” she said, her lips back tight against her teeth. “You darling, darling boy!”

“Please, Hester--we’ll forget what has been.”

“Let me go,” she said, rising and pinning on her hat; “let me go--or--or I’ll cry, and--and I don’t want to cry.”

“Hester,” he called, rushing after her and wanting to fold her back into his arms, “let me prove my trust--my love--”

“Don’t! Let me go! Let me go!”

At slightly after six, the ultra cavalcade drew up at the court-house steps. She was greeted with the pleasantries and the gibes.

“Have a good time, sweetness?” asked Wheeler, arranging her rugs.