CHAPTER XII

AN EXCURSION INTO ARCADY

Of course I knew what Judy meant by her horrible past. The escapade Victoria had told me about while she was trying to persuade me to help her put the soft pedal on Alexander Corbin’s activities in the matter of the theft of the necklace. She hadn’t, to be sure, so much told me about it, as bounded it for me. It began, I knew, in Judy’s flight from school and ended in the Martha Washington Hotel where Victoria had found her, “looking as if she hadn’t found liberty as jolly as she’d expected.”

The natural inference from this last remark of Judy’s was that it was Bill Grant who had disillusioned her, who had reduced her to that cynical acquiescence in defeat which I’d found it so hard to understand in her. The appropriate thing for me to have done then, under the traditional code, would have been to tell the young man he was a yellow dog and order him out of my house. But the notion of doing anything like that was so absurd that I smiled at him.

Bill misunderstood the smile.

“It’s quite true, sir,” he said soberly.

“He knows it’s true,” Judy remarked.

“You go to sleep,” he told her gently, “and don’t listen in. I want to tell this my own way.”

But it seemed he couldn’t begin. He sat there taking his pipe in short, sharp little puffs, his eyes unfocused, his thoughts astray all over the area of the past. He seemed to be exploring for a path that would take him through.

“To begin with,” I said at last, to help him out, “tell me who you are.”

“Well, I _am_ Bruce Applebury’s cousin,” he answered doubtfully.

“I don’t mean that,” I said.

“Tell him what you do,” put in Judy.

“Shut up,” he ordered, “and go to sleep.”

“I’m not an Applebury,” he then said to me, possessed of the thread at last. “His mother and mine are sisters. Osborne, their name was. We don’t see them much. Father, mother and I have traveled around a good deal--a little like Henry James’ family, though I don’t mean the results have been the same. Anyhow, until I went to college, my education had been a catch-as-catch-can affair, never in one school very long. Bruce, of course, did everything perfectly regularly, so I didn’t see so very much of him. And after we graduated and he went into the family bank, I saw him still less. I really know him pretty well, though, and that’s important.”

I could see that it might be, but I wasn’t ready to go back to Bruce. I remembered Judy’s comment, “Tell him what you do,” so now I asked him.

“Oh,” he said, embarrassed, “I try to write.”

“What do you write?” I asked.

“Why, I’ve tried my hand at pretty nearly everything but poetry,” he told me. “When I met Judy, down in Easton, Pennsylvania, I was traveling around on a try-out circuit, one-night stands mostly, with a play of mine, trying to lick it into shape, as they say, and hoping it would get into New York. It never did. It died out on the road. But I wasn’t there when it happened. I left it in Easton.”

“Where you met Judy?” I suggested.

“Yes,” he admitted. “But not because I’d met her. I’d already made up my mind to quit when that happened. I’d come to hate the thing so that it made me sick. Every change they made in it made it worse, until I hoped it would die on the road. If it had ever got in New York, I’d have run like a rabbit.”

“Anyhow you _did_ meet Judy,” I persisted. “How did it happen?”

Once more his face was shiny with sweat, and he mopped it with his handkerchief.

“Oh, it sounds rotten,” he said miserably. “You’ll think I ought to be kicked, and I wouldn’t deny it. But then, you know Judy. You _do_ know her, don’t you?” he shot at me fiercely.

“Yes, I know her,” I said. “Go on.”

“She was a waitress in the hotel,” he resumed. “One of these coffee-shop places, you know, where half the town comes for lunch. I talked to her over a meal or two. She’d been to see my play. One night I overtook her on the street, and instead of going to that damned theater, I went for a long walk with her.

“Of course I’d known from the first word she spoke to me that she wasn’t an ordinary waitress.... Well--naturally. But I couldn’t make her out at all. She wouldn’t tell me anything about herself. She gave me a name to call her by, but she told me while we were on that walk that it wasn’t hers.

“By way of playing the game I didn’t tell her anything about myself, either. She knew my name, of course, but I let her think it was a _nom de plume_. It was Osborne Grant on the programs, and I told her to call me Bill. It got to be a sort of understanding that we took each other as is, without explanations.

“You can’t imagine what it was like. Well, perhaps you can, but I’d never imagined that anything like that could happen. It was the only really romantic thing that ever had happened to me. And it was like that from the very first moment.

“On that walk we took I told her I was going to quit the play. I said I was so deadly sick of it that I couldn’t go on with it. I said I was going to buy a Ford and go somewhere, disappear for a while--get lost.

“It’s hard to be sure you’re being honest telling about a thing like that. I suppose I must have had it in the back of my head as an awfully jolly possibility that she’d come with me. We talked about it at first as a joke, and then she said to me suddenly, ‘Are you really joking? Because if you aren’t, I’ll come.’ She said she was on a sort of tramp, anyhow. She meant to work her way west, clear to the Pacific coast perhaps.”

He broke off and looked at her. She was sound asleep now, and no mistake. He went to the couch and drew a light blanket over her.

“She’s had a rotten two days,” he said, as he stood looking down at her. Then he went back to his chair.

“You’ll find it hard to believe, sir,” he went on. “I find it hard myself to believe it now. She looks like a little girl, asleep there. But I really thought, then, that she was as old as I was. She seemed harder. She seemed to have seen a lot of life. I don’t know how she could put it on. It was a sort of defensive armor, I suppose. Anyhow, I didn’t feel I was taking any advantage of her. And I didn’t expect to be any Sir Galahad about it, either. I don’t know that I exactly expected the other thing. I was just willing to let it ride. I’d only just begun to know her then, you see.

“Well, I bought a Ford, and she quit her job and we started out. And on that first day together I began to see what she was really like. She kept getting younger, and, well--I don’t know any other word--sweeter; taking off the armor, you know, as she tried me out and came to feel I was all right.

“We went across Pennsylvania, through Lancaster and Gettysburg, and hit the old National Trail in Maryland; followed it up into the Cumberland Mountains. We didn’t get on very fast, because whenever we saw anything we thought it would be jolly to stop and do--nice little brooks to wade in; things like that--we stopped and did it.

“I did turn out to be, well--a Galahad, after all, though it wasn’t any merit of mine. The thing just took itself for granted, the first time we put up for the night. I won’t talk any brother and sister rot. No brother and sister ever were like that. But we always slept in separate rooms. We didn’t pay any attention to appearances, though. If the rooms happened to be adjoining, it was all the better. We talked through the door.

“That lasted a week. And then I couldn’t trust myself any further. We were in love with each other, you see. Oh, we’d been that from the first, but now each of us knew the other knew it. You know what _she’s_ like. She’d never welsh in her life. She’d go through with anything that she started; perfectly reckless, if no one but herself was concerned.

“Well, that was all right. We might have got married then and there, and it would have saved a terrible lot of anguish if we had. But by that time I’d come to. I knew how young she was--she’d given that away--and I knew she was a runaway. She’d never told me her name, nor what her people were like. I knew what they must be like, of course.

“Well, it struck me that I couldn’t look them in the face, nor Judy, nor even myself, if I took advantage of a child’s escapade like that. I hadn’t any idea of giving her up, but I thought I’d figured out a way to square the thing. I wrote her a letter, and slipped it under her door that last night, and bolted. It seemed the right thing to do, but I knew by instinct I was being a fool all the time.

“I told her in the letter that I loved her, and always would, but that I wanted her to go home to her own people and her own surroundings and take a little while to think it over. I said that after she had thought it over she was to make her choice.

“I said it was perfectly possible that when she found herself back among her old friends, she’d think of this adventure of ours as something perfectly insane. If it did seem like that she wasn’t to worry. I’d never try to follow her up, and she could remember it as a pleasant episode. Lord, what a fool I was! I might have known how Judy would take that.

“I went on to tell her of course, that I loved her as I never would love anything else in the world, and if she found she still loved me, back home with her feet on the ground, she was to write me a letter and I’d come like a shot. I signed it with my full name, of course, and wrote out my permanent address. And then I wrote a postscript telling her she wasn’t to have any regrets whichever way she decided it, because she’d given me something....

“Well, you know how it is, sir. It looked all right on the page. I thought I meant it; meant that I could be satisfied with what I’d had, even if it stopped there. Of course I was a perfectly doddering fool.

“Oh, and I did one more fool thing. I didn’t know how her money was holding out. I was afraid she might be completely strapped. So I put a couple of twenty-dollar bills in the envelope to pay her fare home.

“I drove off in the night, and I turned back three times before morning. I wish to God I’d gone all the way back, but I never did. I hung on, somehow, to my fool idea.

“Well, of course I began watching for a letter from her within a week. I didn’t know her handwriting nor what the postmark would be, and every time I found a letter addressed in a woman’s handwriting, my heart stopped beating--literally stopped, I mean, for one beat anyhow, and there isn’t a thing the matter with it.

“After three months of that I was pretty nearly crazy. I couldn’t go looking for her, you see. I’d sawed myself off that limb by promising her that I wouldn’t. I couldn’t be sure she hadn’t taken me at my word; decided she’d done a perfectly crazy thing--which it was, of course, by all her home standards--and was only hoping that I’d never turn up to remind her of it. My mother saw I was half out of my head about something, and persuaded me finally to go to Italy with her for the rest of the winter. I made extra careful arrangements for my mail to be forwarded, and went.

“I came back just in time for Bruce to ask me to be best man at his wedding. I was a little surprised at his doing that, because we’ve never been friends really, but he’s great on family, and going out, as it seemed to him, into the wilds like this, he wanted to rally us around and present a united front. I agreed to it, of course. I’d nothing else to do.

“He didn’t talk about her much; never showed me her picture. Well, he wouldn’t. I hadn’t had the slightest warning, not a hint, when I got out of that car under the porte-cochère at The Oaks and saw her standing there in the veranda.”

I had paid his tale the tribute of almost breathless attention, and even now when he paused as if he’d come to the end of it, it was a good while before I could find anything to say.

At last I asked a question. “Why didn’t Judy write to you?”

“She’d torn up my letter in a rage before she’d ever got as far as my name and address at the bottom of it. Oh, naturally enough. Think of the perfectly hellish jolt she must have got just from the sight of those two damned twenty-dollar bills, and the knowledge that I’d gone!

“And the thing I’d really done wasn’t very much better. Do you remember what she said just now, about thinking she was too young to be allowed to decide anything for herself? That was the theory I’d gone on. I’d taken the decision out of her hands.”

“It was the chivalrous thing to do,” I argued dubiously, but wasn’t very much surprised when he flung the word back at my head.

“Oh, chivalry be damned! She deserved to have been taken in on it, all right, and I ought to have known it. Lord, I’d had seven solid days of her. She hadn’t acted like a silly kid out for a lark. I was a coward, that’s what it came to. I was afraid if I told her what my plan was that she’d talk me out of it and I’d cave in and be left looking like a crook. Hell, there are times when a man ought to have courage enough to _be_ a crook!

“But I wasn’t at the end of my chivalry yet, even when I saw her there at The Oaks Thursday afternoon, saw her turn white and bolt into the house, and found out she was the girl that Bruce was going to marry.

“I saw through the sprained ankle dodge, of course, and decided I wouldn’t play tennis. I was hanging around the hall waiting for a sight of her, when Punch caught me and showed me to my room. I did have a few minutes with her afterward, when the others were out on the courts.

“But I was still trying not to look like a crook. I started out by trying to tell her she needn’t be afraid, that I hadn’t known I’d find her here and that I wouldn’t give her away.--Oh, I don’t blame myself so much for that. I was rattled, naturally. But I’d lost my chance for a talk that would get anywhere with her, and it began to look as if I’d never have another.

“By the time that first infernal evening was half over (lord, it was only night before last) I was desperate. I went off up-stairs and sat down and wrote her another letter. She’d told me why she hadn’t written me, so I had that much to go on. And of course I knew without any question at all, that, regardless of what happened to me, she ought never to marry Bruce.

“It would be a perfect crime, a marriage like that, for Judy. Bruce isn’t a monster, nor a villain, nor anything like that. But he’s stiff and self-satisfied, and bull-headed, and he hasn’t the imagination of a good Ford car. He’d try to break Judy on the wheel without knowing he was doing it.

“I don’t think he _could_ break her, but he might drive her to almost anything.--Well, I put all of that and a whole lot besides, into that letter, and then went out on the veranda where she was sitting and handed it to her.”

“I’ll tell the world he did,” came a sleepy voice from the couch. “I could have killed him. He explained afterward he thought I could tuck it in my dress.”

“Well,” I asked, “why didn’t you?”

She opened her eyes and looked at me with a hopeless expression.

“What do you think we wear?” she asked me. “Corsets? All I had on, that night, besides my shoes and stockings was a shirt and a step-in--and my dress, of course. Where do you think the letter would have stopped if I’d stuck it down inside?”

It came as a shock to me to realize that this time-honored repository, consecrated by tradition to the implements of intrigue, love-notes, keep-sakes, and so on, had become as obsolete as a sedan chair, but there was no getting away from the logic of the facts.

Judy, still curled up on the couch, was broad awake now, and went on telling me about it.

“I saw Bruce bearing down on me, so I shoved the letter down into that silly Chinese vase that people are always dropping cigarettes into, although I knew I’d have a fearful time getting it out. If I could have been sure what line Bill had taken in his letter I’d have hung on to it and seen the thing through with Bruce then and there. But I had to read it first. So I climbed out of my window in the middle of the night and got it and read it, and then spent the rest of the time until daylight riding around on Punch’s bicycle, deciding what I’d do.

“Poor little Punch! I wouldn’t have cared except that he saw the whole thing. He saw me hide the letter in the first place, and he knew when I went out to get it. I don’t know what he thought.”

“I can guess what he thought,” I said. “He thought it had something to do with the loss and the return of the necklace. That’s what I’d have thought too, if he’d told me about it. Now it seems that the necklace had nothing to do, from start to finish, with the whole affair.”

They looked at me and looked at each other. Bill drew a long, heart-felt sigh of dissent.

“Hadn’t it just!” he said. “It was that infernal necklace that made all the trouble, really.”